Forewarning of conditions for TERRORIST VIOLENCE (actually just the wilful use of technology for anti human, anti essentialist and wireheading purposes (unless you subsequently get violent about this)))
I don't find this particularly convincing compared to the arguments and data from the original debate. In particular I disagree that all of the other evidence supports lab leak. There were quite a few other points in the debate, many of which favored zoonosis. Rootclaims insistence to the contrary feels like bad faith lying
Before the debate, I was maybe 60% lab leak. After the debate, that went down to 30-40%. Their response made me discount lab leak a little more still.
It shouldn’t be so difficult to estimate the probability that a post like this damages your reputation and, by extension, the credibility of your platform and method altogether.
As long as they still pay the winner I don't mind too much, but for a group supposedly using math they like using words like "impossible" and "obviously" without backing them up..
Your Book Review: Consciousness And The Brain: A review of Stanislas Dehaene's book "Consciousness and the Brain", which explores the cognitive neuroscience of consciousness. The book discusses the differences between conscious and unconscious processing, the neural signatures of consciousness, and theories of consciousness such as the Global Neuronal Workspace.
a) According to Dehaene, what are the key differences between conscious and unconscious processing? What can the brain do without consciousness, and what requires consciousness?
b) How does Dehaene's approach to studying consciousness, which relies on subjective reports, differ from traditional methods in cognitive psychology? What are the strengths and limitations of this approach?
c) The book discusses several theories of consciousness, including the Global Neuronal Workspace, Integrated Information Theory, and the Multiple Drafts Model. How do these theories differ in their explanations of consciousness, and what evidence supports or challenges each theory?
How Should We Think About Race And "Lived Experience"?: An article discussing the complex relationship between race, genetics, and lived experience, using the case of Elizabeth Hoover, a professor who identified as Native American but was later found to have no Native American ancestry.
a) How does the case of Elizabeth Hoover challenge the idea that race is primarily a matter of "lived experience" rather than genetics? What are the implications of this case for how we define and think about racial identity?
b) The article discusses the potential problems with using genetics as the sole basis for determining racial identity, such as the risk of retroactively invalidating someone's life experiences and cultural contributions. What are the pros and cons of using genetics, lived experience, or a combination of factors to define race?
c) How might concerns about cultural appropriation, affirmative action, and the preservation of minority cultures influence how communities define and police racial boundaries? What are the potential unintended consequences of these practices, as illustrated by the Elizabeth Hoover case?
Walk & Talk: We usually have an hour-long walk and talk after the meeting starts. Two mini-malls with hot takeout food are readily accessible nearby. Search for Gelson's or Pavilions in the zip code 92660.
Share a Surprise: Tell the group about something unexpected that changed your perspective on the universe.
Future Direction Ideas: Contribute ideas for the group's future direction, including topics, meeting types, activities, etc.
Does anybody here have experience with Acton Academy? One just opened up in our town (they're enrolling for next year) and I'm interested, but also a little wary. My son is in second grade and is not getting challenged at all in his public school (there are no gifted and talented programs). This is the only private option in town and I really want to believe that it might work for him.
Some questions you can ask the school that might help your due diligence, though I guess most of these will have to be directed to some "reference" Acton Academy instead of the one in your town:
(1) What fraction of students return for the next year?
(2) For students who don't return, what are the reasons?
(3) What are examples of discipline issues/punishment at the school? Are there examples of
students expelled?
(4) What are examples of students who wouldn't be well served by AA?
(5) What is the average number of years a teacher stays at AA?
(6) What processes are there in place for teachers to work with each other (adult-adult interaction is shockingly rare at a lot of schools)?
(7) How are teachers given feedback? How do teachers improve over time?
I'm sorry that I can't help with direct experience of this school franchise, but would also be interested to hear from current students/parents.
> I am confident that any randomly-selected ten-year-old from Acton would have succeeded instantly where at least some MIT graduates failed.
...well, this really rubbed me the wrong way. I was like: these people seem to utterly lack any critical thinking, and seem to expect the same from their customers.
But then I watched the Peterson podcast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEUjcRWfu3c and the founder of the school seems quite smart and nice, and many of the things he said made sense to me, so I guess I am going to forgive them this.
I think the dark secret of many successful schools is that the success of the kids depends a lot on their character traits such as IQ, so the easiest way to have successful students is simply to only admit the successful kids as your students. Admit only the ones with high IQ (and if you can't measure their IQ directly, use some proxy, such as their existing academic success, or the success of their parents), and kick out the troublemakers, and maybe also the ones who are lazy or otherwise demotivating (the fact that Joe is lazy is not a big problem per se; the problem is rather that his classmates see him and it impacts their own expectations of "normal"). This alone will probably make you one of the best schools in the neighborhood.
But you shouldn't say this openly, because (1) it will invite the controversy you don't need, and (2) it will invite people who have high IQ but are otherwise problematic. Instead, you should probably behave as if IQ does not matter. That way, you can also attribute all their success to your unique teaching methods, even if you did literally nothing.
That doesn't mean that the school has no impact on students at all. The school can definitely encourage or discourage the smart kids. If you let the smart kids follow their interests, they will mostly turn out okay even in the classical subjects. (Sadly, this is probably not true for the average kids.) From the emotional perspective, the school environment can range from very friendly to deeply toxic. Friendly is better, because stress hurts kids, but mutual cooperation can help them a lot.
So, the vision of the school is nice, the question is whether the reality matches it. Could you perhaps find the parents of the students, and ask them about their experience? Maybe try contacting them via social networks, or ask whether your local friends know someone.
Their first class at this school won't be until the Fall, although I suppose I could find a way to talk to parents at other schools (maybe there are Facebook groups?). But yeah, my big unknown is whether the reality matches the vision.
My ideal situation would be one where my son is with other smart kids, but there are really no skill-based programs around here. It's hard to predict what the population of this school would be. The local founder is marketing it largely as a way for parents to exercise more choice in their schooling.
Sometimes a completely "normal" school happens to be surprisingly good, probably as a combination of "has sane administration" and "people in this neighborhood happen to be unusually smart".
People talk a lot about whether IQ is related to race or sex, but I think that much greater controversy would be if someone published a map comparing average IQ on various *streets*, or parts of town. In practice, it would be difficult to obtain the data, but I suspect the effect is real and strong. (Before anyone says "this would simply reflect the ethnic differences", my point is that it would actually be much *stronger*, because even people from nominally the same ethnic group sort themselves out geographically. Also because in smaller groups, the variation is statistically greater.)
I mention this because my daughter is currently in a "normal" school, and we are quite happy about it. But before we made this choice, we have asked many parents we met on playgrounds in our neighborhood, how happy are they about the schools their kids attend. Then we did some optimization to get our daughter sorted by the system to the right school. (We used some lucky coincidence, but a general solution would be to rent a place near the school, bring the paperwork saying that your child lives there, let the system assign to your child to that school, and then say "well, we moved somewhere else, but we are happy with keeping our child here". The feasibility and complexity of this plan would depend on your local laws.) I am mentioning this so that you can have a Plan B in case you would try the Acton school and something goes wrong.
> The local founder is marketing it largely as a way for parents to exercise more choice in their schooling.
This is mostly a good thing, because it will filter out the parents who don't care. It will select for opinionated people, so likely for intelligence (which is good), but also maybe for various forms of craziness (which is bad, but probably inevitable). Overall, seems like a good thing.
Don’t have personal experience, but the Jordan Peterson Podcast episode 336 was an interview with the founder and made me wish very badly that there was one in my area. I’d recommend checking that out if you haven’t already.
I took a class in it a couple years ago taught by a very smart and honest researcher, psychologist Alan Davis, and was impressed by the results. Here are links to a few of the studies we read:
Psilocybin-assisted group therapy for demoralized older long-term AIDS survivor men: An open-label safety and feasibility pilot study
Effects of Psilocybin-Assisted Therapy on Major Depressive Disorder A Randomized Clinical Trial
Alan K. Davis, PhD; Frederick S. Barrett, PhD; Darrick G. May, MD; Mary P. Cosimano, MSW; Nathan D. Sepeda, BS; Matthew W. Johnson, PhD; Patrick H. Finan, PhD; Roland R. Griffiths, PhD
Safety and Efficacy of Lysergic Acid Diethylamide-Assisted Psychotherapy for Anxiety Associated With Life-threatening Diseases
Peter Gasser, MD,* Dominique Holstein, PhD,Þ Yvonne Michel, PhD,þ Rick Doblin, PhD,§ Berra Yazar-Klosinski, PhD,§ Torsten Passie, MD, MA,|| and Rudolf Brenneisen, PhD¶
Predicting Reactions to Psychedelic Drugs: A Systematic Review of States and Traits Related to Acute Drug Effects
Jacob S. Aday,* Alan K. Davis, Cayla M. Mitzkovitz, Emily K. Bloesch, and Christopher C. Davoli
Didn't have time to read it, just read abstract. But none of the studies I gave links to used psilocybin to assist a long-term, insight-oriented therapy. Most involved about 10 sessions of therapist contact, with 2 psychedelic sessions somewhere in the middle -- generally first was low-dose, then a session to process trip, the next one, which could be higher dose or, if subject preferred, a repeat of the original low dose. And the actual sessions were focused on the patient's problem. Prior to the first trip subjects and therapist discussed patient's problem, including things like what they had tried so far, aiming to develop some sort of formulation of what was wrong or what needed to change. For instance, in the study where a couple psilocybin trips were used to help people quit smoking, a subject might formulate the problem as "I've quit before, but I've come to associate smoking with feeling good -- it relaxes me when I need it, gives me energy when I need it. And the pack in my pocket is like my little friend. So even though I know smoking is bad for me, that just doesn't *feel* true, so I always go back to it." So this person might be told that psilocybin helps people see things from a different point of view, and that look for ways during the trip to try to see smoking -- or quitting smoking -- from a different point of view. And of course therapist tells the person some stuff about what to expect when the effects kick in, and answers any questions. After the trips therapist and subject talk about what it was like, and what if anything can be harvested from the to help with quitting smoking.
So I described the smoking cessation study in detail, but the other studies -- of anxiety, despair, depression, etc -- were all on the same model. Actually I think they would be better termed therapist -assisted trips, rather than trip-assisted therapy.
Also, there's something odd about the article's complaint that lots of therapist are doing psychedelic-assisted therapy. How can that be true? Unless a shrink is doing a research study that gets approved by all the various powers that be, there is no legal way to give patients psychedelics. The shit's illegal in almost all states, and in face is a Schedule 1 drug, along with heroin and meth.
What there is, though, is a lot of "ketamine-assisted" therapy. The great advantage of ketamine is that doctors can legally prescribe it. The great disadvantage is that it's not really a psychedelic -- at least IMO. I got a psychiatrist I know to let me try it, both a low doses and at high ones, and to me it seemed like the low doses were sort of like mild marijuana high. The high doses fucked me up so much that at their peak I could not even remember why I felt so weird. But they were not rich experiences, the way even marijuana can be -- more just a temporary scrambling of my mind.
I've been following this topic for a while now, there is a Meetup group that bills itself as the Minnesota Psychedelic Society and I ran into some interesting and serious people, not therapists, but what I would call goal driven users of psychedelics. There was a group of young fathers that were trying to become better at being dads that I liked to listen to. But COVID came, and George Floyd died a few miles from my house and a lot of things were knocked off track and haven't really gotten back into the same form as before.
There are a lot of ketamine therapy outfits in my area and I watched a Zoom presentation for one of them. The setup rang some 'grift' alarm bells though. I talked to one of the business owners on the phone and that impression was reenforced. For example they required a physical from their doctor and when I told them I just had a thorough physical they wouldn't use those results. I went to check on their office and there was only an empty office front so I shied away from that operation.
I did talk to another group and spoke to the medical doctor in charge and the operation seemed more on the up and up, but as you mentioned ketamine is not a psychedelic and efficacy for anxiety and OCD has not even been explored.
I thought the AJP article that I linked was interesting because it seems to suggest that the neuroplasticity effects by themselves are at the heart of therapeutic use. Obviously I'm not a professional but a curious amateur poking around in an interesting field.
The NYT article about the research at Johns Hopkins didn't surprise me a lot. We are in the honeymoon phase of this renewed research that was aborted with the 'War on Drugs' for a while now and while the research seems to have a lot of potential there are bound to be setbacks along the way.
I like the sound of that young father's group. If you do decide to try ketamine I can tell you about my experience with different ways of getting it into your system.
I agree that the neuroplasticity psilocybin makes possible is the crucial thing. And there are plenty of people who took solo trips and felt better forever after. (But also a few who felt haunted forever after.). I think a few meetings with a therapist can be helpful in sort of planting a flag in the area of the mind the. person hopes will change -- also in reinforcing the idea that change is possible. Most people who have suffered for a long time from a head disorder believe in their hearts that it is their fate and it is impossible to affect the problem.
It's a shame I lost track of the "let's get better at being dads" group during the COVID plus rioting plus 12 year old boys hijacking cars for kicks period.
Their sincerity was readily apparent. Two things stick with me from those guys, one of the more experienced guys said it comes down to "trying to lead with love", a newer guy said "I'm just trying to become less of an asshole." Even if I only achieve the lesser objective I think it would be time well spent. :)
Maps [dot] org has a bunch of stuff. It's from a true believer point of view though.
A couple weeks ago the NYT did a piece about research at Johns Hopkins maybe leaning into desired results with psychedelic therapy there, as in bad science, prompting responses from study participants.
So today I learned that the Obamas have a film and TV production company, which surprised me. I don't know why, except that "film production" is not something I would have imagined as post- presidency careers for them.
Looking it up, they've had it since 2018 and it seems to be mostly producing stuff for Netflix, so a more successful version of what Harry and Meghan tried doing with their production company? Anyway, I learned about all this due to the fact that their company produced a series set in Ireland that will be screening on Netflix in May:
It sounds a little bit like an Irish version of all those Scandinavian thrillers/police shows that were wildly popular in the UK a while back, and I suppose I'm fearful that it may indulge in Paddywhackery. Even the modern form of Paddywhackery, which is more "the dark dire drear doings of the bog dwellers, isn't it great that we're so modern and urban nowadays?" unless it's the "we're so modern and urban nowadays, we have gangs and crime and drugs and guns all that good stuff where people wallow in poverty and misery and can't get out" variant.
EDIT: Okay, going by the trailer, yep, Paddywhackery. And swiping the Scandinoir style with the Midsommar version of Hallowe'en (no, even in darkest West Cork they don't walk around with skinned rabbits in a procession, ask Scott if you don't believe me) and the de-saturated colours. I never thought I'd complain about asking them to turn up the brightness, because usually it's the *opposite* problem in movies/TV set in Ireland, but even while it can be grey and dreer here, it's a tiny bit brighter and greener than this shows. If it's Hallowe'en, that's the end of October, and in a West Cork coastal village you'll have the golden autumnal evening light and the long Atlantic dusk where the western sky is amethyst and sapphire.
EDIT EDIT: Although feck it, there's a scene at around 1:32 in the trailer where one of the intrepid podcasters breaks into what looks like an abandoned chapel full of beehives with a statue at the end surrounded by candles as in a shrine, and if the writers did *any* kind of homework, that *could* be Saint Gobnait because it's West Cork, she's a prominent local saint there, she's associated with bees and bee-keeping, and she's also the patron saint of a mountain parish in my own place, which is how I know about her.
I saw one of the Obamas' movies, "Rustin" a few months ago. It was about a gay black civil rights organizer who helped with the March on Washington. It was OK. Interesting behind-the-scenes history, and a lot of good scenery-chewing by the actors, including some great Oscar-bait lines. But it wasn't terribly coherent - it gave the impression of a bunch of scenes stuck together in the pattern of a story, neither fully embracing the complexities of reality like a good documentary, or putting the chosen narrative above all else like a cheesy docudrama. Instead, it sort of muddled between the two, and IMO failed at both. But perhaps I've been spoiled by David Simon's work ("Generation Kill", "Show Me A Hero", and above all "We Own This City" come to mind).
Yeesh. American Factory was pretty good, but looking at this and the other stuff on their website, not much else in their portfolio looks to be to that standard.
Everything I know of Ireland I've learned from @Deiseach, and what I've learned is that it's wall-to-wall Fae incursions barely held in check by a combination of Catholic rites, good old-fashioned Celtic moxie, and political shenanigans. :-)
There is something deeply amusing to me of the idea of a successful politician retiring to make movies, and then filling their movies with the most racist stereotypes they can think of.
They're not exactly racist, just cliché. I think the Scandis are entitled to be miffed at swiping their trademark "There's something nasty in the woodshed, Olaf" mayhem-in-the-smiling-countryside productions and setting it in Ireland by an American outfit.
Is that what scandi-noir is about? I haven't read or seen any of it.
I'm used to that sort of thing being set in the American south. Like, either the deep south, or West Virginia. "Deliverance" would probably be the most (in)famous example. So on the one hand, maybe there's less ripping-off going on, but on the other hand, there might be even more looking-down. :-/
The Duelling Banjos scene is absolutely worth a listen:
This is what I've picked up over the years (and I don't have any links and I may be wrong about some of this) — but with the popularization of inexpensive paperbacks in the 1950s, Swedish publishers started translating British and American mysteries and crime fiction to meet the new readership demands of Sweden. Initially, the British tea cozy mysteries (a la Agatha Christie) were quite popular, and Swedish authors began to write their own versions of these in Swedish settings. My understanding is that they were all very tame and derivative, but I can't say if this is true, but this was the opinion of a Swedish-American friend. Then in the 1960s translations of American crime fiction (a la Raymond Chandler) hit the market. Something about that noir sensibility struck a chord with Swedes (with their long dark winter nights and their sleep-deprived summers) and they started writing their own noir fiction. They took the genre and ran with it! Wikipedia doesn't have an article on it, but search for Swedish Crime Fiction and you'll get dozens of authors (link below).
Jo Nesbø is probably the author you want to start with. Although it was Stieg Larsson's Girl with the Dragon Tattoo that introduced me to this genre. Icelandic crime fiction is pretty damn good, too. I don't know if the Danes and Norwegians have the same fascination with fictional criminal psychopaths, though.
Nope. I kind of fell out of pop culture around when that became popular. Was it any good? It seemed to fall into that broad genre where flaws in the rest of the work get covered up by slathering on sex appeal.
I enjoyed the novels more than the Swedish movie adaptations and the Swedish movie adaptations more than the American movie adaptations of the Swedish movies. It's important to note that Stieg Larsson dropped dead of a massive coronary after finishing the trilogy. My understanding is that his unmarried longtime partner didn't get any of his quite valuable literary estate, but his family did, and they hired some hacks to churn out more in the series.
The main character is quite Aspergery, and I thought Larsson did a great job portraying her. The writing seems a little uneven in places, but that may be because of a poor translation.
Yeah, not this one, but I'm imagining, like, Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton making a drama set in China, and then everyone spends the whole movie speaking Pidgin.
The closer their job was to international relations, the funnier.
Seems like paddywhackery is somewhere at the intersectionality of colonialism and oppression. Does being heavily freckled qualify one to be a person of color?
Did I really just say that?! <sound of me whacking my face>
I'm calling my race the Colorless People. I tried using Everybody But the White People instead of People of Color. It's much more direct. But all the racialists in the room either shouted Shush or ran for the door.
I don't classify race by color. I classify race by skin color but by tastebuds. And there are two races, those that like spicy food and those that don't. If you're not into spicy food, then we can have absolutely nothing in common and I don't want to associate with you. But if you're of the spicy race, let's party!
I'm lame as hell by your standards. I like tasty spices like cumin a lot, but you're talking about hot spices, right? I just cannot comprehend how people can like them. Pain is not a flavor! Why would anyone take pleasure in having their mouth hurt while they experience the actual flavor and texture of the dish? And for those who enjoy a burning sensation while chewing, couldn't we come at it using a different model, one that doesn't wreck most things on the menu for people like me? For instance the cooks can leave the capsaicin out of the food, and instead supply the table with some sandpaper and a lemon. Those who like a burning sensation can sandpaper their lips while ordering -- then, while eating, they can rub them with lemon juice before each bite.
Maybe whites could call themselves Consolidated Spectrum People? (White light is made up of all colors). Integrated Spectrum People would be good except the first word demands a trigger warning. Um . . . Rainbows in Disguise Entities?
I have been informed by previous discussions on social media that persons of colour can indeed be freckled, so you need not whack yourself in the face for that.
Deiseach, who is the saint people pray to when they can't find something? I once lost my car keys after stopping to clean up my car interior at a gas station that offered a big trash barrel and use of a vacuum cleaner. When I was ready to leave I just could not find my keys. After half an hour of crawling around the car floor, digging in my backpack, checking the ground etc. I was blinking back tears of frustration. A guy nearby helped me briefly but had no more luck than me, and returned to cleaning his own car. And about a minute after he left, I found them. They were in the trash barrel, right on top. I told him and he said matter-of-factly, "yeah, I said a little prayer to St. _______ for you."
I think the best evidence that we are living in a simulation is the consistency with which my mother can find a parking space using the St Anthony hack.
St Anthony of Padua, the go-to guy in my family for "Hey St Anthony I lost my keys/paperwork/sanity, go find it for me, please?" and he never lets us down.
Don't forget to at least light a candle if you don't put money in the donation box! 😁 Yeah, we're not above trying to bribe a saint: "Hey Anthony, find this for me and I'll put some money in the box, we gotta deal?"
It's even funnier in that he got his reputation as a theologian and preacher, but popular piety decided "yeah, we're gonna make this scholarly friar find our lost crap, that seems the best way to approach this".
Haven't been watching Peaky Blinders, it's not really my thing. Seems very dramatic, and I've seen some discussion that later seasons are not as good. Cillian Murphy of course became a star out of it, so good luck to him.
I've been following Murphy since Breakfast on Pluto, 28 Days Later, Redeye and Sunshine. I always enjoy his acting. Everything he does or says, he puts a little bit of spin on, a little wobble, that gives a sense of interiority and of the character's areas of eccentricity. Also am fascinated by his profoundly androgynous good looks. And his blue eyes are sort of a superpower. Saw him in a movie where the director had him wear brown contact lenses and I did not realize it was Murphy til near the end, even though his appearance was not changed at all except for the eye color.
Back when I was a child in Poland, I often heard my grandma pray to St. Anthony of Padua to help her find her glasses/keys/other stuff. Thanks for the trip down memory lane 😊
Assuming there's any credence to all of that, it still seems like St John had it completely backwards. It's faith that's the source of denial and attatchment to false idols. Actually abandoning attatchment would involve stripping away the lies that make up your view of the world, even down to your own identity... but then you would be left with nothing. And apparently the human mind can't handle that.
Anyways, I don't think anything in there is related to meditation-induced psychosis. The whole "dark night of the soul" just seems to be temporary disillusionment with their faith. Or it's just seasonal depression.
Alternately, it's stripping away the veil of illusion that prevents you from directly perceiving reality. You are not your identity. What was your true face before you were born?
Not that it's much easier for the human mind to handle that. And I suppose one could debate whether "reality" is different from "nothing", but well, I think that view generates enough despair under introspection, as is.
Depersonalization and derealization are hellish disorders. I've seen both in post-meditation syndromes. But they do seem to be a pretty rare consequence, even among people who do meditation marathons.
Culadasa - John Yates - touches on it in "The Mind Illuminated" in the section on insight meditation. I was looking into attending one of his ten day training sessions in Arizona just before he was caught up in some sort of scandal and was kicked out his practice.
A Google search on the phrase + meditation will turn up a lot of links to Reddit discussion, etc. So I suspect it's a thing that happens to some people with regular long sessions.
I've had a daily practice for several years and will often do one hour sessions but I haven't had it happen. No Jhanas for me either.
Personally, I've been lucky and never really experienced anything I would call depression. It was always just a lot of anxiety and some pretty bad OCD for me. I'm a good responder to SSRI's for the OCD so I've been lucky that way.
If something bad happens, like losing a friend or a relative or even a pet I'll go through a period of sadness but I think that happens to pretty much everyone and it would be cause for concern if I wasn't low for a while after that sort of loss.
One of my brothers does have issues with seasonal depression though. He relocated to Phoenix because Minnesota winters were just too dark and dreary for him.
This is interesting - I also have OCD that responds very well to SSRIs, but I won't try meditation because of my fears about the negative effects (particularly that some switch might flip in my brain that would send me into psychological hell). I love that you are getting a lot out of it!
If you haven't had jhanas, and find SSRIs good enough to deal with anxiety and OCD, how do you get the motivation to do daily practice for years, even to the point of planning a ten day training session?
For me personally, I seem to lose meditational steam outside my extreme lows where I come close to thinking of taking my life. Even then, Michael Sealey's youtube videos seem to give me more immediate response to stress/sleeplessness, though for longer term transformation possibly (I don't know) a TMI-style framework might suit better.
The daily motivation comes from the self exploration of insight meditation. I’ve worked some important things out regarding my own motivations for my own actions and I have developed a good degree self understanding and non reactivity to events outside my control.
It made working with engineering teams with big egos much more harmonious. I’ve retired in the last couple years and the patience I’ve learned with myself and others makes life for me and the people around me more open and loving. I’ve been married for a long time - 41 years and counting - and my relationship with my wife has never been so conflict free.
This is a pretty brief summary of how meditation has helped. It probably has the ring of too good to be true. The process involved a lot of self work and wasn’t always easy and I’m glossing over many details here but I’ve been up since 5:00 this morning and I’m a bit tired right now. If you like I can go into more detail tomorrow.
This is already great -- thank you very much -- but more details will of course be even better.
My impression was, for instance, that "open and loving", "calm" etc. were more in the shamata (especially metta) territory, and that people embrace insight-driven-misery once they graduate from shamata only for progress towards supposedly more serious goals like stream entry. Here you seem to suggest that at least some could understand their own motivations better from insight meditation rather than shamata + targeted contemplation on one's own motivations?
I remember having read this a while ago (I think Gwern Branwen had linked to it somewhere).
That said (epistemic status: not an expert) I think these issues tend to kick in with a rather large dose of meditation? (If I understand the article correctly, Megan Vogt, the main focus of the article, had to meditate for *sixty hours* before she finally went insane.) Usually normies who are into meditation tend to meditate for maybe like an hour a week(?), which should be below the threshold of craziness.
A few years ago, I used to practice meditation very casually for maybe 15-20 minutes daily. I believe (but have no way to prove) that this meditation regimen led to the onset of a weird bodily sensory issue which I still struggle with to some extent. The sensation itself and the discomfort that it causes are difficult to describe in words. Essentially, my attention will occasionally gravitate, spontaneously and uncontrollably, toward my heartbeat (which is a sensation that I became consciously aware of for the first time during these meditation sessions). This causes me significant discomfort, due to my squeamishness regarding internal bodily sensations.
Is it possible that you might have some condition like a heart arrhythmia which by a coincidence developed at the time you were meditating? Perhaps you should check with a doctor.
It's definitely possible. I got an ECG a few weeks after these episodes started, which came in normal. But I also have relatives on both sides of my family with various heart conditions. If it is a physical arrhythmia, then I sort of suspect that vagus nerve stimulation could be what triggers it.
In the article it mentions a threshold of thirty minutes per day, beyond which meditation stops being a benefit and has the potential to be harmful. They didn't follow that up, so I'm not sure if they've done any more research into that threshold. It does match with my experiences though - I've done meditation for about 15 minutes a day for a long time and never had any bad experiences, but at one point I went up to two hours per day. The experience was very different, I had some profound realisations, but I also saw frightening things. After a few weeks I realised my mood was getting lower and lower, and I backed off from the long meditation then. The realisations I had were not negative, but I could imagine some people do experience very negative and frightening realisations like the ones described in the article.
The rationalist tradition in Hinduism that began in ancient India. (Btw, This is a great channel of you're interested in Indian history. Came recommended by an expert I know.)
There are a lot of Indian philosophical traditions. I never had the time to learn about them--I don't know Western philosophy that well so I wouldn't know what to compare it to. Just a reminder there are thousands of things you will never know.
But a school with a focus on this world seems credible--this is the home of the Kama Sutra after all. ;)
Ancient Indians were into theorizing everything. Panini created (2000 years ago) a set of 4000 algorithms to define what a well formed sentence was in Sanskrit. Basically, he codified a language. This is widely seen as one of the greatest intellectual achievements of humanity. There was an intellectual environment for at least a 1000 years before that, that led to that.
Some of the other subjects theorized, such as the Kamasutra, were pretty wacky. Ultimate nerdiness.
I mean, only in a society where smart theoretical people are unattractive and therefore theorizing about sex is creepy.
I read through it ages ago as a kid, and it seemed eminently practical to me, though at the time I was too young to do anything with it, and thought, "Hm, guess some cultures are less puritanical about sex. I guess this might be useful for an adult." The thing I remember was the three categories of genital sizes with animal names.
True, that they were not puritanical about sex. However, 1000 years of colonization by Islamic and then Victorian Christian cultures affected that though.
I feel exactly the same. Drives me crazy when I'm looking up how to do something tricky in Photoshop. I'm willing to scroll and scroll through google hits looking for the information in prose. But usually it does not exist, and I end up with a 20 min video with somebody perky, one unskippable and one skippable ad at the beginning and 2 or 3 unskippables in the middle. And the first long part of the video is stuff I already know, and the last part is stuff I don't need to know, and I have to hunt for the middle part that tells me how the hell to do X, and when I find it the instructions involve panels and options I'm not familiar with, so I have to go look up how to get Photoshop to extrude them into view, then go back and find again the part about X, and the crucial part has an unskippable ad in the middle. Fuck that.
Do you have a few minutes to talk about our lord and savior, YouTube Premium?
While I agree with @Anonymous that ad-blocking browser plug-ins are terrific, YouTube frequently finds ways to thwart them, and of course thwarting ads in YouTube phone and TV apps is no longer trivially easy (or maybe no longer even possible).
But $25 a month gets you no ad interruptions, ever, plus YouTube Music (I have no idea how it compares to paid Spotify but it seems good enough to me) and other crap I don't use like downloading videos to watch offline, and that's for up to **FIVE** YouTube accounts.
I signed up for Premium and my four family members pay me $60 a year for their accounts, so I'm only actually paying $5 a month for ad-free YouTube. There are no requirements that everyone be in the same household and your Premium account follows you everywhere you are logged in. You can be logged in in more than one place (like your phone and a Roku, or whatever).
This is heaven.
Seriously.
Heaven.
I went to a friend's house and tried to share a funny 2 hour video essay on a Marvel movie with them on their TV and the ad interruptions were *torture.* It was so bad that I persuaded them to log out and let me log in, and our collective blood pressure immediately dropped.
They signed up for YouTube Premium at the end of the night.
It's a bargain for one person at $25; it's a steal for five people at $5 each. Just do it.
I just downloaded the subtitles of the video shared above (as .txt) using some google-thrown-up subtitle download website, which I don't recommend or link because that site is full of ads with gifs. I hope there is a better site that can do the same.
Thanks. I did download it and invoke the command wrongly, but then now I am starting to get paranoid if the developers could have slipped in something nasty in the code. Let me be stupid and ask: how do I know that wouldn't be the case, when I download software by a bunch of private individuals I don't know at all?
Sorry, no idea. My heuristic is something like "if too many people use it, I would probably have heard if it did something fishy".
I wish there was a better (and sufficiently simple) way to use untrusted programs. Something like when you install an app on smartphone, and it keeps asking for permissions, maybe something like that could also exist in Windows, like you would run the program in a paranoid mode and keep getting notifications like "now it tries to download from this URL", "now it tries to write into this file on disk" and could agree or disagree on any action (and remember your previous decisions, or create rules for the future). But I do not know anything like this.
Yeah, I'm lazy and sloppy when I'm in the throes of a photoshop project. It's hard to break out of that state and proactively do the sensible thing. Does Ublock work on Mac?
Yes; it's not based on operating system but on browser. It will not work in Safari, due to Apple once again ruining its bundled apps for no good reason, but it will work in Firefox as well as in Chrome-based browsers.
See, this is part of why I avoid taking some of these proactive steps. They sound easy -- 20 mins getting and installing it, and the rest of your life will be bliss. But I have been using Safari for years, and whatever is wrong with it I am so used to dealing with that it doesn't bother me. It's like being married! I'm sure there are ways to port your bookmarks and history and passwords over to another browser, but doing all that will take me. a long time, I will probably get stuck on something and need help, etc. And then once it's done I'll have to get fluent with the new browser. I think I'm stuck with the YouTube ads, unless there's an equivalent ad blocker for Mac.
Um -- my guess is that they give it to the Alphas in the group, and the Alphas impale it on their great big peckers and feed it to women who have developed crow's feet and are now willing to do anything at all to get an Alpha or even a bit of food.
Yeah, that first wrinkle is each woman's Crack of Doom. You fall into it screaming AAAAIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEE! and that's it for you. Though if you're lucky you might find a lonesome, though somewhat crispy, Gollum at the bottom. And the worst of it is, Gollum was no Alpha even prior to crisping.
Just for context for y'all, here's a definition of The Wall from a page of definition of Redpill acronyms: "The Wall- The point in a woman's life where her ego and self-assessed view of her sexual market value exceed her actual sexual market value; the beginning of the decline. Usually occurs as a wake-up shock to women when they realize that their power over men was temporary and that their looks are fading. This usually results with first denial and then a sudden change in priority towards looking for a husband. Even after hitting the wall, many women will squander a few more precious years testing her SMV with alphas to double-check, hoping her perceived decline was a fluke, this will make her even more bitter when she finally has to settle for a worse-beta than she could've gotten before because of squandering her youth."
And, um, crass as I am, my Gollum comment had nothing to do with sex -- well, except for good times women who've hit the wall might have with Crispy Gollum down in the Crack of Doom. The Crack of Doom is the canyon in or near Mt. Doom with a river of molten metal flowing through it, right?
You know, when I first encountered the redpill stuff it really seemed to me like the sort of things feminists used to say about men, except of course with the places reversed. They had some good points but exaggerated everything--SMV does exist but varies depending on the beholder, and yes it does decline with age but a lot of women are aware of this, get married successfully and exit the market. Or else decide they don't want to and manage their money accordingly. You also have to see the irony in wanting 'traditional values' and then screwing around--sure the consequences were worse for women pre-1960s but 'good time Charlies' weren't respected either.
Still, after hearing endlessly a bunch of second-wave stuff growing up about how awful I was for even looking at a woman the wrong way and how terrible my natural inclinations were and if I screwed up I'd be unhireable and starve to death on the street...well, it starts to look refreshing. There are these people I've been terrified of my whole life and nobody ever criticizes them and we had to pretend we loved them--AND SOMEONE IS FIGHTING BACK!
Then they turned into Nazis. Oh well. Nothing good ever lasts.
The one thing I got out of reading both Dworkin and Mackinnon (or more accurately their epigones in the popular press) *and* Roissy and Roosh over the years is that the sexes are basically enemies--while there *are* indeed negative-sum outcomes like nuclear war or climate change that hurt everyone, in general what benefits women hurts men because they don't need men anymore, and vice versa. Fundamentally, male and female interests are in conflict, because (a) unlike say LGBT where straights don't lose anything by allowing gay marriage, men and women are both half of humanity and resources are limited, and (b) at least for the heterosexual majority, both sexes are engaged in trying to get the 'best possible' partner of the opposite sex, which usually means limiting the agency of that sex (either by taking away money from women or creating consequences for approach by unattractive men) so they have to settle for you.
Forget any dream of romance and companionship, for in the grim darkness of the near future there is only war, and the laughter of thirsting lawyers.
I visited Taiwan many times, most recently 4 years ago. Even though a white guy with minimal Mandarin, I was always treated well. I was often disoriented, since I was unable to read, speak, or understand. Someone always helped. Also, IMHO, best food in the world
I feel like this might be getting tedious now, but something has gone wrong with the scores. The highest blind score on the spreadsheet is 0.275 (as stated in the post) and the highest full score is 0.34. But the winning score was 0.38.
"Google has launched an "antiracism" initiative claiming that America is a "system of white supremacy" and that all Americans are "raised to be racist"—including Ben Shapiro, who is depicted as a layer of the "white supremacy pyramid," culminating in "genocide.""
Something to keep in mind next time somebody talks about 'wokeness is in decline' or something
If you are Jewish, Black or an immigrant to the US you should be seething with anger at yourself because you are destroying White America with your vile genes, character and habits. If you are Asian or something else I'm not clear whether and how much you should hate yourself -- but I'm sure Hammond will be happy to provide guidelines.
Only if they're knife-ears, though, as the Rings of Power reminded us:
"Elf ships on our shore; Elf workers taking your trades. Workers who don't sleep, don't tire, don't age. I say, the Queen's either blind or an Elf lover, just like her father."
Google pulled out of a conference in Europe because the organiser criticised Israel. As did Intel and Siemens. American capital is pretty much pro Israel.
I don't know the specifics (since there's not enough data to identify the conference and the organizer) but from my experience, I strongly suspect "criticised Israel" means something like "denied the right of Israel to exist as a state, propagandized boycotting and ultimately destroying Israel and unquestionably supported genocidal organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah in their quest for massacring Jews and ethnically cleaning the territory of Israel". That's how it usually turns out - it's one thing saying "Israel did this and that wrong" - and I don't believe thoroughly woke and leftist Google would pull out of anything because of that - and quite the other thing saying "make Palestine Judenfrei!" especially right after over a thousand Israelis had been brutally murdered by an organization with an official goal of making Palestine Judenfrei. *That* could make even the very woke and leftist Google to stop and think maybe they don't want a part in this particular thing.
You might want to update your priors, because you're wrong on just about all counts. Also, it took me a grand total of two minutes of googling the first sentence there before I had the tweet from the organizer in question.
"I’m shocked at the rhetoric and actions of so many Western leaders & governments, with the exception in particular of Ireland’s government, who for once are doing the right thing. War crimes are war crimes even when committed by allies, and should be called out for what they are."
Followed immediate by an apology, which starts, "First, what Hamas did is outrageous and disgusting. It is by every measure an act of monstrous evil. Israel has a right to defend itself, but it does not, as I have already stated, have a right to break international law." and advocates for peace using Ireland as the metaphor.
Also, Google is a highly profit-driven TRILLION dollar corporation. They are not remotely leftist lol.
And if you think leftists are some kind of pennyless hippies that despise money you need to really update your world model. It's a fallacy beyond a mere lol, it's double-facepalm-worthy misconception. There are a lot of leftists billionaires, and it's probably pointless to count the millionaires, there are so many of them. Bernie Sanders is a millionaire, for Marx's sake. Trillion dollar corps do not contradict leftist principles in any way - in fact, for a trillion dollar corp it makes sense to ally with the left, since they can easily overcome or capture the economic control mechanisms, and they would be delighted by both the capacities of control that such alliance promises (who wouldn't like to be able to decide what people can and can't speak about?) and all the negatives would be much heavier on their smaller and less established competitors than on them.
As for Cosgrave, I can see that he, a week after Hamas murdered over a thousand Israelis and and kidnapped several hundreds, before all the victims were even identified and buried, while giving lip service to Israel's "right to defend", accused Israel of "war crimes" (note he had never said Hamas committed any). This was way before operation in Gaza started, that was on Oct 27. And he endorsed the call of Irish government for "cessation of all hostilities" - effectively denying Israel's right to defend itself right after giving it lip service (because there's no way Israel can actually defend itself it it ceases hostile actions toward Hamas). I think the position here is clear - Israel is the criminal here, and while Hamas is "disgusting", Israel should just shut up and take it, and not respond in any way or form. This is a little step better than outright denying the right of Israel to exist, but only barely.
I grant you that some Google *employees* identify as leftists, and maybe even are. I'm well aware you don't need to be penniless for that, I'm a software engineer. That said, I'm not talking about the employees, nor was it the topic of discussion you replied to. We're talking about the *company as a political entity* - e.g., the part making decisions about pulling out of conferences, the actual management of the company (the employees are not making these decisions). They are categorically not leftists, nor are they pro-Palestine (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/08/business/israel-palestine-google-employees.html)
If the word "leftist" has any meaning other than "to the left of me, the person talking", there are no leftist billionaires. Millionaires maybe, but I don't think you really conceptualize the difference between "owning 2-3 houses" wealthy and "financially able to purchase thousands of houses and let them sit vacant" wealthy.
As far as the rest of your post, it's clear you're not actually open to new information here, using some truly motivated reasoning to avoid updating, so I'm not interested in further discussion. If you're complaining that "what Hamas did is outrageous and disgusting. by every measure an act of monstrous evil." is insufficient because it didn't literally use the words "war crime", it's clear you're not engaging in good faith here.
> We're talking about the *company as a political entity*
Oh, then it is definitely very very leftist. I mean the whole company was in mourning after Trump has been elected in 2016, held special meetings to help the employees cope with that, and several top officials promised to work extra hard to never let it happen again. As a company, Google is probably even more leftist than a random worker. At least on worker level people like Damore exist(ed). On company level, they obviously can not be tolerated.
It is true that as a company Google is not pro-Palestine (or pro-Hamas) - a lot of American Left are not very sympathetic to Hamas (though a lot also are). That doesn't prevent them from being very leftist in all other political questions.
> If the word "leftist" has any meaning other than "to the left of me, the person talking", there are no leftist billionaires
George Soros, Jeff Bezos, Mark Cuban, Tom Steyer, Mark Zuckerberg, Steven Spielberg, Eli Broad, Michael Bloomberg, Pierre Omidyar, Marc Benioff. These only ones I could quickly recall, there are probably many more.
These are people who are on record endorsing leftist policies, organizing PACs to elect Democratic candidates and promote Democratic policies, giving money to leftist causes and NGOs. Any sensible definition of "leftist" would include them.
> so I'm not interested in further discussion.
Of course, after proclaiming some easily disprovable falsities, you are "no longer interested". No surprise here.
> is insufficient because it didn't literally use the words "war crime"
No, not because he didn't use the particular words (though it certainly wouldn't hurt) but because the practical conclusion he makes is that Hamas, while he calls them "evil" and "disgusting", should keep the hostages and go unpunished, while Israel is being called "criminal" right after it has been brutally attacked. Practically, the real crimes of Hamas are ignored in anything but rhetoric, while actions of Israel are called "crimes" by default. It is a grotesquely distorted view - yet very common, especially among western woke leftist. Their formulaic "condemnation" of Hamas atrocities is nothing but a smokescreen permitting them to move on to the real goal - bashing Israel. If they really thought Hamas is evil - they would endorse practical steps of fighting evil (which the Left is very active at when they really, and not just formally, think something is evil), but when it comes to the evil of Hamas, they somehow never do. I guess it may have something to do with "engaging in good faith"?
There's a source and it's kinda accurate in the sense that there has been a slide deck with that pyramid and it drew a progression from IIRC "white supremacy" to "genocide" and had some prominent right-wing names on it, but that was in 2021 when I saw it and I don't remember the exact thing and it's not different enough from a thousand of similar woke duckspeak pieces enough to bother digging it up. On my recollection, it wasn't even made by Google per se but one of those woke consultancies that profiteer on the whole DIE fashion but it probably was spotted somewhere at Google sponsored event. Again, not something unique or special - since 2021 there has been dozens of such instances spotted.
I wonder if this isn't a hoax. If this were an officially sponsored Google slide deck...
1. All the slides should say "Google Confidential" if they were really Google confidential. instead only one slide has "Google Confidential" pasted on it in the upper left hand corner.
2. Likewise, where's the Google watermark? That doesn't mean this isn't the Ladipo Group's slideware, but if this were a course sponsored by Google HR, they would have insisted on a more official form (confidential statement on every slide, and Google watermarks indicating sponsorship).
3. What's with that "Join the watch party" slide? If this course was sponsored by Google HR, they'd make sure that all their employees were taking it, rather than encouraging them to join watch parties after hours. Also, for the past decade just about all HR training is delivered through online modules that force the user to click through the content and then take a quiz. Watch parties are not a commonly used courseware delivery method.
4. Google employees have their own groups that are allowed to meet on site. Maybe this is some sort of wokeness study group?
Bottom line this whole thing doesn't look corporately official. And, BTW, did you know the word gullible isn't in the OED?
I had thought that "Oppression Olympics" was a term used to criticise wokeness by opponents of wokeness (back when it was called "social justice", but whatever). I suppose it's possible that it might have been in the slide-deck as an example of an anti-woke argument which should be countered, but if so then I'd expect it to have some context around it? It's strange to see it there as a slide by itself.
Theoretically, it could be a hoax. But I've seen the same ideas expressed so many times since 2021 in so many venues that creating a hoax that would look exactly like dozens of other DEI courses and decks sounds kinda pointless. Why bother? Judging by the style, those graphics likely weren't created by Google people but were copy-pasted from some other sources - probably some kind of DIE consultant content decks, or maybe activist sites/forums. And Rufo mentions several documents and videos in the thread, so the genocide pyramid is probably from another document than the confidential slides. Could be that this document is from some kind of wokeness promotion group, yes. Could be private initiative of the DIE person Rufo mentioned that created it as a guide. "Official" is kinda vague here - on one hand, you probably don't l;iterally have to read and follow literally everything DIE Lead sends out. On the other hand, it's kinda clear what the company endorses here, isn't it? I mean, if a senior officer would be sending coworkers links to the stormfront site, would we say "meh, it's not officially endorsed and mandatory" or would we be a bit more worried?
We had DEI training modules every year at my former company (15K employees worldwide), and they looked nothing like those slides. Basically, they were all about not saying things that racially or sexually insulted our coworkers. You'd get conversational scripts (which you could read or listen to the audio) and then you had to identify when someone was being a jerk (comments on par with "You mean you didn't grow up in a ghetto?" or asking "Is it your time of the month?"). It was pretty easy to score a 100 on these tests — even if you were a clueless jerk. There was nothing about identifying our privileged identities. And the Wheel of Power wasn't part of the training. BTW, that slide is credited to ccrweb.ca. I checked out the website and CCR is the Canadian Council of Refugees, an immigrant rights organization. Their mission statement: "The Canadian Council for Refugees is a leading voice for the rights, protection, sponsorship, settlement, and well-being of refugees and migrants, in Canada and globally. CCR is driven by member organizations working with and for these communities from coast to coast to coast." After the opening statement, there's some boilerplate about the intersectionality of colonialism and oppression. But it doesn't sound like they're trying to wokify Canadians.
You have linked to a tweet dated 8 September 2021. Setting aside any possible concerns with accuracy, this clearly does not falsify the hypothesis that wokeness has declined since that date.
<quote>The cuts come as the tech industry doubles down on artificial intelligence. With fewer diverse voices represented in AI development, the resulting products could be less accurate or more harmful to users.</quote>
Whenever someone uses the term "diverse voices" I automatically think of choirs singing off-key. But I'm thoroughly enjoying the shitshow as AI companies try to placate the competing racialist obsessions of the Right and Left.
I'm not, it doesn't amuse me to think that a decade of hundreds of AI researchers (roughly millennia of human thought) working together and centuries of computing time by GPUs result in a model that we then proceed to shackle and shittify because its users are not responsible adults and can't conceive of it as a neutral search engine whose answers are not opinions.
Oh dear. Apparently now saying "I'm not racist" means that you are racist, according to Ibram X Kendi. I have decided, therefore, that I am racist, but only against Ibram X Kendi. I trust the woke mob will find my position acceptable.
Have not used them, and am generally supportive of the concept, but have two concerns.
I suspect that with some conditions, the predictive power is limited. As I've seen it, predictive power is often quantified as the difference in the odds of having a disease when comparing the highest to lowest risk decile of poly-genic risk scores. I've seen recently with Schizophenia a ~3X greater risk (maybe Orchid has a better algorithm). But most parents won't be selecting between the highest and lowest risk deciles, since they are giving limited genetic material, I imagine they'll be selecting between 4th and 6th decile or 1st and 3rd (but these are intuitive calculations, I don't know how much variance exists in risk-genes in a typical couples embryos). That being said, if there is a sharp increase in risk between any deciles, and you have reason to believe that your embryos may straddle those deciles, the prediction could be useful.
Another concern I've heard is whether the predictions will remain true when the child grows up. Maybe Schizophrenia or Alzheimer's or whatever-disease emerges as an interaction between genes and culture, such that today's risk genes are not tomorrow's risk genes. I wonder if there is any way to evaluate this possibility.
All that being said, granted the limited risks of in-vitro fertilization, and knowing nothing else, if it wasn't for the $ & inconvenience I'd do it for some conditions at least.
Or consult the movie GATTACA. It's theoretically possible (albeit I'm pretty sure illegal) that health insurance companies could decline to cover you if you're susceptible to some of these diseases, or an employer could screen you based on mental health risks. This seems speculative, it would involve espionage or collusion with Orchid, and a very compotent (and... bad-acting) CEO who is capable of understanding and acting on this information without too many people finding out.
If you're already undergoing IVF, then there is no additional risk from using IVF. However, if you were not planning on any sort of aneuploidy screening, then there is the risk of some type of harm from trophectoderm biopsy. However, it appears this isn't really an issue: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajog.2023.08.010. So, if you find it worth the cost, then I believe it is "riskier" to not use their PGT-WGS, as in P(disease|no PGT-WGS) > P(disease|PGT-WGS).
As for privacy concerns, that is probably a better question for them -- I don't know
I stumbled into a (relatively) old interview [1] with Yehuda Shaul, a Co-founder of Breaking the Silence [2], an Israeli organization that specializes in debunking the myth of the "Most Moral Army" by soliciting personal accounts from some of the people who fought for said army about what they did during their service. For example, the current top link on Breaking the Silence's website is a post-October-7th NYT op-ed [3] from an IDF soldier who fought in the 2014 war, where he recounts how - based on false briefing from his superiors - he accidentally killed an elderly woman with a grenade.
Breaking the Silence, along with B'Tselem, are the main 2 characters in a change of heart I had recently (mostly after October 7th, but in some sense it started before, not by too long), where I transitioned from an older model of Israel, the mainstream default in most Arab circles, of Israel and Israelis having no intention to ever see the word "Peace" except as a cynical delay tactic and as a tool for aborting actual peace initiatives and negotiations, to an updated model where **most** (by number) of Israel and Israelis are like this, but where a significant and influential minority of as-yet undetermined size truly wanting peace and bearing massive social and personal costs as it swims against the immense currents of cynicism and warmongering in a desperate Hail Mary for peace. I'm highlighting this org because - in some sense - this change of heart it induced in me is the 3rd most massive POV switch in my belief network, right after Atheism and Vegetarianism. And just like for those 2, I have a certain fondness and feeling of gratefulness for the people who pointed me to (what I now see as) the right direction and away from the unexamined inertial one.
The highlight of the interview for me:
-- Yehuda recounts how his former unit in the West Bank city of Hebron was tasked with what he described as "making our presence felt". Meaning: Breaking into a Palestinian home, waking up the resident family in terror and inspecting the whole house, going to the roof, jumping into the neighboring house's roof, and coming out the other house's gate. 8 hours a day per individual patrol, each day a year, every year from 2000 till now. For what reason? What military objective? What galaxy-brained endgame that defenders of the IDF's behavior always seem to hallucinate in their ever-more-futile quest to justify the unjustifiable? Yehuda, former IDF personnel, says "literally nothing". Nay, that's actually not what he said, he said something far worse: the objective is to create the "Feeling of being Persecuted" in the occupied Palestinians, translating from a slang Hebrew term widespread in the army. That is, the whole reason is for Palestinians to know that "Big Brother is Watching", the entirety of the IDF mission in occupied Palestine being essentially little more than a gesture of "That's a Nice Family you have over there, would be a shame if... you know".
I recommend watching the full interview and checking out the Breaking the Silence website to see the thinking and handiwork of a man that I'm sure changed the mind of many Israelis and (more importantly, and so I hope) many Palestinians and those who root for them. The interview was posted nearly an exact 10 years before October 7th, on October 10th 2013. Itself a statement about the sheer uniformity of oppression and dispossession meted out by the Israeli war machine, an anti-dote to the artificial short Context Window that many on the Pro-Israel side loves to impose on the debate, where you're supposed to tunnel-vision on the exact 100 hours stretch between the night of October 6th and the night of October 10th of 2023 and not a single sensory input else.
I don’t really want to get involved in discussion on this topic, but anyone who is interested in how these things are “seen” in different countries might like to have a look at the headlines of British newspapers on Wednesday 3rd April, after the lawyers and factcheckers felt they had confirmed what happened to a group of charity workers. https://www.tomorrowspapers.co.uk
Yes, over the 75 years of continuous warfare, I am sure you can find examples of IDF soldiers - and regiments, and commanders - behaving all sort of ways, including committing some quite heinous acts. It's an army at war, and it is not composed of angels - it will have the same percentage of assholes, jerks and even violent psychos sometimes as any other large group of people. So yeah, there's a difference between the ideal mythologized image and the grim reality on the ground. If you are beyond your teen-age years, you should already know that. If you are not, hold in there, there's a lot of surprises on the way.
IDF and the political establishment governing it pay a lot of attention to not harm civilian population unnecessarily and to make the army behave in a way that doesn't harm Israel's image unnecessarily. It is based on both moral and practical considerations. Israel's political goals - beyond the initial decades of it's existence, where it has been much more complicated - are purely defensive. Israel does not want to conquer any of their Arab neighbors, does not want to "genocide" or destroy or harm in any way at all any of these countries. Israel mostly wants to be left alone. However, that is not going to happen, at least for now. The war has been waged, in various forms, for about a century now, and it's not going to stop anytime soon, as it looks. And yes, when you have an army composed of real people waging a real war, there would be all kinds of stories, including stories not looking very good. If you make your life's purpose to cherry-pick and collect those stories, you will always succeed. Some would probably be much, much worse than accidentally killing a civilian based on a bad intel.
With all that being said, anybody who uses these examples as a basis to claim that Israel's army and Israel's political government's goal is something other than being left alone and ultimately achieve peace are just wrong - at best, mistaken, usually - cynically lying. Moreover, those organizations that are using this to give boost to movements like BDS and give passive - and sometimes active - support to movements like Hamas and hamstring the ability of IDF to fight Hamas - are actively harming the cause they nominally support, i.e. achieving peace, and actively contribute to the harm done to civilians at both sides. These people may be subjectively idealist and strive for peace, as they understand it, but objectively they are the ones that ensure movements like Hamas see that their cause is alive, their victory - which, have no doubts, they see as destruction of Israel and murdering or expelling most of Jewish and other non-Muslim population of Israel - be possible and within reach. Until it becomes clear to these movements that this dream is not going to happen, there could be no hope for peaceful co-existance. And the position like "we support the right of Israel to defense in theory, but we will scream like hell and demand boycotts and sanctions each time Israel tries to do something to defend itself in practice, because they are not inhumanly perfect while doing it" is just a moral coward's way of saying "to hell with Israel". Obviously, Israel would never accept that, and no "peace effort" based on that would never achieve anything.
Israel wanted to give Gaza back to Egypt but Egypt wouldn't take it. I can say with some confidence that, for Gaza specifically, they have no interest in "conquering" it.
EDIT: After a half hours Googling I haven't been able to find a source for the idea that Israel offered Egypt control of Gaza back during peace negotiations. Until I do, I can no longer stand behind this statement as being true.
My first reaction was "why Egypt? why not simply have Palestine governed by the people who live there?", but that of course opens another large debate and I do not want to spend the time necessary to study all the relevant history and whatever.
Just wanted to say that I find "Israel offered Gaza to Egypt, and Egypt refused" plausible but irrelevant.
(As an analogy -- and a bad one, because of course the situations are different in many aspects -- it sounds to me like Putin proposing a peace deal where he keeps the eastern part of Ukraine, and Hungary gets the western part. Hungary refuses, and Putin says "well, I tried; everyone can clearly see that conquering territory was never my priority, but what other options do I have?")
That's a pretty good example of what's a hopelessly demagogic/brainwashed Pro-Israel supporter would say: zero self-reflection, 100% catechisms and parroting propaganda verbatim. Zero engagement with the actual post you're replying to, 100% whiny fretting about Anti-Semitism while in complete denial about the dehumanization and war crimes that the war machine you're cheerleading for is engaging in.
That's a pretty good example of what I consider to be not worth the keyboard wear-and-tear on my laptop to even attempt to respond to. Thanks for setting it and have a good day.
"100% catechisms and parroting propaganda verbatim. Zero engagement with the actual post you're replying to, 100% whiny fretting about Anti-Semitism while in complete denial about the dehumanization and war crimes that the war machine you're cheerleading for is engaging in."
Couldn't have put it better myself. Utterly disgraceful behavior on their part.
Yeah, that's how the dialogue with "proponents of peace" usually looks like. "We are all for peace, but you don't want peace!" - "Let's look at these facts and arguments?" - "You are a brainwashed zombie not worth discussing with!". Yeah, that's a great way to achieve peace, keep going. Don the keffiyeh and go scream "free Palestine! from the river to the sea!" at a random Jewish-looking person in the street, that will help a lot, I am sure.
> 100% whiny fretting about Anti-Semitism
There was literally 0% fretting about Anti-Semitism in my response.
> while in complete denial about the dehumanization and war crimes
I literally spent most of the response talking about how the things that the orgs you mentioned talk about happened, and probably worse things too, and why, which is the literal opposite of denying it. You didn't even bother reading it, did you? Not that I hoped for much better. If you, in the future, will be interested in the question why there's no peace, the mirror would provide a good answer.
If it makes you feel any better, I did read your entire response. It's not very long, I was just impressed with how formulaic and devoid of any originality it was.
Perhaps if you behave, I can even point you to the exact parts in your first and your second reply where you quite obviously appear as whiny and how you might do better in the future. As of now, I don't think you deserve it enough.
If that's true, that makes it even worse. You read it, and then you claimed I wrote the exact opposite of what I did. Right there, in plain sight of everybody. Now you resorted to personal insults and trolling, so I guess we reached the natural conclusion of it. Keep the "struggle for peace" or whatever the voices in your head tell you to do.
> an older model of Israel, the mainstream default in most Arab circles, of Israel and Israelis having no intention to ever see the word "Peace" except as a cynical delay tactic and as a tool for aborting actual peace initiatives and negotiations
Funny, because most Israelis and Israel supporters believe that Israel wants peace but the Palestinians don't want peace and will only use peace negotiations as a tactic to extract concessions, without any intention of maintaining peace. This belief makes them discouraged about the peace process, because there's no point in negotiating if you believe the Palestinians will never accept peace anyway.
I didn't know until now that the opposite view was common in Arab circles. I assumed it was something more like, "we can't accept peace without Jerusalem and the right of return".
Which is not very surprising, of course when one side perceives the other side to use peace as a cynical tool, it will (consciously or unconsciously) converge to using peace as a cynical tool.
The only question is who started it, there is a very good argument to be made that it's Israel. Beginning with starting the war in 1967 then using its conquests to strong-arm the Arab neighbors into having a favorable peace settlement. But since I'm firmly on the "Pro-Palestinian" side of the issue, I will understand that people farther away don't necessarily see it the way I do.
I'm aware of the Israeli narrative, I'm also aware that the case it makes is unconvincing, and that all sources say the war started with Israel's air force attacking Egypt without Egypt doing a comparable escalation.
Just to show that this is a widely (though not universally) held view and it's not just Israelis, here's a quote from the Wikipedia page on preemptive war (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preemptive_war):
> Israel incorporates preemptive war in its strategic doctrine to maintain a credible deterrent posture, based on its lack of strategic depth. [26][27][28] The Six-Day War, which began when Israel launched a successful attack on Egypt on June 5, 1967, has been widely described as a preemptive war[29][30][31][32] and is, according to the United States State Department, "perhaps the most cited example [of preemption]."[33] Others have alternatively referred to it as a preventive war.[34]
I suppose we will never know, would we? You can always shoot first and justify later, and in a Prisoner's Dilemma type of situation you will always find enough wrinkles in the data to fit however many epicycles in your narrative.
What I mean to say is that the cold hard truth is that Israel attacked first in 1967, and attacked first in Lebanon the 1980s, and attacked first in Lebanon 2006, and attacked first in Gaza 2008/2009. All else is commentary.
Or, in other words. "we will never accept peace that doesn't include your destruction". Which, of course, is a kind of peace - just not a kind that you can expect other side to voluntarily agree to.
I’m not going to beat around the bush, I’m an Israeli myself and I strongly disagree with some of your assessments. However, it is a rare opportunity to talk with someone from the “Arab side”, with the exception of Arab Israelis, which are a different situation, I believe.
I am not going to try and change your mind, both because I don’t think I will be successful, and to avoid this discussion turning ugly. Instead, I’m only going to ask you some questions, and I will be very grateful if you’ll answer them. In turn, I will be happy to answer any questions you might have. These questions might seem “leading”, but this is not my intention. They simply reflect my own opinion on the conflict and army, which is naturally different from yours.
I may not agree with you, but my genuine intention is to understand your way of thought. I promise you that any rudeness is unintentional.
How do you assess your own general knowledge about the technique and morality of war? Other than the Israeli-palestinian conflict, do you read or take an interest in other wars/conflicts? If so, I’ll be happy to know which ones.
Regarding the morality of the IDF: if you discovered that other countries' armies behave worse/better in a similar situation, meaning coming in contact with foreign civilians and combatants, would it change your mind? In what way? What do you think would be a good way to measure the morality or conduct of an army? As much as you can, separate the way the army behaves from its political goal. I do not believe those things are separate, but that separating them for a moment in our thought will lead to a better understanding. For example, you can criticize the American war in Afghanistan, and its political goal and reasoning, and have a different criticism for the way the army behaves day to day.
You say that you believe that only a minority in Israel is interested in peace, what is the source of that assessment? Do you believe the “peace seeking” rate has changed with time? To what direction, and what do you think caused it?
What types of actions will demonstrate to you that a large part of Israeli citizens are interested in peace? That the government is interested in peace? Should “peace seeking” actions be taken by the Israeli government, what do you think will be the Palestinian response? If the response turns out to be negative to Israel, especially if it puts its citizens in danger, what do you think will be the morally appropriate response?
What do you think about the evacuations of settlements from Gaza? Do you think it was right/wrong? Strategically, morally? What do you think was the Israeli government's aim when it did it?
What do you think is the most moral solution to the conflict? What does peace look like for you?
Do you think peace is possible with the current Palestinas governments, meaning the PA and Hamas? If not, what do you believe will practically cause a change in leadership? What do you think Israel is morally permitted to do about it?
I’m assuming you don’t think peace is possible with the current Israeli government. What do you think about other Israeli parties/leaders? Beni Gantz, Yair Lapid, Yair Golan? Mansor Abbas?
Let's imagine that “the other side” proposed a two state solution, based on 67 lines, some kind of joint control of jerusalem, no/limited right of return for palestinians to Israel, but some kind of financial compensation for those who lost property in the 48 war - What do you think will be the response from the Israeli side? The Palestinian side?
Taking into account both moral and practicality, what do you think each side should do to promote peace? Hamas? PA? Israeli government? What happens, to each side, if everything goes wrong? What happens if it goes right? How likely do you think each outcome is?
Those are my questions for now. I will be very grateful if you'll answer them, and of course I will be happy to answer any questions you might have. I hope we can have a useful discussion, and understand each other better.
> I’m an Israeli myself and I strongly disagree with some of your assessments.
Hello, I welcome talking and having conversations with (and - hopefully in the not too far future - peace/friendships/hospitality) with Israelis too as long as it's in good faith with a bilateral recognition of each other's (Jews/Arabs/Israelis/Palestinians/...) humanity. Disagreement is okay, it doesn't automatically mean you're right and it doesn't automatically mean I'm right either.
> to avoid this discussion turning ugly.
Discussions generally don't turn ugly with me until I detect my interlocuter is careless/flippant about the civilians dying and starving in Gaza, and even then, there are instances where I apologized after I had gone too far with someone like that.
> How do you assess your own general knowledge about the technique and morality of war?
I hate self-assessment, especially numerical ones, so I will interpret this question to mean that the answer is a verbal judgement, and the judgement is "Not much, but enough". I have never joined an army or fought a war, which presumably means I know less than you as being an Israeli Jew means you have necessarily joined an army with overwhelming probability. But I know enough about the technique and morality of war to recognize that posting TikToks in a warzone making fun of the displaced populations and their destroyed houses, or dedicating the destruction of civilian infrastructure to the soldeir's daughter on her birthday, is not normal or professional conduct.
> other than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, do you read or take an interest in other wars/conflicts?
Yes. In rough reverse chronological order: the many Iraq wars, the Vietnam war, the Korean war, WW2 and WW1. Those are the major ones that I read and watched multiple things about, there are many minor ones. Here's a recent selection of what I have watched a couple of days ago: The Iraq War Explained (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWICnxeVLp4), What the Red Sea ship attacks are really about (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPhTwmylZi8), which might look like it's about October 7th and Gaza but it's actually a crash course on Yemen's recent history up to this point.
> if you discovered that other countries' armies behave worse/better in a similar situation, meaning coming in contact with foreign civilians and combatants, would it change your mind? In what way?
It depends on what exactly is the part of my mind that you're talking about. My mind is *already* changed to a certain extent, after all the default Arab narrative which I now reject and try to push back against assumes implicitly that Israeli evil is beyond any evil and that it's motivated by exceptional ethno-religious hatred. Part of my change of heart was to recognize that this is the remnants of Arab propaganda from the 1940s-1960s, and that Israeli evil is not exceptionally different than any state evil, it might be motivated by some ethnic hatred but not abnormal levels of it all things considered.
However, very few armies are defended as the "Most Moral in the World". Very few armies (exactly 1) are the self-appointed guardian angels of a "Jewish State" where criticizing them or saying they're acting immorally will make people think you're antisemitic. Very few armies have the kind of incestuous relationship with the USA that this one have. And of course, very few armies are defended as fiercely as this one in the pockets of the internet where I hang out in (like this one). For those reasons, other armies behaving worse or better isn't too relevant to what I'm trying to do.
> What do you think would be a good way to measure the morality or conduct of an army?
That's a huge question. As low-hanging fruits, the army can start by recognizing its power over helpless civilians. It can instruct its soldier to not publish TikToks where they're gloating about the death of civilians and the destruction of their cities, and not film themselves destroying toy shops or playing with women's underwear belonging to the civilian population, it can assign protection to aid convoys, or at least not actively shoot them (and I'm not talking about the incident at an aid distribution line from about 2 or 3 weeks ago where the IDF investigators admitted shooting at civilians, there is a recent incident where 5 World Kitchen personnel were killed in an airstrike), not target the UN forces (recent incident in Lebanon), and not gratuitously destroy a city (this report https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-calculated-bombing-gaza/, where anonymous sources in the IDF say that every single bomb that fell on Gaza there were exact estimation of how many civilians vs. how many terrorists would be killed, and most of the time those estimates were "a single terrorist in one floor of a building and all the civilians living in the building").
> You say that you believe that only a minority in Israel is interested in peace, what is the source of that assessment?
No single source, an overall Gestalt as I perceive it. The components of this Gestalt are how many members of Breaking the Silence and B'Tselem there are relative to the total population, how are those groups treated (like traitors), the general number of polls that ask questions about a Palestinian state or the legitimacy of the current war in Gaza. The sum total of all those pieces of info leads me to conclude that, even from way before October 7th, Israel and the majority of Israelis are not interested in peace with Palestinians. They're very interested in peace with the Middle East west and south of the Levant, as a tactic to neutralize the Palestinian problem and obtain legitimacy to delay the resolution indefinitely.
(Of course, "Interested in Peace" is implicitly being defined operatively here as "Ready to make concessions for Peace". Because obviously, everyone is "interested in Peace" with no concessions, Putin is interested in Peace, Hamas is very interested in peace, and so is Netanyahu. That's why I measure "Interested in Peace" by how many Israelis are supporters of a Palestinian state, or how many are not supporters of the current war in Gaza.)
> Do you believe the “peace seeking” rate has changed with time? To what direction, and what do you think caused it?
Who knows. The traditional wisdom is that there was Oslo in the 1990s and with it a real hope for lasting peace, but then came the second Intifada and destroyed it. Many people challenge this narrative, many for example point to the Yitzhak Rabin speech where he says Palestinians will only be allowed "less than a state" entity as evidence that even the much glorified Oslo was not in fact a good peace process. I was an unborn/a baby at the time so I couldn't follow it firsthand.
What I think is the real reason that Israelis are not interested in peace is the fact that no real consequences are imposed for warmongering on part of Israel. Why would anyone do anything if they're not pressured? At the end of the day Israelis have a state and Palestinians do not, they're in a position to indefinitely keep attacking Palestinians and prolonging the conflict till the Palestinian population is fatigued and accept whatever scraps they're willing to give, if any. This is why I support BDS as a concept and think it's a key piece of puzzle in a peace process. (while not necessarily agreeing with all actions and rhetoric that BDS as a concrete movement is actually engaging in)
> What types of actions will demonstrate to you that a large part of Israeli citizens are interested in peace? That the government is interested in peace?
Government: Expulsion of all settlers outside of Israel's internationally recognized borders, which technically aren't even the Green Line (this is just the 1949 armistice), but let's say it's for the sake of this conversation. No settlers outside the Green Line means no West Bank settlement, and no Golan Heights settlement either, and none in Jerusalem.
If we're talking only citizens with no military power, then actions that demand such an expulsion. Political parties centered around it as a platform. Demonstration in support of it. Polls showing the majority (> 60%) are in support of it. And so on.
> Should “peace seeking” actions be taken by the Israeli government, what do you think will be the Palestinian response?
Who are the exact Palestinians responding? Hamas? PA? ordinary citizens of Gaza and the West Bank? It will depend. I don't think I'm confident enough in any of the models I have of them to predict a response.
> If the response turns out to be negative to Israel, especially if it puts its citizens in danger, what do you think will be the morally appropriate response?
You will notice that I carefully choose the word "Settlers" and not "Israelis", so I believe that a Palestinian response which puts Israeli civilians in Israel in danger is unrealistic while the IDF is still there.
If you mean after the eventual withdrawal of the IDF and the establishment of a full Palestinian state (or 2) which then proceeded to attack Israel despite whatever treaties and assurances that the peace process that established it have given Israel, the morally appropriate response would be to respond to aggression with exactly enough aggression to ward it off and not a single bit more.
> What do you think about the evacuations of settlements from Gaza? Do you think it was right/wrong? Strategically, morally?
Good decision executed terribly. Morally it was good, although not the only good decision (another one would have been annexing Gaza and making all Gazans full citizens, which of course most Israelis do not want for reasons that they insist are not racist but suspiciously looks like very racist). Strategically it was disastrous because it was executed unilaterally, not even waiting for a government of Gaza to be up-and-running before withdrawal.
>If you mean after the eventual withdrawal of the IDF and the establishment of a full Palestinian state (or 2) which then proceeded to attack Israel despite whatever treaties and assurances that the peace process that established it have given Israel, the morally appropriate response would be to respond to aggression with exactly enough aggression to ward it off and not a single bit more.
Do you believe the US declaring war on Japan after Pearl Harbor and fighting them to the point where they unconditionally surrendered was immoral?
I don't think the comparison is apt. Israel is more akin to Japan in this case and has been starting the aggression since it's founding which was based on pretty racist expulsion of natives, to free up land for jews.
The point of the comparison is the similarity of October 7th and Pearl Harbor, in terms of both being a surprise attack with significant casualties made by an inferior military power towards a superior one. In this case I was curious whether HatesIP's theory of wartime morality would imply that the US was immoral in conquering Japan as a result of the Pearl Harbor attacks. It seems that he does believe that said conquest was immoral. I disagree, and I imagine many others would disagree with him as well, but it is a consistent view.
I think they aren't analogous because Israel is ultimately the aggressor and Palestinians are ultimately fighting for their rights. the latter has just cause and the former does not.
Comparison is dishonest and misleading, too much baggage from Imperial Japan to be useful.
For what it's worth, I believe that firebombing Japanese cities in particular, and the 2 nuclear bombings, to be obviously immoral and unerasable mark of shame on the USA and its political leadership.
>Comparison is dishonest and misleading, too much baggage from Imperial Japan to be useful.
Is your position then that the moral thing to do in a war is to fight the enemy only with enough force as is necessary to prevent them from harming you: unless they have baggage?
No, it's not, my position on war is to know the enemy well and not to fall for obvious propagandistic invocations of Godwin's law. Having known the enemy well, proceed to use exactly enough force as is necessary to protect yourself, which you can't know unless you know the enemy well.
> What do you think was the Israeli government's aim when it did it?
Warding off human rights violations accusations in the West Bank, and delaying and distracting the peace process that will start its withdrawal from the West Bank. Here's the English Wikipedia page about the disengagement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_disengagement_from_Gaza where senior members of Sharon's government basically lay out all their thinking about the matter. A relevant quote:
>> the parameters of a unilateral solution are: To maximize the number of Jews; to minimize the number of Palestinians; not to withdraw to the 1967 border and not to divide Jerusalem... Twenty-three years ago, Moshe Dayan proposed unilateral autonomy. On the same wavelength, we may have to espouse unilateral separation... [it] would inevitably preclude a dialogue with the Palestinians for at least 25 years.
Not exactly a peace-seeking mindset.
> What do you think is the most moral solution to the conflict? What does peace look like for you?
Single state between Gaza and Galilee, secular with special recognition for Jewish holidays and other customs (e.g. Kosher). The issue of the Golan and Shebaa farms solved separately in later negotiations with future saner governments of Lebanon and Syria. Preferably Right of Return for whomever can prove descendance from Nakba survivors, but appropriate financial compensation will serve equally well. Right of Return and/or financial compensation to Jews who can prove they fled the Middle East due to persecution.
> Do you think peace is possible with the current Palestinas governments, meaning the PA and Hamas?
No.
> If not, what do you believe will practically cause a change in leadership?
A change of leadership in Israel that reverses the decade-long sling towards Right Wing ultranationalism and religious Zionism. This new government will then hopefully advance peace plans that the current governments of Palestinians will reject or drag their feet in negotiating, which will trigger a mini-Arab-Spring against them from Palestinians. Each step in this scenario is unrealistic on its own, but it's one possible path towards peace.
> What do you think Israel is morally permitted to do about it?
Expel settlers, change the government, advance peace plans, keep defensive IDF presence in the territories, and defend itself only and precisely when attacked.
> I’m assuming you don’t think peace is possible with the current Israeli government. What do you think about other Israeli parties/leaders? Beni Gantz, Yair Lapid, Yair Golan? Mansor Abbas?
I don't know enough about any of them nor the machinery of Israeli elections or government to have an intelligent opinion. Ehud Olmert looks moderate *enough* from what I read in Haaretz, anyone like him can serve as the first step in deradicalization and de-ultra-nationalization of Israel, not the final step - far from it - just the first one.
> Let's imagine that “the other side” proposed a two-state solution, based on 67 lines, some kind of joint control of Jerusalem, no/limited right of return for Palestinians to Israel, but some kind of financial compensation for those who lost property in the 48 war - What do you think will be the response from the Israeli side? The Palestinian side?
Who is the "Other side"? A 3rd party? Arab or not Arab?
The proposal itself looks fine. I can't predict how any future Israelis or Palestinians will react, but current Israelis will almost certainly reject even admitting the Nakba, and current Palestinians will probably reject it too because decades of hardliners trained them to accept nothing less than full return to Israel.
> Taking into account both moral and practicality, what do you think each side should do to promote peace? Hamas? PA? Israeli government?
Hamas: Return Hostages and declare minimal/nominal trials and investigation for October 7th war crimes. Only target the Israeli military in future attacks, if possible by restricting operations to the West Bank. Pay compensation for all families of the non-military dead and captured. Gradually de-radicalize away from Islamic Jihadism to a more moderate doctrine of armed resistance that takes geopolitical realities into account.
PA: Collapse and be replaced by a new government.
Israeli government: Expel all settlers outside of the Green Line, keeping the infrastructure they built and handing it over to a PA successor (in the case of Golan Heights, Assad's successor) as a kind of reparations. In case no successor to the PA (and Assad) is ready and willing, keep the settler cities and infrastructure under IDF control till a successor is ready and willing. Reward each episode of Hamas' de-radicalization with a de-escalation of the siege of Gaza. Begin a process of reconciliation and compensation to civilians whose homes were destroyed in Gaza.
Those actions can be done partially as experiments. For example Hamas can return half the hostages and investigate fighters who appeared on video doing war crimes, PA is already partially collapsing and being reformed into a new government so all what remains is Abbas abdicating, Israel can start by expelling settlers who came to Israel less than a decade ago. (In actual reality, Haaretz reported a couple of weeks ago that Israel is approving more settlement construction and granting legitimacy to more previously illegal settlements).
> What happens, to each side, if everything goes wrong? What happens if it goes right? How likely do you think each outcome is?
If everything goes wrong, each action by each side goes unrewarded and destroys it eventually. Hamas return of hostages only invites further death and destruction in Gaza, PA is replaced by an even more corrupt and collaborating government that further accelerates settlement and oppresses/neglects Palestinians, and Israeli concessions result in a Third Intifada more violent than the second.
If everything goes right, each action by each side accelerates the de-escalation by the other sides, essentially running the history of the conflict since 1948 in reverse.
Most outcomes are unlikely. Israel won't deradicalize without sanctions and the rest of BDS. Hamas is an Islamist organization, it rewards more extremism and one-up-Manship, its incentive structure is designed for such. The PA is a typical Arab government and those are extremely hard to change from the roots even if you happened to change the individual faces in front of the Camera and the individual butts sitting on the seats of power.
> I will be very grateful if you'll answer them
I answered all of them as much as the depth of my consideration and thinking about them allows, some questions I haven't considered before, notably many about Israeli concessions because those are historically rare and unlikely, but I have tried to consider it as carefully as possible while I'm answering them, but many of my answers are provisional.
I can't think of well-phrased questions of my own as of now. But I might think of them later when you reply.
Thank you for answering! I am finding it hard to put what I’m thinking into words, but anyway I am not sure how much value writing everything down has right now, and it is past midnight. You are right that I served in the IDF, but not in a combat position by any way. I think that I’ll start reading more about modern warfare and aid, outside of just the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and perhaps that will be the missing piece to make sense.
Of course feel free to ask any questions that may pop up later!
Here are a few things that might interest you or others:
- Some Israeli Knesset parties stated that their direct aim is a two state solution in the last election. You have Yesh Atid led by Yair Lapid, the second biggest party in Israel with 24 seats, The Avoda led by Merav Michaeli with 4 seats, and also Raam and Hadash-Taal, two Arab Israeli parties, with 5 seats each. You also had Meretz led by Yair Golan, which didn’t get enough votes to get a seat at the Knesset. So out of 120 Knesset seats, 38 were held by parties that openly supported the two state solution, most of them “jewish” parties.
(And just as a little tidbit, Raam is led by Mansor Abbas and was the first Arab Israeli party to join the coalition, in the previous government.)
- Another thing that you might find interesting is the volatility in the Israeli government. A full term of the Knesset is supposed to be four years, but it is rarely achieved. Another thing is that Israel has no term limit, so the present prime minister acted as one for 16 years! I don’t know how much of what I wrote is already known by you, but if you’re interested I’ll be happy to write more about internal Israeli politics.
- There is an Israeli group called “Commanders for Israel’s Security”. They’re a bunch of ex military guys advocating for “seperating” from the Palastinans. To quote their website:
“Members of the movement are united around a common vision: Israel as a secure, democratic state with a solid Jewish majority for generations, conducting itself in accordance with the spirit and values of Israel’s Declaration of Independence.
To realize this vision, Israel must advance a security-based separation from the Palestinians and pursue peaceful relations with pragmatic countries of the region, all with a view of resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and contributing to regional stability.
The eventual agreement with the Palestinians should be based on the principle of two states for two peoples and account for Israel’s security needs.”
No problem. Feel free to respond later either in this thread or a new top-level thread in another Open Thread.
> So out of 120 Knesset seats, 38 were held by parties that openly supported the two state solution, most of them “Jewish” parties.
Interesting, about 1/3 of the people's representation then? What does it mean to put Jewish between quotes? Are they Jewish or not? Are all parties open to Arabs or not? Do parties having Arabs receive less votes than parties with comparable policies and position with no Arabs amidst their ranks?
>I don’t know how much of what I wrote is already known by you, but if you’re interested I’ll be happy to write more about internal Israeli politics.
Yes, do write more about Israeli politics. The information is all there on Wikipedia, I'm sure, but in a confusing and dry format that doesn't make it very easy to connect facts and incidents. If you're like me, you would agree that writing and opinions based on facts is - vast majority of the time - better than writing and opinions not based on facts. Facts naturally moderate and counterweight extremism, as in actual practice nobody is the devil, and nobody is the angel.
I knew about Israel having no term limits, I never thought about it explicitly, but I knew that Netanyahu was elected sometimes after Ehud Olmert in the late 2000s and kept being Prime Minister with only a brief months-long hiatus in 2021/2022. So I knew the fact one way or another.
> They’re a bunch of ex-military guys advocating for “separating” from the Palestinians.
I will have to read more about them, the only thing mentioned in their Wikipedia page is how they disagreed with Netanyahu once and he called them leftists. One thing I don't like is how they keep using the word "Security", and I have learned that this word in the Israeli parlance is euphemism for "Subjugate the Palestinians and humiliate them and dispossess them to no end and call anybody who notices an antisemite". But there is not much in the writing on their websites that suggest this till now.
What I would like to see is precise census data that shows at least 30% of Israelis are - in aggregate - enrolled or supportive of organizations like B'Tselem, Standing Together, Breaking the Silence, Land for All, Commanders for Israeli Security, etc.... I have no trouble that I can find a similar percentage enrolled or supportive of Pro-Colonization movements that (among other things) are calling for resettling Gaza right now, so to change my mind that the Pro-Peace or at least thinking-about-peace faction of Israel is not a minority I will need to see data that suggests a significant percentage like 30% or 40% of Israelis do actually support a full and non-demilitarized Palestinian state or a single state or binational confederation or whatever.
But if Polls are anything to go by, most Polls don't show Israelis are interested in Peace in the same number they're interested in settling and resettling lands not theirs.
I think you are a smart and reasonable dude. I dearly hope Netanyahu is crushed at the next election (and Biden too for enabling him); I hope Israelis can see that his strategy of “security” and “managing the conflict” has led to more conflict, not less.
I am Israeli in the sense that I hold an israeli passport and have an aunt and cousin who live in Israel. None of us support Netanyahu or Likud. I hope you can speak to many such people and we can build bonds of understanding and recognise mutual humanity. May peace prevail
Israelis are an invasive force, they don't intend to benefit Palestinians but ideally make life so ruthless for them they are forced to leave and free up more land for Jews.
Israel can't really benefit the Palestinians who elected genocidal terrorist organization Hamas to be their representative (and they still have very high level of support for Hamas, if you believe the polls made in Gaza). Those who chose different path - like Arab citizens of Israel, over 2 million of them - yes, Israel benefits them a lot.
I do not think that Palestinian people benefited from Israel's existence, but it wasn’t really my point either. It is a point that you heard the pro Israeli side make? I’m surprised by that because the arguments I hear tend to do more with Israel’s historic claim to the land/right to defend itself/the Palestinians don’t want peace anyway. Do you remember when you heard/read about that argument? I’d love to know more because it honestly took me by surprise.
Regarding Abu Gharib and sadism: if possible, can you specify which social media posts/incidents are you referring to, and what do you think would be an appropriate response? I don’t know if you are referring to incidents of the like, but I remember a few months back a soldier sang a jewish prayer in a mosque. A lot of people in Israel wrote about it and condemned it, and the soldier was removed from active duty.
Anyway, if you think that the IDF is in the ballpark of the american army actions, that is good enough for me for the rest of the discussion. Unfortunately, I don’t think this will be the last war. What I am interested in understanding is “the other side” standards and aspirations. What do you think Israel should do, both morally and practically? If Israel took a positive action yet it backfired, what do you think Israel should be permitted to do? Please be as detailed as you can bear, thank you.
Not to barge into a conversation not mine, but since AY98 probably doesn't intend to reply, I will reply to your questions myself.
> is it a point that you heard the pro Israeli side make?
Yes, they do. Very frequently. Starting from the repeated assertions that most/all Palestinians are actually economic immigrants from Egypt and the Levant who came to Palestine in the 1920s and the 1930s to work on the Jews' farms and Kibbutzim, and ending with similar assertions about how modern-day West Bank Palestinians are actually better off with the occupation of their lands by Israel because then Israeli companies and businesses can employ them and give them higher salaries than their counterparts who aren't employed in Israeli companies and businesses or other Arabs outside of Palestine. Implicit in most of those assertions are racist worldviews and racist insinuations that Jewish minds are the true money-making component of businesses and all Arabs are merely mindless "hands" to execute Jewish visions.
> can you specify which social media posts/incidents are you referring to
I can't possibly know what the original poster was referring to when they wrote this, but - in particular - here are several instances where the IDF plausibly engaged in torture and/or mistreatment of captives:
French-Israeli soldier allegedly shared himself while boasting in French about torturing suspects captured in Gaza, video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTOrvhRs4l8. French lawmakers then declared that all French nationals engaged in the war will be investigated and those found to have committed war crimes will be prosecuted.
(4) CNN reports about many instances of IDF soldiers filming themselves destroying universities and mosques while laughing and making fun of Palestinians: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1D3uQbiE8No
I can go on and on, keep in mind that I don't have a TikTok, that's just what filters down to YouTube and not just any YouTube, but official news channels on YouTube (CNN, Reuters). If I had a full day and a TikTok account, I can probably fill an Open Thread worth of links of IDF soldiers documenting and posting themselves violating the so called IDF "purity of arms" code of conduct guide, internationally agreed upon rules of warfare, and just plain humanity and decentness.
> A lot of people in Israel wrote about it and condemned it, and the soldier was removed from active duty
If someone were to do something similar to a Jewish Synagogue, would this reprimand be enough?
> What do you think Israel should do, both morally and practically?
I have answered this question in general in my other 2 comments to you, but in the particular case of the IDF behavior in Gaza, what Israel should do to punish the self-described "Most Moral Army" is real punishment, real monetary fines (> $10K) and real jail time, all aired in public. Naming and shaming soldiers who engage in this behavior. Compensation to civilians in Gaza too, as a bonus.
It's always struck me as odd that women's college basketball, at least in my experience, is WAY more widely viewed and followed than women's professional basketball. I guess it's probably at least in part because people have inbuilt loyalties to the schools, but other women's college sports don't get nearly the same attention.
I would imagine it is linked to *participation* in women's sports. Families with girls playing basketball or vollyball will be interested in and follow women's sports in general, because it's part of their shared social mileiu. Since there is almost zero expectation that they (female student-athletes) will become pro athletes, their attention horizon stops at college.
The WNBA has a very different vibe. Subjectively it feels like a bunch of fifth-year seniors who should have moved on. Also: women's basketball is very boring because it can never have the pace and power of the exact same game played by men.
School loyalty is definitely the biggest thing; but, I think some of it is also that the WNBA season is during the summer so people aren't really in a "basketball mood". People are also less likely to be inside at 7pm watching TV in the summer.
University of Minnesota Gophers women’s hockey is pretty popular locally at least. Not as big as NCAA basketball though. There is the whole ‘dynasty’ thing with teams like UCONN.
I am looking for as detailed as possible a data source on human height: average, median & variance, segregated by sex, nationality & decade; the more, the better. Does anyone have recommendations where to look for that?
Looks like it's becoming less of a threat over time. I posted this graph of H5N1 deaths by year on TwiXter. The worst year of H5N1 deaths was 2006 (~75), and they've been mostly decreasing since then except for an upward blip in 2015. Since this chart was created there were a total of two H5N1 death in 2023. Flutrackers hasn't announced any H5N1 deaths so far this year — and since H5N1 follows a seasonal pattern like other influenzas, unless this person in Colorado dies we probably won't see any more (at least in the northern hemisphere) until Autumn.
the crazy amount of birds and other mammals dying in the (not so) wild and also being killed by humans because of H5N1 continues to grow since 1997 and evolve including in cows to humans now in the US so it's 10,000 years past time to end animal slavery and fishing. agree? lol the ideology of speciesism and superiority complex of humans should end. today. all of us should WANT to be vegan and the animal abuse f*ckery should end forever. zoonosis will still exist but come on, we humans are flesh eating blood thirsty zombies.
Every time I run across a vegan extremist like you I always make it a point to buy an extra pack of hot dogs. Congratulations, your insane rhetoric just caused some marginal animal death. Do everyone a favor and keep your nonsense to yourself.
How are those of us who choose to reject animal abuse the extremists and insane? You must not know the extreme harm animal agriculture and fishing causes. Or maybe you just don’t care. No empathy? If it is unnecessary to consume them why would you choose to?
Comments like this are what solidify my desire to eat meat.
So bird flu means we should abandon animal husbandry. But that won't stop bird flu because it will still exist in the wild amongst non-domesticated animals. But that's not the point, anyway, because this is just an excuse for evangelical veganism to maunder on about "abuse".
Also I *wish* I was as hardcore as a flesh-eating blood-thirsty zombie.
Reasonable comment: Transmission of pathogens to humans from intensive rearing of food animals is a reason to consider moving the modern diet to vegetarianism/veganism
The systemic violence of speciesism speaks from the perch of patriarchy confusing fantasy stories of gods with non-bias actions towards all sentient beings. How low can you go in your control of all others? You are here to proudly justifying humans being animals' husbands! 🎤
(1) Setting aside "fantasy stories of gods", humans are animals like other animals, therefore it is no more wrong for a human to eat meat than it is for a lion to eat meat
(2) Animal husbands? Careful there Vicki, you don't want to be using hate speech about zoophiles, furries, and people who talk about being cat and dog moms and dads!
And you can find the Avian Flu data here for the US wild bird populations below. There's a .csv file you can download from 2022-the most recent month of 2024. I'd be curious what it would show if you graphed the rate of incidents over time. But in the last 30 days there've only been 23 incidents.
High Pathogenicity Avian Influenza (H5N1 and its variants) has been circulating in avian and mammal populations at least since 1996 (when it was first identified). But what's the trend? The WOAH (World Organization for Animal Health) puts out regular reports on Avian Influenza. Using poultry outbreaks as a measure (because wildlife is harder to survey), they've been tracking it year over year. The graph (page 2 of the report in the link below) shows H5N1 is like other influenzas and follows a seasonal cycle peaking in February. But year over year it doesn't seem to be trending upward or downward.
They are concerned because this is the first year it's been seen in mammal and bird populations in the Antarctic. A special southern hemisphere edition of their situation report here...
If you're interested in pathogens (and I am), it's worth checking these out. Unfortunately, our news media swings from ignoring the problem to hysteria.
I just read through your link and much of what it linked to. Have you? Having read it my conclusion is that the situation reported in the media release you posted does not warrant much worry.
They have just been approved by the FDA as a treatment for people with heart disease. I believe you don't have to have a severe, symptomatic heart condition to qualify, just something like high blood pressure or high cholesterol, not controlled by the usual drugs. I suppose the people who qualify must also have to be overweight, but maybe they don't need to be as much overweight as is required for those without evidence of heart disease ? I'm reporting on a remembered brief blurb I saw in my Medscape news bulletin a coupla weeks ago, and may have some details wrong. But based on what I read it seems the FDA believes the drugs will prevent or delay some heart disease drugs.
Oh, this is 100% my area. It is my strong assumption that weight loss medications increase lifespan, if started early enough in life. We have pretty good data that weight from diet loss prior to 65 years of age increases lifespan, after that it is a bit mixed.
I would note however that, as trite as it sounds, it will have a greater effect on "healthspan" meaning years of life spent free of disability. Orthopedic concerns and frailty are a big deal in older age, and I suspect that weight loss can help offset the age at which those things become debilitating.
What's your read on the likelihood of long-term side effects like type 2 diabetes? This is such a systemically powerful drug it seems to me like weird side effects could start popping up once millions of people are on it for several years.
Very unlikely, not impossible. There is a general principal in medicine of tachyphylaxis (tolerance) that builds up to repeated exposure to the same stimuli. Theoretically, I could imagine GLP1 agonists causing GLP1 down-regulation leading to issues. We don't see that, and I'm not entirely sure why, I have some guesses, but they're probably not right. In terms of some other, non-gastrointestinal/endocrine side effect (like causing cancer, or problems with vision or something) we probably should have seen at least some signal by now in the animal models.
At this point I'm not worried about side effects that aren't known issues.
Interesting, thanks. GLP1 receptor down-regulation and insulin resistance were exactly the things I was thinking about. Good to know that doesn't happen.
Are there any data about weight loss due to diet/lifestyle change vs. weight loss due to medicine? I.e. is it just "less kilos is less kilos, no matter how achieved" or there's a difference between if it's done by better lifestyle or by ozempic?
I disagree with the framing of your question. The loss of weight is caused by the diet change in both cases, specifically by eating less. (You may also choose to exercise more, etc., but the same is true whether you take the medicine or not.) There is no difference in that part.
The difference is that if you do it the natural way, eating less is accompanied by *hunger*, but when you do it the medical way, the feeling of hunger is reduced by the semaglutide. So the semaglutide helps you do the thing that you could in theory also do without it. It is not "better lifestyle or ozempic", it is "better lifestyle achieved by suffering a lot, or better lifestyle made possible without suffering by ozempic".
I am not an expert, but my understanding is that there is an ideal amount and composition of food that you should eat in order to achieve the ideal weight, but the mechanism for feeling hungry/sated is unbalanced for many people. If your hunger mechanism is well balanced, you can eat exactly as much as you want, and your body looks great. You can thank the gods for their blessings, or you can pretend that you have a superior willpower and everyone else is a pathetic sinner. If your hunger mechanism is misbalanced, eating the right amount of food will leave you hungry; and eating the amount of food that feels right will make you fat. And there are also people whose hunger mechanism is misbalanced in the opposite direction, so despite eating as much as they can, they can't e.g. grow muscles, because their "as much as they can" is barely enough for them to survive.
A few months ago I have volunteered for a medical experiment for the new generation of semaglutide-based medicine (basically, like ozempic, but in a pill), so I can describe the effects first-hand. I have lost 10 kg in five months, mostly by eating less. Both before and after, I was eating only when I was hungry; the difference is that with the pills, I am simply hungry less. Before the pills, the only way to lose weight was to constantly feel half-starved... which wasn't good either for my mood or my ability to concentrate on work. Before the pills, when I tried to lose weight, it felt like my entire life became *about* losing weight. Now, I just swallow one pill a day, and then I do whatever I want, which includes eating when I want, as much as I want. I don't even eat super healthy now; I just eat less of everything, including the unhealthy stuff. Or rather, after eating some healthy meal now I feel full, so I am not tempted to eat so much unhealthy food afterwards. Eating the right amount of food became *easy*. I can do some exercise on top of that, when I feel like it, but I am losing weight even when I don't exercise.
(Generally, I think that exercise is a red herring in debates about weight loss. Yes, you should exercise, because it gives you various health benefits. But losing weight is *not* one of them, because when you look at the actual numbers, your entire hour spent in the gym is equal to the number of calories contained in one apple, or something like that. You can't outrun the food! The sad truth is that the only way to lose weight it to eat less, full stop; unless you are training for the Olympic games, your exercise is a rounding error compared to that. Also, exercising more means you get more hungry. Problem is, how to eat less without constantly feeling hungry. Winning the genetic lottery is one answer, semaglutide is another.)
"Before the pills, the only way to lose weight was to constantly feel half-starved... which wasn't good either for my mood or my ability to concentrate on work"
Now don't you know that's just the price of health? Why, there are people who are able to fast on nothing but water for two to three days at a stretch! This means that the only thing wrong with you fat, lazy, greedy lump is that you're a fat, lazy, greedy lump with no willpower.
This comment brought to you courtesy of the many interactions I've had with "the reason I over-eat is that I'm constantly hungry" "Well just go hungry long enough and you'll stop feeling hungry eventually, it's a simple matter of getting off your fat ass and exercising some willpower"
EDIT: If you say that you *constantly* felt half-starved, well that just proves you were Doing It Wrong. *I* have no problems giving up eating and quelling the hunger pangs, so you're just lying or not doing it at all!
I think it's really hard for people who have never been fat, or only somewhat overweight, to understand really fat people. A lot of it from our side *does* sound like excuses, but it really is that the metabolism doesn't work the same way for some reason.
This never-been-overweight reader expresses sincere sympathy. I get really frustrated with “just eat less and exercise more” nonsense directed at the overweight. Because if I exist - “eat whatever in any quantity and never gain weight” - then the opposite clearly has to exist.
I believe the intersection between exercise and weight loss is more interesting than people think.
The first thing is that initial weight loss itself is pretty easy relative to keeping the weight off, and a slight marginal reduction in net calories could help more than it seems.
The second thing is that exercise is important for mental health, which (anecdotally) is itself important for weight loss.
The third is that lifestyle choices like hiking or choosing a physically active job burn a huge number of calories. Hiking in particular can more than double your daily caloric needs, and it's genuinely hard to eat enough food unless you bring chocolate, nuts, dried fruit, fatty preserved meat, and so on. Again anecdotally, it feels like there's some amount of compensatory reduction in caloric needs, but walking 20km a day can overwhelm this.
I think it takes 5 or 6 hours walking for an adult male to double the daily calories burned. Possible on weekends, but if you have a full-time job, that would reduce your entire workday to sleep + work + hiking. Heck, I might do it anyway, and my wife would be happy to join me... but we also have kids, and they require some care, so we cannot spend the entire afternoons hiking.
I was already walking every workday 40 minutes to my job and 40 minutes back (7 km total), which is about as much walking as I can put into an average workday sustainably.
Depends on the kind of walking, but plausible. But if you're eating twice as many calories as you would normally burn, you've got *huge* problems. As in, you're gaining about three pounds a week, 150 lbs in a year.
Realistic weight gain or weight loss, aside from unsustainable crash diets, I think typically involves a calorie surplus or deficit of 10-20% normal demand. At that level, modest exercise can make a substantial difference.
I don't have info from weight loss due to medicine vs weight loss due to diet and exercise. There is some data like that for bariatric surgery, which finds it is as-good/better. Keep in mind, semaglutide was approved in 2017 in the US, so we're still waiting to see how that shakes out. It is my assumption that since we are ultimately reducing calories that are being eaten rather than doing anything different with storage or metabolism (weight loss medications, especially GLP1s work by curbing appetite) I suspect their health outcomes will be the same as diet changes alone (modulo how it may be easier to stick to a medication assisted diet than a willpower based one).
Genuinely, I think "Wow I don't feel hungry all the time" is the game-changer here and one I don't think the non-fat understand. I wasn't able to be on Ozempic long enough to get to the "I don't feel as hungry" stage due to shortages, but even the low initial dose was beginning to have some "Huh, I don't want to go eat right now" effects.
I mean, yeah, it's simple as "calories in = calories out for weight loss" and "stop eating so much crap", but the 'simple' part is not *easy* when it comes to "I have the constant nagging sensation that I need to eat". Not that "I want to eat" or "I want to eat junk food", but "I need to eat even though I only ate two hours ago".
I was lucky to be born with a set point that kept me on the slim side. For most of my life I've just eaten what I felt like eating and weighed myself only occasionally, and when I did it was always in the same 5-10 pound range. But there have been 2 times when I have taken drugs with a known side effect of weight gain, and both times I have gained 25+ pounds. And I was no more able to lose the weight than people are who have been overweight all their lives. And I tried quite hard to lose it -- I was horrified to suddenly be chubby. Nope, could not do it. If I got through the day with zero cheating, I'd wake up ravenous in the middle of the night and eat a couple bowls of cereal or a sandwich. Those experiences completely cured me of the idea that being slim was an achievement of mine, due to my eating sensibly and being reasonably active.
Drug-induced weight gain is definitely a thing (my father, who was not overweight, had to go on steroids for a while and ended up with the typical 'moon face' and weight gain even though he was not eating excessively). I just wish the diehard "calories in, calories out, metabolism is not immune to the laws of thermodynamics, if you say you're not eating bad junk but still gain weight you're lying" set would acknowledge even that much - that it's not as simple as "if you get fat, it's because you eat too much and exercise too little, no other reason at all".
I mean, yeah. I eat too much and exercise too little. But *why* do I eat too much? That's not ever been addressed (apart from "junk is hyperprocessed to be delicious and you're some poor sap with no willpower and too greedy"). Up to my mid-twenties, I had little to no access to junk food, and still was overweight.
"If I got through the day with zero cheating, I'd wake up ravenous in the middle of the night and eat a couple bowls of cereal or a sandwich."
My mother used to refer to that with the old-fashioned term "night starvation". It seems to have originated in a 1930s ad campaign:
Yeah its one of those things where even if it does have some gnarly long term side effects they would have to be *really* gnarly to outweight the catastrophic effect morbid obesity has on your health in all factors. I could still see there being hefty backlash from the statistically illiterate though.
It does look like there are some genuine gastro-intestinal side-effects, due to the mechanism of action being slowing down emptying of the digestive system so you feel full for longer and therefore don't feel hungry. So that's the usual "we only find this out when we do it at scale in humans for long enough" findings, and I wouldn't say that having some concern around this is being statistically illiterate. If the side-effects are bad enough that you can't continue on the drug, that's not alarmism, that's something you are having a genuine problem with that is affecting your health.
So I think newer generations and refinements of this class of drugs to get around that (maybe finally the holy grail of shutting off hunger) will work better, but that will take time.
Kind of early to speculate. I am already getting spam emails from Ambulance Chasers Are Us outfits looking to sue for Ozempic harmful side effects though.
All experts are at risk of inflating the importance of their area of expertise, so there could be bias here. And $8 trillion is a huge number (roughly equal to the combined GDPs of Germany and the UK). World GDP is ~$100 trillion.
Is this claim plausible? If yes, chances of making this a new EA cause area? Even marginal progress on reducing cyber crime might save a trillion dollars!
It's also important to keep in mind that "cost" is a very ambivalent term in economics. As others have pointed out, it's not revenue or profit of fraudsters. It's what companies invest in cyber security. As all economic costs, these are part of the GDP and also have economic benefits, like giving jobs. So it's tricky to count it purely negative.
I still do agree that it's a part of the economy which doesn't generate welfare for society: if cyber crime didn't need prevention, and thus no one would need to protect against them, then the money and labor would be spend for better purposes. But there are surprisingly many parts of the economy like this, where all sides would be better off if this part of the economy didn't exist. Many parts of the economy are zero-sum games. Just to give a concrete example, take lawyers. There is no advantage if both sides in a big trial spending millions on lawyers. It's just that if party A spends them and party B doesn't, then party A wins. So both are forced into an equilibrium where they spend lots of money. But if there were regulations saying that both parties may spend at most 10,000$ on lawyers, all sides would benefit, and the money could be spent in a more productive way. (Ok, perhaps the millions help to get marginally better decisions in the end. But let's be honest, this effect is not large.)
So if you want to establish a good EA cause area, then I doubt that fighting cyber crime sticks out. You may be better of reducing zero-sum games. You could also fight for reducing the cost of lawsuits, or the cost of marketing (which is also mostly a zero-sum game), or the cost of fundraising for that matter. In economy, if you count generously you are quickly at some very high numbers.
For example. in the UK all of our ATM cards have a microchip in them.
The cost of fraud under the old mag stripe system was just too high, so the banks had to roll out better security
I have a suspicion the government also leanedon the banks/ If you have a choice between loosing X in fraud vs spending X on coutermeasures, economically its the same but the government would much prefer you do the latter/
Well, smart cards have been a thing since the 1990s. They likely don't cost trillions a year. I would recommend them over mag stripes on general principles even in the absence of any fraud.
Agreed for the total amounts going to both. In a perfectly efficient market (admittedly fictitious), one would expect business to operate at the point where the marginal delta-X lost to fraud would match the marginal delta-X spent on incremental countermeasures to prevent it.
The government has one other incentive: delta-X spent on cybersecurity experts' salaries probably gets taxed at the usual rates, delta-X acquired by fraudsters probably not so much.
The link doesn't go to a report, only to site claiming to summarise the report, and asking for me to provide my contact information in order to download it. I say, if the report was good, they would publish it directly, and this is just a marketing exercise.
Also, I don't believe this cause area can be neglected.
Likely a lot of double-counting here. If somebody steals a credit-card number, buys $1k of some shitcoins, then shitcoin project rugpulls, then somebody hacks them and takes all their money, then they fall for a romance scam and lose it to the next conman, etc. etc. - that's a lot of "loss" with the same $1k of money.
Also, of course, "we have to hire somebody to maintain and update our systems and can't just install 10-year old free distro of linux and forget about it" is also counted as "costs". And if, say, a bank is hacked and the clients sue, lawyers' fees on both sides will be "costs of cybercrime". Etc. etc.
> Likely a lot of double-counting here. If somebody steals a credit-card number, buys $1k of some shitcoins, then shitcoin project rugpulls, then somebody hacks them and takes all their money, then they fall for a romance scam and lose it to the next conman, etc. etc. - that's a lot of "loss" with the same $1k of money.
This doesn't seem like a valid point; the total is being compared to GDP, which is calculated the same way. There's a whole concept, the velocity of money, relating the total amount of money to the total amount of spending.
I mean its the old joke with the economists and the cow pat. Economic measures have always double counted because its very hard to calculate what portion of money changing hands actually generated new value. Not to say this report is credible.
You say those dismissively, but protection costs are indeed a real cost produced by cybercrime. Businesses could invest a lot more in actually building and selling better products if they didn't have to worry about data security. It's like a mini version of the broken windows fallacy.
I don't say it's dismissively per se, I just say it needs wider context. E.g. if you say "we have a billion dollars lost to crime in this city" then it's one thing if thieves steal a billion dollar worth of cars and wallets, and another thing if 99% of it is the local police department's pension fund. I mean, I have nothing against the police and their pension, but that's just different picture. I am not pushing any conclusion here, just noting that the picture includes things that are very commonly overlooked when talking about such things.
This is utter hogwash; it implies there are 80 million people earning $100,000 every year from cybercrime. A few scrotes earning pennies on the pound from street deals got us the war on drugs––and we're supposed to believe that 8% of the world economy vanishes into a black hole? Shit, if was that easy I'd have chucked the day job two decades ago.
>A few scrotes earning pennies on the pound from street deals got us the war on drugs
1/ I'm really not sure "penny on the pound" is a good description of the profit margins of the drug trade.
2/ Even if they did make pennies on the pound, the damage dealt by drug addiction is pounds on the pennies. How much does it take to ruin one's life through drug? A few months of dealer income, I'd wager? On the other hand, Cybercrime seems to have a tendency of causing little second-order damage (except cost of protection, per "40 Degree Days" comments. When a ransom is paid, the damage dealt is (roughly) equal to the income of the pirate.
The cost of cybercrime is not necessarily equal to the profit from cybercrime. If I'm a local government official, and I have to pay $500,000 to upgrade our digital systems to protect against advances in cybercrime, criminals haven't gotten any money but I'm still down $500,000.
Yes, obviously. Resources that are being spent on security could be used on other things if burglary was made physically impossible. Though, as completely preventing crime is impossible without some extreme measures, this whole discussion isn't particularly meaningful.
Ring cameras can be useful for things other than preventing burglary, like seeing if you're friend is at the door when you're away. But yes, costs paid to prevent crime are indeed a cost of crime, including cameras, lighting, police, etc.
The USA spends a little short of 1 trillion a year in defence––doesn't mean we say that war costs the USA $1tn a year. It means we say the USA spends $1tn a year on defence.
Here's a simpler example: someone breaks into your car and damages a vital part, in order to get scrap copper to sell. The repairs cost you $1000, but the thief has only made $50.
Or if you don't want to count that example since a vendor/employees are getting the $500,000, if cyber criminals attack a stock exchange in the hopes of getting a ransom payment but are ultimately defeated by law enforcement, there could still be lots of lost GDP from the time the stock exchange is offline/damage to the systems even if no money is ever successfully stolen.
I asked this in the announcement thread but was late and got no reply so trying here: Would it be acceptable to enter the book review contest by writing a review of a fictional blog? The blog in question has not "concluded" and is not structured as a book, but it is fictional and I think could benefit from a "book review"-style analysis, but if that's not what the contest is looking for I'll write up something more standard.
I say go for it. From what I've seen it's hard as hell to rise above the median review (there's a coterie of excellent analysts and writers who follow this blog, shocking I know), so if this is the hook that gets you in that upper echelon, more power to yah
I'd say site review is a genre different from book review. Has been very popular at the early years of the internet, but then almost completely disappeared. Maybe worth trying to bring back, but it's not the same as book review.
Isn't a review of a blog that doesn't exist itself fiction? Admittedly the book review contest encourages creative writing and some entries from past years have been... strange with respect to their topic material, but what you suggest seems to go beyond that.
Maybe you can just write your fictitious blog review and then get somebody else to review that for the contest, or vice versa.
Just to mention, Scott already said it was fine to enter imaginary books. The drawback being you have to make the audience care about a review of an imaginary book.
Again inviting people to read and hopefully subscribe and even more hopefully then comment on what they read at "Radical Centrist" https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/
There was an article I read a while back about a US intelligence officer who lived in Damascus before the civil war broke out. He talks about sitting in cafes and coffee shops eavesdropping on the conversations people around him were having, and realizing based on this that shit was really about to hit the fan. Not only was a war going to break, but based on what he was hearing on the ground he thought there was a chance that radical Islamic groups were going to end up controlling large swaths of territory in the midst of the chaos. Apparently he brought these insights to his superiors in the Obama administration and they laughed him off. Of course that’s exactly what happened.
Point is that sometimes what you’re hearing on the streets is a useful barometer for a monumental shift that’s about to happen.
I bring this up to say that I think there is a decent chance Trump wins in a landslide. I was at a Lil Wayne concert recently, with a crowd that was roughly 75% black and Hispanic, and for whatever reason there were a ton of people voicing their enthusiasm for Trump in the Men’s room and elsewhere. All races cracking jokes about how terrible Biden is and how insane democrats are. It was pretty surprising. If Biden can’t win the Lil Wayne fan demographic, which based on what I hear on the ground it doesn’t sound like he is, he loses the election in a landslide. Obviously it’s not a perfect heuristic, but it seems like everywhere I go there’s more enthusiasm for Trump than there’s ever been.
What I've noticed (at least online) is not so much that Trump support has become cooler, but that actively opposing him has become dated and cringe. Posting anti-Trump sentiment feels like Tiger King or Harambe posting.
It's not clear that actual voter preferences would be counting for much.
Don't underestimate the number of ballots that will be produced and counted despite not having been cast by a legitimate voter. Among other numbers, consider the at least 7 million migrants newly let into the country - if ballots will be somehow obtained for, say, 1/3 of that number, imagine how that would affect the outcome.
I think we're once again going to see ballot dumps of questionable origin counted sometime after the election day flipping a bunch of states that now look certain to go to Trump.
What if I imagine that ballots will somehow be obtained for, say, 1/3000th of the number of illegal immigrants? How would that affect the outcome?
I can see ways that an illegal immigrant could secure a ballot for themselves, so by the law of large numbers applied to human populations, it's almost certainly a thing that happens. But how *much* it happens is critical, and that is something that requires *data*. Not imagination.
And if 1/3rd of America's illegal immigrants were voting illegally, it should be easy to find hard data. Where is it?
Do you have any evidence for this is actually happening at sufficient volume to affect elections? It's quite a thing to have posted this without offering any.
The last time I saw actual evidence proffered in one of these "the left is winning with illegal immigrant voters" debates was years ago, and it was frankly laughable. Took some digging, but I found it - I apologize because it's on scribd (https://www.scribd.com/document/326149037/Report-Alien-Invasion-in-Virginia), which makes it a pain in the ass to deal with and I'm going off of my memory rather than scroll through dozens of ads to try to find the exact specific pages where it gave its numbers.
As I recall, they found thousands of illegally registered voters and votes over a 10 year period, which sounds scary until you realize that (a) by “thousands” they meant less than 10,000 registered voters and even fewer votes, and (b) that was in all elections over a 10 year period, including 2 presidential years and 3 mid-terms. If you ran the numbers, a highly-motivated conservative organization had, at best, proven that “illegal voting” was changing vote totals by .002% or some similar paltry amount that never came anywhere close to impacting the election results.
Sure, it proved that this kind of voting occurs slightly-more-often-than-*never*, but "error rate near-zero but not quite true zero" isn't typically a cause for panic, and it didn’t come anywhere close to raising concerns that what they found was impacting elections, or showing how anyone with a fiscally conservative bone in their body would think it a problem worth the cost of solving.
Purely anecdotal of course, but over the last few months I've seen four people wearing those red MAGA hats in public. None have been white. And I live in a disproportionately white area, too.
Yeah I should add I’ve been seeing this everywhere. The Overton window has shifted and people are much more comfortable supporting trump publicly, and I think he’s simply gotten more popular.
Clearly a US intelligence officer living in Damascus has a self-interest in saying that that happened. I would want to at least see his contemporaneous predictions before saying that he gained any special insight from his experience.
What do you mean by a landslide? Trump won the electoral vote by quite a big margin in 2016, despite losing the popular vote. Today, virtually every poll has Trump ahead in the popular vote. If you mean that Trump could win the electoral college by a 20% margin, that's been evident from th polls for some time now. If you mean that Trump can win in the same way that Reagan won--by winning all but one state--you'll need more than a Lil Wayne concert to demonstrate that.
1: The Syrian Civil War started a few months into the Arab spring. People were talking revolution all across the region. It would have been hard to know in advance that the Syrian case would turn into the worst shitshow.
2: The rise of Al-Nusra/ISIL/etc. Was heavily contingent on actions from the Syrian regime, the US and its allies, as well as the "moderate" rebel groups. Basically, Assads regime put all of their effort into eliminating moderate groups to make sure that outside powers would not have any attractive alternatives to his regime, while infighting between "moderate" rebel groups and indecision on the part of the US in providing weapons and other assistance weakened the opposition enough to make this strategy successful. This left strong extremist islamist groups, which were eventually defeated by an outside coalition when the pathetic remains of the Syrian government were not able to do so.
The Lebanese civil war was from 1975-1990. Barak Obama would've been around fourteen when it started. It's shameful that he didn't take the intelligence seriously from our agents in the field.
I don’t know enough about the dynamics of the Middle East to know how relevant this information would be to the situation in Syria in the late 2000s. If I remember the article correctly (it’s been years and I’d love to find it but can only remember the main gist), there were a lot of people in the intelligence community who didn’t take his concerns seriously as well. So it’s not just Obama.
Not completely irrelevant, as Lebanon and Syria are fundamentally connected in many ways. Indeed, a large part of the "Lebanese Civil War" was basically Syria and Israel duking it out through proxies.
Bit before the "formal" civil war broke out, I was in a meeting that had a Lebanese communist involved, and she said that the Syrian protests seemed to be directed from abroad and would tip towards the Islamists. I didn't pay that much attention since she was a bit oblique about the topic, but later on reflected that the Gulf support to various Islamist opposition groups was probably already evident.
It’s not that I think it can predict the future but I think you can pick up on trends that polls or more sophisticated methods will miss. 3 years ago no one would publicly admit they supported Trump in such an environment, where as now there’s a lot more open enthusiasm about Trump even in apolitical spaces. I’ve seen this same phenomenon in a variety of settings. Easy example is to look at him walking into UFC events now compared to a few years ago, the crowd goes insane. The UFC has a broad, mainstream audience these days. Something has definitely shifted in my view, and the most likely is that Trump has gained popularity. I could be completely wrong though, tbf.
I think the place this could make sense is this: Suppose you live in a dictatorship. You and everyone you personally know well enough to trust talking about it thinks the dictator is an idiot who is wrecking the country. But for all you know, and from everything visible around you, everyone else thinks the dictator is a genius who is wisely guiding the country into a glorious future. If suddenly the noose seems to loosen a bit, and everyone is expressing their contempt and hatred for the dictator, then everyone's knowledge about what everyone else thinks can change very rapidly.
If you were present at the time when the whole society transitioned from "nobody ever speaks ill of the Glorious Leader" to "everyone is kinda joking about how the Glorious Leader is a jackass," you could detect this transition and infer that everyone now knew that everyone else wanted Assad gone, and thus that an uprising like happened in the rest of the Arab Spring was possible.
No. I f**ked up. But an apocryphal story about somebody hearing somebody else talk shit in a cafe — and who Obama didn't take seriously — is not a historically useful analysis. What we hear on the streets depends on which streets you're on. Just sayin...
I think it has value and you shouldn't dismiss it. In 2017 you could hear people talk about crypto in public transit. Same in 2021. And now again I hear people talk about it that are probably just "common people"
Well crypto is different as it’s a general topic of conversation. To be honest with you I don’t believe any of this. Political debate at the interval of a concert to imaginary conversations in Damascus - still largely pro Assad - to Obama not knowing or understanding rebel groups that the US helped fund.
Every measurement about the world needs error bars in order to be correct.
This is true the same way that every energy measurement needs a relativity term in order to be correct: In the vast majority of cases, this extra term can be safely ignored.
In some cases it cannot, and this is the common problem between non-frequentist probabilities and the “Rootclaim’s $100,000 Lab Leak Debate” probabilities. To be clear, I fully believe that someone smarter and more eloquent than me has written about this. However, since I haven’t seen said writing, I’m going to give it a go myself.
In the case of non-frequentist probabilities, this is a little bit pedantic, but I think it gets to the root of why (some) people object to them. It plays out as follows:
If I see 400 white balls and 600 black balls in an urn, then I can say “There is a 40% probability of a randomly pulled ball being white”. However, this is incorrect. What is actually true is “There is a 40% probability of a randomly pulled ball being white, given that I counted the original number of balls correctly, plus N% that I was off by net-1, plus an M% chance that I was off by net-2, etc…”. In other words, my 40% number has error bars – It’s really 40.0000% += “probability I counted wrong”. In this case, however, we can assume that “probability I counted wrong” is very small relative to the information being conveyed by the 40% number. Maybe it’s actually 40.00 +/- 0.1%. Thus, in common parlance, I can elide the uncertainty altogether, and just say 40%, and very little information is lost.
In the case of the question “will it rain tomorrow”, the model is much more complicated, but the basic idea remains the same. If the weather forecast says “There is a 20% chance of rain”, what they actually mean is “there is a 20% +/- all-the-error-in-our-model-compounded”. And (I assume) meteorologists actually know what these numbers are, at least to some extent – there’s a reason that weather forecasts don’t go more than 10 days out: meteorologists understand that, past a certain point, their error bars are large enough that they simply can’t say anything helpful. They don’t include their error bars in their forecasts because we don’t live in a statistically literate society, but it’s generally understood that a.) the weather forecast has bigger error bars than the 400/600 balls case and b.) the weather forecast’s error bars increase with temporal-distance-from-the-present
Hell, I assume Samotsvety has detailed confidence calculations on all of their predictions. I would hope. If they don’t, I would love to know how their results end up being as good as they are.
The problem with putting probabilities on AI doom (or any other thing that we don’t have well-tested models for) is that the error bars are large enough that 0-100% are all included in them. Saying “AI has a 20% chance of destroying the world” is technically wrong in the same way saying “I have a 40% chance of pulling a white ball is wrong”. Both of them are eliding the “+/- chance-my-calculations-model-etc-are-wrong”. But with the balls case, that probability ends up being very small – saying “40%” when the reality is “40% +/- 0.1%” is mostly correct. But in the AI case, the chance the model is just wrong is really high. So saying “20%”, when the reality is “20% +/- 50%” is mostly incorrect. Given “20% +/- 50%” as a probability, the ‘correct’ shorthand is “I don’t know”, and not “20%”.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with probabilities for future events, but stating numbers for things with large error bars gives a misleading
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This has gotten long, so I’ll keep this short. This is the same problem that Baysean reasoning has, particularly with many terms, and particularly with small terms.
If you’re multiplying probabilities, you have to multiply their errors as well. Probabilities aren't numbers -- they're distributions. And if you do so, you very quickly get error bars which encompass, say 20+ orders of magnitude. Thus, unless you are supremely confident on all your components, any Baysean process that doesn’t ignore uncertainty will very quickly find itself giving a useless answer, and any Baysean process that does quickly becomes wrong.
If you're dealing with a singular event, a single point probability estimate is fine. If I flip a coin *once*, it's 50% probability of coming up heads even if there's a significant probability that the coin is unfair because there's no reason to prefer biased-heads to biased-tails. Though if I estimate that e.g. 1% of coins are either double-headed or double-tailed because of tricksy cheating gamblers and that tricksy cheating gamblers prefer double-headed coins to double-tailed by a 60/40 ratio, then I'd give my single-point probability estimate at 50.1%. The error bars can be folded into that estimate, and as 4Denthusiast points out you don't need to put error bars on the error bars.
If you're dealing with many repetitions of the same event, e.g. if you are going to flip the coin ten times in a row to settle bets, then you need the error bars to account for the correlation between repeated samples. "5% of bolts are from bad lots and bolts from bad lots will fail 20% of the time", correctly gives you a 1% probability that the next bolt you use will fail - but it also gives you a 5% probability that a bridge will fail if it's designed to stand the loss of 10% of its bolts and you bought them all from a single lot.
In this case, we're asking what is the probability that the 2019 pandemic was due to a lab leak, not the fraction of future pandemics that will come from lab leaks, so the single point estimate is fine.
But Scott's general point that the math involved in doing this right for complex problems is really hard, is valid. And the need to account for potential sources of error, even if you are going to fold them into a point estimate of probability for a single event, is a big part of that.
There is a difference between the case where you know you have a fair coin and 50% probability and the case where the coin might be double headed/tailed. The difference is that in the last case you may need to make assumtions about the probability of having double head/tail. Depending on your level of information this may be very uncertain, and your final probability could change drastically depending on the assumtion - so two probability estimates from different people could be very different - like the case with covid lab leak. In the case where you have a fair coin, two independent probability estimates would presumably be equal. I think this is important information to convey, even if the estimate is for a single toss.
So I will give that, in theory, one could incorporate their uncertainty into a single point prediction for the lab leak hypothesis (and for each component of their Baysean reasoning). But it is clear that the debaters either didn't do that or were *wildly, grossly, irresponsibly* overconfident.
I think it is uncontroversial to say that there is a >1% chance that both/either sides in this debate are wrong. This is *clearly* not a cut-and-dry issue. If it were, the debate wouldn't be happening. Scott saying "I think 80% lab leak" is perfectly reasonable. The actual debaters, saying "there is a 532:1 likelyhood of a lab leak" is clearly ludicrous. That level of confidence should be a huge red flag not to trust them, not evidence that they're right!
I think the real problem with this kind of Baysean analysis on hard issues like this is that, yeah, the math is really hard. To the point where no one ever gets it right. To the point where the whole thing is a useless exercise. But it is a shiny, intimidating-looking useless exercise, so all it end up with (in practice) is making extremely uncertain numbers look more certain.
> I think the real problem with this kind of Baysean analysis on hard issues like this is that, yeah, the math is really hard. To the point where no one ever gets it right.
No, the math isn't what's hard. The math is straightforward.
The problem is that doing the math calls for you to supply values that you don't actually know. This can't be done.
Yeah I'm mostly clueless about Bayesian probability propagation, but the last lab leak post I felt like give me some error bars and all these guesses are about the same... except for the winner who's numbers I find disingenuous... not sincere.
Should the sizes of error bars themselves come with error bars? Of course not, you just include that in the original error bars if there's such an issue. Probabilities work the same way. In the urn case, say there's a 99% chance that there are 400 white balls, and 0.5% each you miscounted by 1 and it's 399 or 401 (the chances of greater errors being negligibly small in this hypothetical), and similarly for about 600 black balls, then we can just add up the conditional probability of drawing a white ball given each of the nine possible true values of the contents of the urn, weighted by their probabilities, for a total 39.982% chance of drawing a white ball. The same applies to the real-world probability estimates of things like chance of AI doom. If the model is uncertain, you can just take that uncertainty into account in the probability estimate. Depending on what sort of error you envision, this will generally move the probability towards 50% (relative to the raw probability produced by the model).
If you want to incorporate your uncertainty that your model is even correct into explicit Bayesian reasoning, I don't think error bars on the likelihoods are the right way to go about it, because probabilities are not distributions, they're numbers. In the specific case where there are several observations of the same kind being used, where you're not sure how to interpret the observation such that you may be making a consistent error for multiple of them, this manifests as a correlation that needs to be taken into account in the Bayesian calculation.
So the problem is that no probability exists in a vacuum. In both of these cases, the actual question being asked is "Should I believe that AI will kill us all/covid was a lab leak". And to answer that question, an answer of "I calculate the probability to be 20% (or 50% or whatever)" is entirely useless unless you can communicate how sure you are about it.
"50% chance because I have flipped this coin 10,000 times" is not the same thing as "50% because I have no idea" when trying to answer the question that people actually care about.
It's true that you can use a probability as a single number, but if you do so, you can't use it as impetus to do or change anything. If you want to actually be able to *use* the probability for anything, you need to either specify or assume a certainty.
And since people usually assume highish certainty when looking at percents, leaving out a certainty on a low-certaintly percent reads as lying by omission.
If you want to use a probability to take action (placing bets or the equivalent), a single number suffices. If you want to update your personal probability estimate of some event based on someone else's knowledge, then you do need more information than just their probability, you also need to know what information their probability is based on. Even for that though, I think error bars on the probability are not that great a way of summarising the information, because it depends specifically on not just how much information they have, but how that compares to how much information you have, and how much that overlaps.
Say that we are to flip a coin one time to get heads or tails. The coin can be fair or double sided. Say person A has no information about this and therefore estimates p(h) = 0.5. Person B on the other hand knows that ther coin is double sided with tails on both sides. Now person B offers a bet to person A with 10/1 odds that the coin will land tails. It seems like if the singular estimate is sufficient to take action that person A should take the bet, as he had caculated p(heads) = 0.5 and the expected value is positive? In this case it seems to me that the correct conclusion for person A is that I have no information, and that p=0.5 without error bars is not sufficient to take action even for the single event?
I mean the problem is that the vast majority of the time when probabilities are communicated, they are intended to make someone update their personal probabilities on something. In which case a raw number is unhelpful-to-actively-malicious.
Certainly I agree that information-provenance-tracking is better than error bars (or some more general error measure), but that's a looot harder to do/takes what would be a sentence and blows it up into an entire essay. But yeah, when possible, full informational provenance is obviously preferable.
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Re: placing bets, even a low-certainty probability isn't necessarily very helpful. Assume I am quite naive. If I end up playing a 'fair' game of dice 'for fun' (but with real money) against someone who's using loaded dice, my default (low-certainty) probability for victory would be 50%. I would be much better served waiting and gathering more information rather than just working with the default 50% probability and losing my money.
A probability is only useful if it's correct, and low-certainty probabilities are more likely to just be flat-out wrong.
I haven't actually worked out a detailed objection, but I still vaguely feel like error bars are the wrong way to represent the uncertainty in this case, because they'd specifically be representing the difference in information between you and the one offering the bet, which is different from the usual case where there is no specific adversary or point of comparison other than the truth.
The relevant probability distribution on probabilities of an event X is given by P[X given Z], where Z is some information you don't currently know, treated as a random variable. If you want, you can turn this distribution into error bars by taking quantiles, but the distribution itself is more fundamental so I will be discussing it rather than the error bars. If you're telling someone about X for them to update, Z is what they know. If you're betting against someone about X, Z is what your opponent knows. If you're analyzing some repeatable process, Z is all the details of the process that remain consistent from run to run. For a one-off event, the closest to an objective Z you can get is probably something like "What are all the relevant facts that could plausibly be known about X at this time?". In other cases it's "What might I find out if I put a certain amount more effort into investigating?". The point I'm getting at is that the size of the error bars in this case would depend on more context than just how much you know about the thing. Also, conceptually, describing this as the error bars on your probability of X just feels weird to me because it's not really the same question. It's not "Is X the case?", but "What would my probability for X be if I knew Z?". I think this is my main objection, although it is admittedly pretty subjective.
Betting is not a great example because in that case you have an adversary who may know more than you, but for generally taking actions under uncertainty where there is no adversary, the point about using the single number as the probability stands. This applies to several of your original examples (the weather forecast, Samotsvety, and to some extent AI doom). There's already an expert who is assumed to have taken into account all of the relevant information that's available, so there is no clear other person to refer to who might know more, and the error bars wouldn't really be adding anything.
Actually, I think I got a bit distracted by other stuff. My main point is the last one in the comment above: error bars on probabilities make some amount of sense in contexts where there is some state of greater knowledge to compare to, but this does not actually apply to several of the examples in your original comment (most clearly, the weather forecast).
Technically what you're saying makes sense. Psychologically I think it might help people accept subjective probabilities if you explicitly say something like "x has a 40% chance of happening because we have a very convincing argument that the chance is right about 40%" vs "x has a 40% chance of happening because we have a fairly dubious argument that it's 10% to happen, which we correct back up towards 50% based on how likely we think the argument is to be valid."
Actually, is this correct? I get that for a single draw, if you assign 40% probability to the next ball being white, it doesn't matter how you got there. But it *does* matter for how much you should update based on the next draw being white. If you know the box has 400/1000 white balls, a run of picking white is just a weird coincidence that sometimes happens. If instead, say, someone who's not entirely reliable claimed that there were 200/1000 and you said 40% because you thought they might be wrong, then a run of white balls might have you updating much more quickly.
> Depending on what sort of error you envision, this will generally move the probability towards 50% (relative to the raw probability produced by the model).
According to your math above, that isn't what happens in this case, interestingly.
Yes, your prior on how likely each possible number of balls is does affect how you should update on new observations, and in this sense having a probability distribution on probabilities does make sense, but only because it's repeated draws from the same distribution, where there are two separate sources of uncertainty: what the process generating the distribution is, and how it turns out in each case. For unique events like the origin of covid, you can't split it up like that and only a single probability applies. (You can still get probability distributions on probabilities for related but somewhat different questions in such cases though, as I described in my comments on the non-frequentist probabilities post.)
> 5.2 Irrational number without zeros among its digits is inconceivable
> An irrational number (nonrecurring, i.e., no pattern in its decimal form; in other words, when the decimal form has no pattern whatsoever, it is irrational. If there is a pattern, then it is a good indication for rational) without zeros among its digits is inconceivable. An irrational number (a number that cannot be expressed as the ratio of two integers) will always have zeros in its decimal (or any other radix) representation. It is a conjecture to us now, but the proof should not possibly be difficult.
It is of course very easy to prove that irrational numbers exist which have no zeroes in their decimal expansion. You can do it by constructing an example! (A really easy example would be the number whose decimal expansion is the concatenation of the strings '2', '12', '112', '1112', '11112', etc.)
So my question is:
(1) what exactly is going on with this book? Anyone who accidentally read it would have to notice that it is, at best, just a bunch of words someone made up, which, to the extent they're supposed to have a meaning at all, are wrong.
(2) Why is Ravi Agarwal's name on it? Is that fraud or did he do it? His faculty page says that he is or was a research mathematician with a Ph.D. from IIT. It isn't possible for such a person to believe that it might be possible to prove that all irrational numbers have a zero in their decimal expansion. What happened?
Second, what was the difficult part of my proof? The number has a 2 at the 𝘯th place of its decimal expansion if 𝘯 is a triangular number, and a 1 otherwise. This is so simple that I can give you the explicit formula for the number:
Well, it often works as far as intuition goes. It should work for most normal numbers.
But you'll have a terrible time trying to prove that the number you've generated is irrational 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘯 𝘪𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵'𝘴 𝘵𝘳𝘶𝘦, and as you've already observed, in the general case, it isn't true.
It would be an incredible result if you could show that "pi with the zeroes deleted" was a rational number, but the fact that that would be really surprising is not actually a proof that it's false.
As an applied mathematician he may have some preexisting odd but defensible ideas about non-computable numbers and nonconstructive proofs.
The book shows some signs of being written by someone in an unusual mental state, and is very concerned with mysticism (seeing mystical insight as more important than formal proof), so perhaps this leads to those ideas being expanded to the point that they are definitely wrong.
I think this is the explanation of how such a thing gets written.
As for how it gets published, it's just not that hard to get Elsevier to publish something. They put in almost no editorial effort and don't necessarily have to pay the authors anything, and clearly don't care about a reputation for quality.
> As for how it gets published, it's just not that hard to get Elsevier to publish something.
My point in observing that it was available directly from Elsevier was mostly to disprove the idea that someone obtained a bunch of nonsense and then supplied cover art including the names of some unrelated professors. (There's a second listed author!)
Elsevier may not care whether the book has any contents, but I suspect they do care that the attributed authors are actually responsible for the book in some legal sense.
If you're saying the reason this book got written was that both authors were high as a kite for the entire process... really? It must have taken _some_ time to produce the book, and to arrange a contract with Academic Press. Did neither of them ever review the text while they weren't high? Did colleagues, administrators, students, or publishing flunkies never notice anything amiss?
While the first proof that comes to mind that such numbers exist is non-constructive, Michael Watts's counterexample is explicit and computable. Also, it sounds like Ravi is confusing the fact that a number is rational iff its decimal expansion is eventually periodic with the false idea that if there's any pattern at all in the digits it's rational (which clearly would imply his conjecture), rather than having some obscure philosophical objection.
As I wrote above, I think the ideas stated in the book are definitely wrong and incoherent.
But they feel like they might come about from the starting point of someone who worries about constructive mathematics, and then lets mystical or unusual mental experiences take them too far.
Hey Dan, I hope you will respond to the points beowulf and I have raised. I am all for facing grim realities, but I think some of your alarming points are inaccurate. Coincidentally there is someone on this thread posting a link to a CDC report about a dairy worker who contracted avian flu from cows, and following up the link asking something like "how long til avian flu makes covid look like nothing?" But if you read what she links, and the links on her links, the picture is not very alarming at all. The worst part of covid for me wasn't the fucking virus or the precautions I had to take, it was seeing anxiety and rage get set off by inaccurate information. On twitter and elsewhere I watched split after split happen within and between groups of people over whether some reported "information" was case for alarm or cause for alarm or cause for screaming "bullshit" and hating those who were alarmed. Or of course the reverse -- hating those who aren't alarmed. So I am now worried and annoyed about these posts, and having to work fairly hard to hang on to my empathy and fair-mindedness.
I was on "Medical Twitter" all through the pandemic, following a bunch of scientists and epidemiologists. When I started seeing articles about brain damage and IQ decrease from Covid, I asked many of them via comments on their tweets or by Twitter PM whether there were similar findings regarding other viral infections -- flu, pneumonia, hepatitis, measles, etc. -- and none responded. (Most did not often respond to many questions from followers on Twitter, but the unanimous silence about this topic was striking.). My guess is that they did not respond because there isn't a lot of data about that. I searched around a bit on Google Scholar and it seemed like there had not been a lot of research on IQ change, brain changes, etc. caused by other viruses.
I had an experience once that nudges me in the direction of thinking that flu affects the brain. A couple decades ago I had when I'm pretty sure was the flu -- had all the classic symptoms, and it was during flu season. For about a week after flu had run its course I felt sort of low-energy but otherwise normal. I did not feel mentally foggy, just tired & blah. So I was driving on the turnpike, and approaching the toll booth I saw from several hundred feet away that the lane I was in was going to take me to a toll booth that had a long line. Still going 50 mph or so I changed lanes -- then realized I had changed lanes *without checking either my rear view or my side mirrors.* I had never done that before, and have never done that since. I have always had an irrational uneasiness about lane changing. I keep feeling like there's a car behind or beside me that neither mirror is catching. I check and double-check my mirrors, but before actually changing lanes I still crave to look over my shoulder to be sure. Sometimes I do look over my shoulder, even though that also feels unsafe, and probably really is.
I think of that incident as being due to some sort of post-flu brain impairment. Of course I understand it's just one incident in one life and it's not reasonable to base an opinion on it. But it does make it more plausible to me that flu, or maybe something like fever that's common to many illnesses, affects the brain.
Have you found data comparing covid brain and IQ changes to those from other viruses?
One other question, about Covid's damage to the immune system. I mostly quit Twitter about a year ago, but I do remember seeing a couple pieces around that time about the effect of Covid on the immune system, and whether it was true that Covid did lasting damage. One came from a physician who was not an active researcher, but did follow and summarize new research findings. She posted links to a couple articles she thought gave solid evidence that the immune system recovered completely after a lag of -- I forget how long, but it was months, not years. The other finding about this issue was from someplace else, not sure where but it was respectable: People who'd had both Covid and vaxes were actually a bit better protected from future severe cases of covid than were people who'd had vaxes only. Are you aware of these findings? Have there been later ones that you think negate them?
I dug into this question, too. Unfotunately I don't think I ever posted it on my biweekly COVID Twitter update. Yes, influenza infections have been found to affect brain function. And before the Measles vaccine, there were numerous studies that Measles in kids can delay cognitive development by an approx a year-and-a-half. Most of the Measles research was done pre-vaccine (pre-1968), so it's hard to find online.
Oh, and Measles really messes with the immune system. Post measles infection it takes 2-3 years for immune memory to be restored. This study compared pre-MV to post-MV mortality rates, about ½ of all childhood deaths from other diseases could be attributed to this effect. I haven't seen any meta studies that show the same effect for COVID. The fact that overall excess childhood deaths haven't increased from pre-COVID levels suggests that it hasn't.
Damn, I'll take you over Monica Gandhi any day! And do you know whether I'm right that current thinking is that actual Covid + vaccination gives if anything slighter better protection against future severe covid illness than vaxes alone? According to OP, "A March 2023 paper in Immunity found “a major reduction in both the magnitude and functionality of peak CD8+ T cell responses in previously infected individuals after vaccination. The authors note that this is similar to what is seen in diseases like HIV. What they found is that people who have had COVID-19 are less able to mount a proper response to vaccination compared to COVID-19 naive controls. ”
Also, I'm pretty sure that research has found that for people who have covid several times later cases are on average milder -- that also doesn't square with the idea that immune system ceases to function well for a long time or even forever after a case of covid
Edit: OK, googled the question and here's the first answer I got: "Compared with SARS-CoV-2 primary infection cases, reinfection cases were more likely to present with mild illness (OR = 7.01, 95%CI, 5.83–8.44), and the risk of severe illness was reduced by 86% (OR = 0.14, 95%CI, 0.11–0.16). " From Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2023 Feb; 20(4): 3335.
Published online 2023 Feb 14. doi: 10.3390/ijerph20043335. Severity and Outcomes of SARS-Covid Reinfection Compared with Primary Infection: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
There have been a bunch of meta-studies of the severity of primary infections vs subsequent COVID infections. Most seem to show the subsequent infections are milder. I've only seen one meta that showed subsequent infections are equally severe as prior infections, and none that I know of indicate that subsequent infections are worse. I admit I haven't bothered to dig into the priors for these metas—so I couldn't swear in a court of law that meta authors aren't selectively skewing their priors. But despite the hysteria being spread by AJ, we'd expect hospitalizations to increase with each wave if our immune systems were being permanently harmed — and we're not seeing that.
The thing is a lot of experts who make these claims are extrapolating from small-scale studies. Yes, some peeps seemed to have suffered a T cell collapse or long-term T cell dysregulation — and the latter is currently the favored hypothesis for PASC (aka Long COVID). But so far we haven't seen the mass disabling event that was predicted by the Long COVIDians in the macro data (yet). For instance, you'd expect excess deaths to be steadily rising. They're not. Too bad Suckstack doesn't allow us to post graphs, but I posted the (almost) latest ED trend here...
Likewise the BLS stats don't show an upward inflection of the permanently disabled (they've been growing at an overall steady state since 2009 — and they dropped during the initial phase of the pandemic but then bounced back to normal).
Interesting! But I want to know why Norwegian Politicians is the 19th largest community on the English-language Wikipedia? Seems like English-speaking Swedes need to step and do their part!
When I hear Americans talk about socialism and communism, they seem to talk about them as though they are the same thing — especially when libertarians or conservatives speak — and that both are necessarily totalitarian.
Here's Bryan Caplan (nothing special about him, it's just the latest example of many):
> Or to take one last example, when I debate socialists, most of them never even mention the old Soviet bloc. They give the impression that their ideas have never been tried. Which makes me wonder: Are they unaware of the history of actually-existing socialism?
I'm neither a communist or a socialist but I am interested and I have always understood them as distinct ideas.
Perhaps socialism is a stepping stone on the way to communism for some but my understanding is that socialism is compatible with democracy — as demonstrated by the many socialist parties in Europe — whereas communism is necessarily totalitarian.
I asked on Substack Notes and a few people replied that I am mistaken: the socialist parties in Europe are not socialist and the core of socialism is totalitarianism. The British Labour Party, for example, was not socialist according to this understanding.
Can anyone help me out? Am I mistaken? Does everyone in America have this same interpretation? What about other countries?
Eastern Bloc countries defined themselves as socialist countries (for example the Soviet Union was officially named the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) who are advancing towards communism under the leadership of communist vanguard parties.
No socialist country was ever a democracy. Introduction of democracy led to rapid abandonment of socialism.
The definitional mess is not some American idiosyncrasy - American socialists will use the same terminology as everyone else - it's just pure intellectual dishonesty by their ideological opponents. However, Caplan is in fact using the terminology correctly here.
First things first - communism has a perfectly precise, established definition, and the definition includes absence of state. As such, it's entirely incompatible with totalitarianism on a very fundamental level.
Whatever different use of the term is predicated on equivocating communism with [whatever self-described communist parties did]. (An aside - self-appointed names need not correspond with reality, Second World states also self-described as republics, and this is neither an argument for them not being totalitarian or, conversely, that democracy is totalitarian actually. But even granting them the right to self-description, it's a weirdly selective way to do it, because:) Those parties never claimed to practice communism. Communism was a distant goal, to be achieved only after worldwide revolution, in the meantime they had to be ruthlessly effective not to lose to the forces of reaction, which necessitated economic efficiency and war-like top-down command of society. They called the resulting system names like "socialism" and "state capitalism" - in time, the first became an official self-description, and the latter was adopted by their detractors.
Now, the definition of "socialism" is much looser. It's a generic term for socially directed economic egalitarianism, as opposed to liberal market-directed individualism, and conservative hierarchical rule, defined somewhere on the intersection of "worker ownership of the means of production" and "subordination of productive forces to the good of all society". This includes communism and all strains of anarchism, but also allows settings such as [centralized state controls the means of production and manages them in the workers' name], and the claim that Second World states could be called socialist is not contested. (Whether they actually were, different story, but largely meaningless to this discussion, since at least everyone can agree they were, in economic terms, more socialist than a generic liberal replacement.)
(Also, more successful than a generic liberal replacement, and we know this because a bit over 30 years ago we had a natural experiment in which some of them turned capitalist and the result was an unmitigated disaster, in macroeconomic ways and otherwise. As in, literally not yet mitigated - Russia, Ukraine and the Caucasus are currently still living through the fallout. This is hardly an obscure argument, which makes me wonder: Is Caplan unaware of recent history? Now, I'd assume they don't come up in discussions often because approximately nobody will use those states as examples of how they want a future socialist society to function {of course Leninists will contest that they had to function this way, and will point out Leninist-model revolutionaries were the only socialists able to hold on to power}, and their undemocratic political system is the main reason why - among others, it facilitated creation of alienated bureaucratic ruling class that eventually liberalized it, i.e. dismantled it for the purpose of appropriating its wealth. But their existence is hardly a gotcha.)
As an American, I'd tend to use "socialist" to describe mechanisms designed to smooth out the inequality curves, taking from the rich to give to the poor, establishing safety nets (of course at a cost to others). This can be applied to many styles of economy. Possibly it could even be a political term, to describe factions strongly concerned with establishing a minimum standard of welfare.
I'd reserve "communism" for systems that, nominally or otherwise, involve collective ownership of capital. This is technically about the internal ownership structure, rather than the goal of the systems erected on top. It's hard to imagine a non-socialist communist society, but if I squint just hard enough I think I can come up with some that I wouldn't reject as laughable settings for a fantasy novel. But it's certainly possible to have socialist non-communist societies.
All these societies have to deal with the question of "who decides", and can further be classified as to how they handle (or fail to handle) ambitious and power-hungry people. I don't think there's any inherent reason why communist societies have to be totalitarian, but I do think that societies that require ideological conformity are necessarily totalitarian.
You might try looking at Israeli kibbutzim for a perspective on non-state-based communism?
I think there's lot of ignorance out there, willful or otherwise. I recently ran across a forum where someone expressed the opinion that "black markets" were an exclusively "capitalist" phenomenon. I refrained from joining just to post "oh you sweet summer child".
But black markets _are_ an exclusively capitalist phenomenon. They are trade in what is not supposed to be traded, as capitalist as it's possible to be.
That they exist in places that frown on capitalism doesn't indicate that they aren't capitalist. It indicates that those places cannot do without capitalism.
This is an extremely slovenly use of the term capitalism. How does a black market in, for example, communist Russia involve a ruling class exploiting the worker through the use of economic force in the form of capital?
Tibetan peasants bartering chickens and yak wool isn't capitalism. Medieval guild economics isn't capitalism. Early-modern mercantilism isn't capitalism, although it's getting there. Black markets are *a form of market economics* and arguably *a manifestation of free-trade ideals*, but not capitalist. It's not the case that there are only two options, full-blown communism where all production is expropriated by the state and "capitalism" which is whenever anyone makes a voluntary trade in any way, shape, or form. Even the ridiculous impossible ideal of stateless communism would involve barter trade on the individual level.
> This is an extremely slovenly use of the term capitalism. How does a black market in, for example, communist Russia involve a ruling class exploiting the worker through the use of economic force in the form of capital?
I think you'll find that your definition of "capitalism" is not widely held. But I appreciate that you provided a definition. It's interesting that, to you, "capitalism" is defined by being inherently evil.
> Even the ridiculous impossible ideal of stateless communism would involve barter trade on the individual level.
The classic statement is "to each according to his needs". Under ideal communism, you would barter for nothing; if you wanted something, it would be given to you.
Legal Systems Very Different From Ours has a chapter on the Plains Indians, describing their internal economics as working much like this.
It's Marx's definition of capitalism, mein dicky old chum. If it sounds evil that's because that's how he formulated it. A more neutral version would be "economic activity is structured at its highest level through the investment by capital holders of their capital in productive enterprises in the hopes of profit". If there's no capital fulfilling a critical economic role, there's no capitalism. For example, in feudalism there are only lands and estates, on the economically meaningful level. Granted that in capitalism land *forms a type of capital*, that nevertheless is not how land operates under feudalism, which is what makes it a distinct economic system. Guilds likewise do not involve investments and are not capitalist.
In either case, in a conversation that's all about how people are sloppy and maybe evil for misapplying the term communism it would be a good idea to set a good example and not just call everything you dislike or every instance of a market economy capitalism, which is a gross misapplication. Particularly ironic since "capitalism" is a commie term.
> I think you'll find that your definition of "capitalism" is not widely held.
FWIW, I was making a similar distinction, similar enough that I don't need to respond to your comment because Anonymous basically said everything I would.
> It's interesting that, to you, "capitalism" is defined by being inherently evil.
I think that has more to do with Marx, and how he defined his terms. I think in practice I tend to use "capitalism" to refer to private ownership of the means of production, which isn't something I view as inherently bad. But without some counterbalancing force, it does seem to lead to concentrations of power, which in turn seem to cause problems. Which is where socialism comes in. (Using this definition, and my previous ones, capitalism is entirely compatible with socialism.)
I take the central example of socialism as being the Scandinavian nations (yes Hammond, I know you consider them mixed-market social democracies, I think the definitions are at least fuzzy, and there are a lot of government components in that mix), while I take communism as having as central examples the USSR, PRC, North Korea, and Vietnam.
That's just applying the term socialism incorrectly though. It means, quite specifically, state ownership of the means of production. Yes there is drift, but there's no reason to give into it. Just call the Scandinavian model market welfare states or whatever you want.
The examples you give of public services are services that most people would agree should be publicly owned.
Would it make a difference if the producers of electricity, coal, gas, oil, steel, ships, planes and nuclear power and the providers of mail, phones, hospitals, cars, water, trains, buses and television were owned and run by the government?
Would that be socialist? What should the crossover point be?
I think the boundaries of the term are fuzzy. Yes, the Scandinavian model has a large market segments, but it also has a very large portion of the economy (health care, education, public pension plans,...) going through the government, effectively state ownership of _those_ means of production. If you want to restrict "socialism" to mean nations where, say, >90% of the means of production are state owned, ok, but I think that that is too restrictive.
The appropriate distinction is public goods (which have or are large externalities - national security, law and order, arguably primary education) which have always been agreed on as state functions, and private goods (TVs, video games, tertiary healthcare) which are, or should be, privately owned and operated. In this latter category, the Scandinavian countries do not own or operate the means of production! At most they provide relatively generous funding support to private individuals to access some of those services (Sweden for instance has vouchers for education).
>In this latter category, the Scandinavian countries do not own or operate the means of production! At most they provide relatively generous funding support to private individuals to access some of those services (Sweden for instance has vouchers for education).
Ok, that certainly is less direct control than direct ownership would imply. I would expect that there at least needs to be something like accreditation, which carries some indirect control.
Hmm... Your point about public goods suggests that there are at least two axes to be considered - whether a good is publicly or privately funded, and whether the provider of the good is government operated or private. I think there are examples of all four combinations.
>Perhaps socialism is a stepping stone on the way to communism for some but my understanding is that socialism is compatible with democracy — as demonstrated by the many socialist parties in Europe
None of those countries are 'socialist' though. They're mixed-market social democracies.
"Actual" socialism involves mass/worker ownership of the means of production. And you don't get there with elections and parliaments. Communism is basically socialism that has fully "abolished" classes and the state - everyone living in one big 'commune'. This is obviously made confusing by "communist" governments that rule countries that don't have anything close to "communism" but ostensibly their end goal is a communist society.
And I say this as a strong anti-marxist who hates all of this stuff.
The phrase "actually-existing socialism" specifically comes from inter-left debates during and preceeding the Cold War, where various non-Communist leftist groups (social democrats, anarchists etc.) would talk about what their visions for socialism were and how Soviet Union was failing to produce those visions, the Communists countered that while they were faffing around, Soviet Union and other such countries were creating actually existing socialism, warts and all (with those warts being a natural product of what happens when you do things in the real world). Sort of amusing to see this argument being then utilized (and turned on its head) by Caplan et al.
An awful lot of people use labels they don’t understand, and those who do understand disagree about their meanings. This is especially true for many -isms. If someone from a different country or different generation than me, uses either of the words socialism, capitalism, nazism, racism, or (neo-)Marxism, to mention a few examples, I usually have to find out what they mean from context, or just ask.
I’m not a socialist, but socialism is a really large umbrella term that encompasses communism and Stalinism, anarcho-syndicalism and democratic socialism. At least if you ask many people who identify with those labels. But no, not necessarily totalitarian. Popular conceptions of horseshoe theory says that you tend toward authoritarianism if you go far enough in either direction. But there’s a faintly mirrored horseshoe, that tends toward anarchy on the left and social Darwinism on the right.
To me, it’s helpful to view socialism and its variants (and certain other -isms) as ingredients, not menu items. None of these pots (ideologies or political systems) ever stop boiling long enough to nail down what the real thing even means, anyway, so why commit to any as an endpoint? (You could that no one has ever tried “real capitalism” or “real democracy” or real anything, but that misses the point that in society, the journey is the destination. The things we have tried are a stew of ingredients, and some stews are obviously tastier than others. Socialism, IMO, is like chili and cilantro – use in small doses, with the utmost care.)
Thank you. This seems like a sensible approach. I was curious because Americans seem to make no distinction between the two whereas I had never accounted that approach outside of the USA. I wondered if that was a general understanding over there or just one used by folks on the right. It helps to clarify meanings!
I've just spent the last few hours reading up on the history of socialism and, certainly, the Labour Party along with several other parties in Europe thought of themselves as socialist until recently. The Labour Party specifically was committed to the nationalisation of all industry in Britain until the Blair government in the late 90s.
Labour have split several times over their history between socialist wings and social democrats but they were never, as far as I could find, in favour of communism.
Yes. In the US, in particular, I suspect conflating socialism with communism is a vestige of the Cold War, with McCarthyism, several hot wars against communist regimes, etc. And of the two-party system not making room for more moderate socialists. And of post-war labor unions almost being more associated with the mob than socialists. With all of that, there was never much need to paint with nuances of red on the left. (Speaking of which… it is also unnecessarily confusing that Republicans are associated with Red and Democrats with Blue in the US.)
>Does everyone in America have this same interpretation?
No. People in India and Germany and Mexico and wherever all have varied interpretations about how these two ideas (socialism and communism) relate within their own countries and America is no different.
If you’re asking if “most” Americans have this same interpretation, the answer is still no. Most Americans could not define either word offhand with confidence (I’m one of them). If you’re asking if most educated conservative Americans have this interpretation, I think that’s an interesting question. I don’t think so but it’s hard to say. It’s politically convenient for a committed American righty to categorize as many socialists as no-good communists as possible, but to tell you the truth, this appeared to be far more common in the 50s-90s than it is now. Maybe a few American conservatives could give us their thoughts.
That was the basis of my question really: whether the conflation was down to political theory or political convenience for the purposes of discrediting socialism.
I see. Then I would say the conflation is down to convenience. American lefties, particularly social-democrats, don’t talk about socialism and communism as the same thing. I think average Americans, right and left, vaguely think of communism as socialism + more extreme shit.
Trump in 2015 described Bernie Sanders as a “socialist-slash-communist” and said something about how Sanders would take everything away from the people. I think Trump said “socialist-slash-communist” here because communism has a more negative connotation than socialism and most Americans of all education levels feel like they understand and agree on what a communist is, but aren’t so sure about what a socialist is. He was taking a shot at Sanders, not trying to fairly portray a difference in theory. But he also didn’t just call him a communist, which is worth noting.
Whether righty politicians and pundits who say stuff like this “believe” it, I don’t know. But I think it’s safe to say they think the gap between socialism and communism is much narrower than the lefties.
A lot of self-described Marxist revolutionaries who want to build a one-party Leninist state, decide to organize political parties with "Socialist" in the name. So it seems fairly natural to conflate them.
If you want "socialists who have no interest in communism" the usual term in English would be "social democrats" although even here the line is still blurry especially in other languages.
I don't think communism is necessarily totalitarian. There are lots of people who profess to support communism who want democracy or even anarchy -- the utopian dream of communism is a stateless society.
(Now the problem is, if the nice, democratic communism doesn't work, maybe people start trying to blame someone, and then they decide to build a powerful police organization to start rooting out the saboteurs causing all the problems -- temporarily of course...)
The bit where communism is associated with totalitarianism isn't because Marx said that it should be, isn't because there's anything in the theory or doctrine that requires it. As you note, many communists don't want totalitarian rule.
But communism is still associated with totalitarianism, because any implementation of non-totalitarian communism in a world populated by real human beings, will see the productivity in the not-totally-controlled segments of the economy go to zero (or to the black market). Since neither "everybody starves" nor "really, we're a black-marketist society" are acceptable to the sort of people who want communism, they're left with either going totalitarian or going home. And by the time they're running a communist state, they've probably burned too many bridges to quietly go home.
> If you want "socialists who have no interest in communism" the usual term in English would be "social democrats"
My research suggests that — in most English speaking countries — "democratic socialism" would be the appropriate term for socialists not in favour of communism whereas "social democracy" is merely a commitment to improving the lot of the least fortunate.
The short-hand conflation might be inexact (notwithstanding that even Marx used terms interchangeably sometimes, iirc) but the distinction is redundant if it's the case that Communism is arrived at by way of Socialism, and Socialism is distinct from "the government doing stuff".
> as demonstrated by the many socialist parties in Europe
There are all sorts of parties, including far-right, so I'm not sure what that proves. Maybe you were referring to policy here (e.g. healthcare, education) but in that capacity it's not meaningfully distinguishable from Liberal democracy. It's a mixed-market economy across the developed world, just to varying degrees.
> whereas communism is necessarily totalitarian.
I think that is a fair assessment, though where communists would quibble is whether it is also authoritarian. That certainly seems to be in line with their espoused sentiments, despite protests to the contrary, whichever flavor is in question (e.g. "we just need to *force* all the businesses to be worker-owned, you see").
I would agree that the USA has a mixed-market economy but the Labour Party in the UK certainly had explicitly socialist policies and nationalised a lot of industries. They never — except for a tiny fringe of extremists — had the intention of controlling the whole economy as they did in Soviet Russia. They didn't see themselves as a step on the way to communism. They opposed communism.
Do you think the Labour Party were mistaken when they called themselves socialist?
Yes if they were never intent on working towards a Socialist State. Nationalization of certain things does not a Socialist State make, though it's what you would expect Socialists at the helm to start with.
To expand a bit on a good comment by @TGGP below, socialism isn't a derivative of Marxism. Socialism, or at least some kind of proto-socialism goes back to the Levelers in the English revolution. It really peaked in France and elsewhere in the 19th century where there was this milieu of different thinkers from socialists to anarchists to Marxists and beyond. Read about the 1871 Paris Commune and stuff like that to get a feel for how all these different ideologies were interacting with each other.
So all socialisms, except maybe that one Italian/German one, share a common heritage and lots of common theory. Whether their current differences are significant...kinda depends on your perspective. From within the left, these differences can be really, really important. From outside the left, it's kinda whatevs.
For a similar perspective, think about Mormons and Catholics in what remains of the Religious Right. From an insider/Christian perspective, they have huge, almost irreconcilable differences. From an outside perspective, they kinda blend together because, compared to the average atheist, they share a lot in common.
It would help if you were to outline what your interpretations of socialism and communism actually are, and also what you think are the differences between them. Just saying that one is compatible with democracy and the other not does not help me understand what you think they are and how they are different.
I think the definition of socialism has evolved over the past century. Where it was originally about owning all the means of production, in modern societies, governments are more selective about which industries to nationalise.
For example, the UK nationalised gas, electricity, the railways, telecom, the health service, the post office, the airline, steel and coal production, education and the car manufacturers while other companies were free to innovate. The UK also had free and fair elections during this period but the Labour Party was most definitely socialist.
In communist countries, the government maintained stricter control over most of the economy (5 year plans and the like). Despite having "Democratic" in their name, neither East Germany nor North Korea were/are democratic. Neither was the Soviet Union. They were communist.
The problem has more dimensions than that, given how diverse those who dislike socialism are. Caplan, for instance, is right to lump socialism and communism together because his primary interests are economic. If you think markets are the way to solve problems, you see socialism as a system that will fail to deliver and will require increasing state control, eventually leading to true totalitarian communism (e.g. let's say you want to nationalize some industry, but the industries up- and downstream of it start to act up, and you then have to nationalize them too). Someone like Jordan Peterson, on the other hand, is concerned about 'cultural marxism', which as far as I can tell is a movement that contains zero people who are philosophically marxist -- but which is fairly univocal from the perspective of someone like Peterson. So if in 1920 various people hated socialism/communism for being anti-market, anti-(your ethnicity), anti-religion, anti-freedom, they all hated the same thing. These days it's not clear that people who disapprove of those things are all hating the same thing or the same people.
Traditionally the difference between communism and social democracy was that the former wanted socialism through revolution, the latter through reform, but nowadays European Social Democrat parties have generally abandoned the goal of socialism, i.e. a society in which all means of production are communally owned, and thus one might argue that these parties are no longer socialist. The parties that used to call themselves communist rebranded after the fall of the Soviet Union but haven't abandoned socialism.
Most European socialists didn’t believe that - which is why there were also communist parties. Some believed that the “commanding heights” of the economy should be owned by the state - which is the same thing at all. Had the Labour Party implemented in full clause 8 then most of the economy would still have been capitalist.
As I understand it, the socialist/communist schism started with the establishment of the Bolshevic-lead Third International in the very early interwar years. After that "Communist" referred to those who aligned with the Third International, and "Socialist" could be used broadly to refer to the revolutionary left in general or narrowly to those who did not align with the Third International parties except perhaps as a temporary alliance of convenience. A central part of Bolshevik ideology was affirmation of Marx's idea of a violent revolution followed by a "dictatorship of the proletariat" as essential stages of the transition to Socialism, with the added idea of a "revolutionary vanguard" party that would lead the revolution and control an authoritarian state following it until the proletariat as a whole was competent to exercise democratic control over the state. "Socialists", on the other hand, often aspired to take power through the ballot box and to continue free elections and most other liberal-democratic institutions (apart from private ownership of the means of production) throughout the transition to socialism. Both views had been represented in the pre-WW1 Second International movement, but the Communists split from the rest of the Socialists after the war, so the narrow-sense Socialist parties after the split would sometime be referred to as Second International parties.
I think you're talking about a later split (post-WW2, I think) between Second-International-style Socialists and Social Democrats, with the former favoring public ownership of most of the means of production while the latter favored something closer to the Scandinavian model of redistributive taxation and robust public services atop a mostly-market-based economy.
That’s a Marxist view of their own history. The Labour Party in Britain - possibly amongst the most consequential - was not really influenced by Marx at all, despite him living there. It was different on the continent where Marxism had more relevance, but socialism, social democracy and even communism (a word that existed before Marx) did not depend on Marx at all. And anarchism was anti Marxist but not anti communist. They believed in communes of workers - which is where the word comes from.
Had Marx been hit by a bus after arriving in London - the Clapham omnibus preferably as that would do a man in for sure - the history of the Labour Party and labour reform in Britain would hand been exactly the same.
I didn't intend to imply that Socialists in general were Marxist. I'm more familiar with socialist movements in Germany, Russia, France, and the US, but my general understanding (which I think is compatible with my understanding of the Second/Third International split) is that many or most of the Socialist and Labour parties that were affiliated with the Second International were not explicitly Marxist: Marx had a lot of influence on the broader movement, but it was more common for Socialist parties to be influenced by Marx among many others (like the SPD in Imperial Germany) than to be purely Marxist like the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, and purely non-Marxist Socialist or Labor parties (like the Trudoviks in Russia) were far from unheard of. The Second/Third International split mostly saw the orthodox Marxist parties aligning with the Bolsheviks and the mixed or non-Marxist parties aligning against them.
This is true in their capacity as 20th century political movements, and monikers for those who ascribe to one or the other. There's a tired game of motte-and-bailey where commies of various stripes pretend these definitions (including as philosophy) aren't a thing so they can wheel out "communism has never been tried" like a blunt instrument, narrowing the definition strictly to "stateless, classless, moneyless society"... as though that is something you just "try", not a consequence of choose-your-socialist-poison.
lso notable is just how shameless everyone involved in this process was. It was obvious that this was not just a group of hungry men peacefully protesting, as IWW supporters loudly and indignantly claimed afterwards. In fact, it was a well-funded intimidation campaign, in which many of the participants were armed. That’s what Bolshevism is: the lowest elements of society intimidate peaceful law-abiding people into acquiescing to a series of increasingly unreasonable demands.
While liberal lawyers and journalists were talking about American democracy when they referenced the case, in reality what they were defending was mob violence. The goal was humiliation and dominance, to get the victim to discredit himself by accepting unacceptable behavior. They all supported and covered for the mob. When you read about the IWW being persecuted by local officials or vigilantes, assume that actions similar to Tannenbaum’s preceded this.
It’s important to note that, as is the case today, there is functionally no difference between leftists groups. Suffragists, communists, socialists, anarchists, labor organizers, civil rights activists, and mainstream liberals: they are all working towards the same ultimate goal. I sometimes use the terms interchangeably because they are interchangeable. They would support each other in any situation no matter how obnoxious the behavior at hand was. Tannenbaum did something indefensible and immediately had a massive media and legal machine backing him up.
>Suffragists, communists, socialists, anarchists, labor organizers, civil rights activists, and mainstream liberals: they are all working towards the same ultimate goal.
Much of the history of the Cold War was about mainstream liberals and democratic socialists choosing to side with their bourgeois governments specifically to combat the Soviet Union. If they hadn't done so, the Cold War might have turned quite differently.
I think the author's idea, btw I didn't write it but found it a provocative article, is that while these group were quite different they all shared a goal of a highly redistributionist social order, and they did in fact at many times all support each other - witness the support received by Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, just one example. But I take you point that mainstream liberals, JFK and Scoop Jackson, as well as unions like the UAW led by Walter Reuther, and the Teamsters were very pro American democracy and free markets.
My understanding is that Rosenbergs did actually not receive that much support for outright clemency outside of the Communist or Communist-aligned circles, and at least some of the campaigners who opposed their execution did so more because they were opposed to capital punishment in general than because they thought that the Rosenbergs were innocent. Here is, for instance, the reaction from Eleanor Roosevelt, one of the most influential figures on the left wing of the American liberalism of this era: https://erpapers.columbian.gwu.edu/julius-and-ethel-rosenberg
I think you’ve been duped by nonsense. If you are inclined to think that suffragettes and communists are the same - to pick the first two on that list - then you maybe should rethink your historical education. Ask yourself if you would remove votes for women now, and if not are you a communist?
The rest of the list is equally spurious. I myself read that article as far as that line, and gave up.
"ask yourself if you would remove votes for women now, and if not are you a communist?"
Yes and yes. A clearly failed experiment, and socialism relies on women having the vote, as they are the ones who vote for the left. In the US, the more right-wing presidential candidate would have won *every election since women got the vote*, if only men had voted. Over a century this represents an incalculable drift leftward.
"In the US, the more right-wing presidential candidate would have won *every election since women got the vote*" -- what is your basis for this statement for the elections prior to 1980? There being no statistically-valid nationwide exit polls before about then.
Also: according to the exit polling in 1992, Bill Clinton won the popular vote among men 41-38-21 which is only slightly different from his total margin of 43-38-19. He'd have won the Electoral College exactly the same that way as he actually did (the 2 percent shift to Perot would not have tipped any states to Bush or to Perot).
Also: According to the exit polling in 1996, Clinton and Dole were in a statistical tie among male voters. That election would have therefore been much closer in the Electoral College than it actually was, but the states shifted from Clinton (actual) to Dole (if women couldn't vote) would not have been enough to get Dole to 270 and the White House.
Not true of England though where voting Conservative is more female than male as I recall. Traditionally anyway. In why case suffragettism didn’t lead to communism.
"voting Conservative is more female than male as I recall"
Huge if large; my understanding was that women in England were more conservative than men *when they got the vote* because the alternative was the Liberal Party, which was quite obviously the liberty side of the classic liberty/security divide and refused to do things like promise to protect the flower of white womanhood from Johnny Foreigner, and that this is the direct cause of the Liberal Party being a humiliated rump in modern British politics. The Labour Party rose by taking advantage of women's craving for redistributionism and the patriarchal state, thus consuming the male-style freedom-loving Liberals and teplacing them as the Party of the Left. IANAE though, so...
Similar trends existed all over the world, though usually in most other countries the switch from women voting more conservative than men to other way around happened in the 70s or in the 80s.
The socialist parties were more popular with men and the women as long as their main focus was on labor union struggle spearheaded by male-dominated unions (miners, transport, factories etc.) with all of its masculine affects (men going against fatcat bosses and their effeminate agents to earn money for their family etc.), and the situation only changed once they scaled down the socialism/labor stuff and focused more on redistribution. If women's suffrage hadn't happened, it's quite likely that quite a few more countries in Europe would have gone communist during the Cold War.
I don’t think that there was much debate at all about immigration in the U.K. until the post war period, and even Labour was sceptical for a long time. Probably until the 90s.
The conservatives enfranchised women in fact, and had well organised women’s organisations, or at least organisations that trended highly conservative like the women’s institute.
In any case class and region the major determinent of how people voted in the U.K. which is still not communist.
I am a leftist and a liberal and I belong to leftist groups but I am neither a socialist nor a communist. Neither am I working towards the same goal as socialists or communists.
I am not sure where you get your information from but I believe you are mistaken.
I describe myself as a communist and as 'far-right' and as a free-market absolutist depending on the topic. If we accept any of the x-risk set [AI, meteorite, climate change, resource limits, population collapse] as valid, we're up against a coordination problem and might have to be something like communist-totalitarian (see Zizeks' points on this -- he personally is concerned with climate change, but the argument is the same for the others. Thinking that there is a meaningful sense in which a people can be said to have a right to a state (or to exist at all) can make me sound either like a "zionist" or "pro-palestinian" or "far-right" or "anti-semitic" depending on who's critizing me. Thinking that markets (including prediction markets lol) are obviously the best way to solve problems apparently makes me a liberal and libertarian and heartless pro-market absolutist.
> The ensuing controversy led to the victory of NY Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt over President Herbert Hoover, who was known to take a hard line against radicals, in the 1932 Presidential Election.
Hoover obviously lost to FDR because of the Great Depression, not the Bonus Army.
If socialism means the government owning the means of production (e.g. UK nationalizing a lot of industries the late 1940s and 1950s) then communism seems much like an extreme form of socialism.
Today, however, "socialist" countries tend to have lots of private ownership of the means of production and just have much higher taxes and more government spending on welfare.
This is one of those cases where I expect that most folks haven't made it clear what they mean by "socialism" (and possibly "communism" ... does communism require a secret police, gulags, etc?).
In some respects all socialism is communism which is what we had in the Soviet Union is similar to everyone getting their 15 minutes to be a Nazi from the other side.
Tax rates are mostly orthogonal to how an economy is organized.
But the words have been hijacked in mainstream discussion so it is difficult to have the conversation.
Communism is a relatively well-defined term - far from perfect, but at least ambijective, and more than unambiguous enough to be useful.
Socialism is used by different people to mean wildly, wildly different things. I gave up using the word at the point when Tony Blair declared that he was a socialist, and Ken Livingstone declared that he wasn't.
I don't think there are many socialist parties left in power in Europe — they are more likely to think of themselves as social democrats these days. But they certainly considered themselves to be socialist at least up until the 70s, even while condemning the communist countries for their totalitarianism and their excessive control of the economy.
I am currently working on organizing a forecasting tournament in a large Western-European government organisation. Due to overzealous compliancy officers, I will have to use tools that can be run locally on a network. As far as I know, this means the open source project by the Confido Institute is my only option. Are there other options ways to run a forecasting tournament locally on a network? Does anyone have experience running such a tournament and might be able to share resources (emails, announcements etc.)?
Years ago I had a friend who constructed Greek words for various irrational fears using the suffix -φοβία, which could then be used in English. A familiar example is acrophobia, from the prefix ακρο, meaning "peak", and φοβία, meaning "fear". Using this construction, he coined the English words "ipsophobia", or fear of everything, "scataphobia", fear of shit, and several others I have forgotten.
I need a similar word for "fear of the Post Office". A friend has displayed this for years, and I thought she must be the only one, but recently another person admitted the same fear.
I have the opposite condition, an irrational love of the post office, so I guess I will need that word also.
What's going on with "ipsophobia"? As far as I can tell, that would be fear of oak, or maybe of woodworm, though in either case I'm not sure the root is correct. Wouldn't fear of everything be "pantophobia"?
I should also note that fear is not the opposite of love; if you want the opposite of liking something, you'd want to use the prefix for dislike, mis-.
Well, I'm officially Too Old because what the hell is a "community of practice" as in Newspeak's "emerging communities of practice"?
That's extremely vague to the point of being slightly sinister. "What are you?" "A community" "And what do you do?" "We practice" "Practice what?" "Being a community".
What it *sounds* like is "We train you to be a SPAD"
In seriousness, it’s basically trendy corporate/academic speak for an informal, non hierarchal professional organization of people who do similar work. I lead one at my office that was basically a monthly opportunity to share war stories with people who had similar job titles in different divisions of the company.
I remember the racist fields, wasn't it to do with "Cotton was grown in FIELDS and those FIELDS were worked by SLAVES so FIELDS is RACIST"?
I'm glad you get the chance to have the 'water cooler chat' thing with a fancy title, I hope the company at least provides tea/coffee and bikkies! 😀
Have to hand it to Newspeak House, they've managed to create "pay us fees to do a Certificate in Schmoozing" and dress it up in the latest corpo-babble, by enticing people with the lure of "seek strategic positions in key institutions".
There's the usual nod to progressive issues but I think that's less of concern to all involved:
"a regular session to work on your tech side projects to help the progressive left campaign more effectively"
Well, they certainly could use that kind of coaching after the Carrick Flynn thing (is it unkind of me to Mention The War?) 😁
I'm an awful person but I'm laughing at this one - "hey, Huxley did LSD, come find out the rationalisation for why you like to get off your face so you can tell your parents you're not a druggie, honestly":
"Come if you are interesting in understanding consciousness, meditation, spirituality, psychedelics, neuroscience, neurotechnology, spirituality, the nature of pleasure and pain."
If I want to intertwine spirituality and pain, I'll stick to a decade of the Rosary.
Flip me, I hadn't even read down this far and yep, I was right about the LSD!
"Psychedelics. What do exotic states of consciousness can tell us about it? From models of how they work (e. g. QRI’s neural annealing) to writing rigorous trip reports to personal experiences."
Well, if they can gouge London prices for fees out of earnest middle-class strivers, good luck to 'em. Ah well, at least they're hosting a meet-up for the ACX bods, that's the most sensible thing on the menu there.
I suppose. What I've tended to interpret as meaning is that practice is the core of the community: you can't call yourself one of them unless you're doing the thing. I agree that it's a weird term to find unmoored from specifics, since the specifics are often the point. And that site is way too vague about what they actually do. Frankly, the whole thing sets off my quasi-scam alerts, but I'm just going to file this away under "being disappointed and sad that the London rationalists spent so much time around scammy people that they now sound scammy themselves".
If I say that the GOP is a political party, that doesn't tell you anything at all about their political leanings, but it's still true and relevant
A community of practice is a real thing, it's a kind of community. I'm sure Newspeak House is a community of practice, and they should say so. Less Wrong is also a community of practice, because people go there to practice being less wrong together
If you say that the GOP is a political party, you're telling me what it does (politics) and in what form (that of a party, as distinct from a belief system such as "conservatism" or a politically motivated street gang such as "the Proud Boys"). If you tell me that something is a community of practice, you tell me nothing about what it does, and very little about in what form ("community" can mean almost anything).
Yeah, but practicing what? Less Wrong is practicing rationalism. The GOP is practicing politics. "Communities of practice" means what? It could just as easily refer to "practicing how to forge better dollar bills" as to anything else.
It's corporate boilerplate, which isn't very encouraging as somewhere getting a shout-out on this site.
I can't say I was ever aware of the term, but evidently it's been around a while and is pretty mainstream. Here's a year 2000 article from Harvard Business Review...
Oh, sweet Lord. "radically galvanize knowledge sharing, learning, and change".
So it is corporate boilerplate, a fancy new term for "professional associations".
"In brief, they’re groups of people informally bound together by shared expertise and passion for a joint enterprise—engineers engaged in deep-water drilling, for example, consultants who specialize in strategic marketing, or frontline managers in charge of check processing at a large commercial bank. Some communities of practice meet regularly—for lunch on Thursdays, say. Others are connected primarily by e-mail networks. A community of practice may or may not have an explicit agenda on a given week, and even if it does, it may not follow the agenda closely. Inevitably, however, people in communities of practice share their experiences and knowledge in free-flowing, creative ways that foster new approaches to problems."
Yeah. Like guilds. Or the Freemasons, or Rotary, or the Lions Club. Why does business feel the need to re-invent the wheel every so often?
"Me and the lads are not having after-work Friday boozing sessions where we talk shop and shoot the breeze, we're engaging in a community of practice that will radically galvanize in free-flowing, creative fostering! Umm, can I claim it on expenses now?"
It's only a year long course, which isn't too bad, but I have the feeling that a lot of this "community of practice" is going to conferences and catered seminars and meeting people and networking, then going back to the workplace with the shiny brochure and assuring your boss that you totally learned exciting new ways of galvanizing.
I am probably more conservative (in both the express political sense and the temperamental sense) than the target audience for this group, but I definitely share your impression of perceiving this language as sinister. Would fit well into Lewis's Space Trilogy, as well as Orwell.
So what's going on with the US's hypersonic weapons program, relative to Russia and China? In the popular media the narrative is that the US is in 2nd or 3rd place in the race to develop hypersonic missiles, and we've certainly had a pretty slow & inconsistent track record in building them so far. On the other hand, I've heard a variety of different responses (which kinda conflict with each other):
1. What Russia is building/using are not actually 'true' hypersonic missiles that we're building, so the 2 programs can't be compared
2. Hypersonics are actually of relatively less utility for the US given our existing missile/other capabilities, so advancements here are less of a big deal
3. Hypersonic missiles are overrated. Alternately, that existing materials technology can't make missiles sturdy enough for hypersonic speeds, so any true 'advancements' in the field aren't practical at this time
Any general thoughts on the field? I'm a little skeptical of what I read in the popular media about highly technical topics
1. "Hypersonic" is a speed regime, not a vehicle class; typical discussions get muddled because they treat it as a class.
2. Tactical hypersonic cruise missiles have *more* potential utility for the US than strategic hypersonic glide vehicles do for Russia or China. N.B., those are the pairings of system types & countries actually developing them.
3. Strategic hypersonic glide vehicles are overrated; they aren't that much of an improvement over pure ballistics (your course can't change very much when you're going that fast). Tactical hypersonic cruise missiles are only a meaningful improvement over the alternatives in a very narrow set of mission profiles (e.g., extremely high value targets of opportunity with very limited time windows) even before considering how much more they cost per shot.
Haven't seen it mentioned yet, so I would like to direct your attention to (IMO) an excellent breakdown of this exact subject from one of my favorite Youtube creators (link below). The long and short of it seems to be that while hypersonic weapons hypothetically have some distinct advantages over other rocket systems, they're also likely of limited tactical use due the immense expense (both in money and expertise) required to build them. Assuming of course that they actually work as intended and that counter-measures aren't able to catch up with them.
There's also some very good arguments to be made that the stated reason that Russia has given for development of hypersonics (i.e. to evade America's missile defense systems) is a load of crap given the fact that existing missile defense systems would be inadequate to stop an all out nuclear barrage. Which, given how damn expensive they are to produce, causes the word "boondoggle" to start rolling around in my head.
So likely not the doomsday superweapons some have been making them out to be.
It should be noted that Russia has a few programs that create a testbed and then go barely any further due to lack of funding. There are several jets and armoured vehicles that had a production run in the low single digits that still got massively hyped by Russia. Its hard to tell what is a boondoggle for Russia and what is simply an underfunded project done for the sake of appearing to still compete technologically.
Always remember, you can't spell "hypersonic" without "hype".
For at least twenty years, the hype has been that "hypersonic" missiles will be impossible to intercept, for reasons that are rarely spelled out. That hasn't been much of an issue for the United States, because none of the people we shoot missiles at can reliably shoot down ordinary old-fashioned ballistic missiles, but people who imagine they might someday be shooting missiles at the US or its major allies, have invested a fair bit in making "hypersonic" missiles.
Like, say, the Russian Kh-47 "Kinzhal" and 3M22 "Zircon", which unambiguously fly at hypersonic speeds. And as of last year, we know what happens if you launch them at targets protected by modern US/NATO air and missile defenses - they seem to get shot down pretty reliably (obvious caveat re fog of war).
So the claim is that Kinzhal and Zircon aren't *really* "hypersonic" no matter how fast they fly, and a real hypersonic missile with a real air-turboscramwarp drive will just blitz past any possible air defense system (even though it's slower than a 1960s style ballistic missile). Which is exactly the same claim that was made about Kinzhal and Zircon up until last year, so get back to us when you've got something real in the "actually exists on Planet Earth" sense and we can test it.
The United States will continue to hedge its bets both by developing its own hypersonic missiles, and by improving its missile defenses in their ability to stop such weapons. We brag a lot about the former, but keep the latter quite secret, so go figure.
1. Russia largely has tactical ballistic missiles with some limited maneuvering capability on reentry. This sort of thing has been around since the 1970s but no one called them “hypersonic missiles” until hypersonic became a buzzword.
Something more game changing would be scramjets (air breathing cruise missiles that fly in the atmosphere at hypersonic
speeds) or “glider” type hypersonics that are ballistic missiles with lifting body, highly maneuverable reentry vehicles that spend a substantial portion of their flight time in the atmosphere.
For various reasons, these are much harder to intercept than conventional ballistic missiles or cruise missiles.
2. Yes, to a point. The US has much better stealth capability and generally has a doctrine geared more toward tactical air power rather than artillery (which is effectively what the Russian missiles are - Very long range precision artillery). Also, China has the unique challenge of finding a weapon to counter US aircraft carriers relatively near the Chinese mainland - the US lacks that particular use case that drives a lot of hypersonic worry.
3. It’s less that they are impossible, more that the idea that they are some sort of major paradigm shifting wonder weapon that will render major parts of the US arsenal “obsolete” is vastly oversold. Look at Ukraine - the new technology impacting the war the most over there is cheap drones for artillery spotting and grenade dropping. Not Russia’s fancy air launched ballistic missiles.
The initial Russian "hypersonic" missile was the Kinzhal, which was just an older short ranged ballistic missile that was modified to be air-launched. Ballistic missiles reenter the atmosphere at hypersonic speeds, so *technically* they're hypersonic, but not in a way that changes the cutting edge of warhead delivery. What the US is working on are missiles that are hypersonic for most of their flight with the capability to maneuver, which is a much harder problem.
Why do Russia and China want them while the US was less interested in them? Well, it mostly comes down to other technologies. The US has a long history of missile defense, starting with fending off the kamikazes in WWII. In the modern era, we have fantastic missile defense systems that can defeat both cruise and ballistic missiles like Patriot, THAAD, and AEGIS. This makes it a lot harder for the missiles in Russia and China's arsenals to actually hit our targets. One solution: more speed. If the missile spends less time in sensor range then you don't have as much time to react and not as much data to use to defeat it. This improves the probability that the warhead reaches it's target. Why isn't this as important for the US? Well, the US went with a different strategy: stealth. Instead of racing the sensors and interceptors, you hide from them. This requires a different, less traditional set of engineering technologies, but it's one that the US has been working on since the 60s.
But why are hypersonics overrated? Well, like most of munition delivery, it comes back to the range equation. It takes a massive amount of energy to push a vehicle through the atmosphere at hypersonic speeds. That requires a massive amount of fuel and therefore an airframe to hold it, making them not very economical. By contrast, a stealth bomber or missile is the same size as a non-stealth version, and has the same range and payload. This makes them a lot more efficient once you have the technical and engineering skills to make them.
With all that, then, why is the US still investing in them? The answer is that speed is useful for more than just evading missile defense systems. They can be useful to hit a high-value target that can only be pinned down for brief periods of time, or any other time quick reactions are needed.
Hopefully this helped you understand hypersonics a bit better!
1) Just going fast (Mach 5+) doesn't make a weapon hypersonic. ICBMs already do this and that is not what people mean by the term. To be a hypersonic missile the bugger must also be fairly maneuverable at speed. This is fuzzy, but there isn't much (any?) evidence that the Russian missiles maneuver enough to count.
2) Hypersonic weapons count on speed and maneuverability. This may (or may not) matter as much as other things (e.g. flying low and terrain following). Back i the 1960 the US was pursuing a "fly high and fast" strategy for bombers. This culminated in the B-70 which could fly at Mach 3+. The US built a total of two of these. The US pivoted to flying slower but a lot lower and eventually produced the B-1. This wasn't because the B-70 couldn't be built. The military just decided it made little sense.
So ... the US has known about hypersonic missiles for a long time and has also had some sort of development program underway. It is quite possible that the US military is behind and "they don't do much" is the party line until the US catches up. It is also possible that they actually don't make a lot of sense (at least of the US). I can't tell you which one is correct. I do NOT believe the hypersonic missiles cannot be shot down because of their speed.
3) This is a variant of #2
Note also that what works for US doctrine with other existing US weapons may be a poor fit for Russia and/or China. The F-35 probably means that the US military can get missiles closer to targets before launching than either Russia or China. That may well make the relative benefit to the two different. As an example of this, consider whether lots more artillery makes sense for the US Army (assuming that the US Army will be fighting a land war rather than providing some weapons to other countries). Probably not, given US doctrine about air superiority and the existence of F-35s, etc. Artillery makes a lot more sense for Russia. Hypersonic weapons could be another example of this.
This is a situation where I really notice how unseriously people take the tic-tac
We know that either Russia or China is so far ahead of the US on some sort of flying vehicle that it literally looks like magic. It feels almost pointless to talk about a super-sonic missile gap in that context. The technological superiority of our missile delivery systems is probably squarely in the past, right? It's gotta be
If the tic-tac is Russian or Chinese, how come they, our inveterate enemies, aren't using it and the underlying technology to comprehensively defeat us militarily when they clearly desperately want to do so? The idea that it's enemy technology fails the first sniff test, namely, that the Russians and Chinese behave exactly like militarily and industrially inferior opponents who are extremely assmangled about being global #2 and #...like, 8?, which they emphatically would not do if they had a technological advantage so vast that we can't even interpret it.
Therefore, the tic-tac is either ayliums, our own black tech, somehow faked by US intelligence agencies, or some unintelligible weather phenomenon/reflection/sensor error/perceptual issue which will be explained by relatively mundane means.
There are a lot of military technologies that could be invented by Russia or China that would resemble magic and still not change the calculus of MAD either through nuclear, conventional or even economic means. I'm not sayng the Tic-Tac is Chinese (or even real) since its wild conjecture at best but the fact they haven't used it to kill us all isn't exactly evidence against.
There would be no need for them to kill all of us, they could just strategically kill the important ones who keep us from being paralyzed and conventionally invaded. Plus, according to Logan's hypothesis, US military decision makers have *no idea* what these things are; if you have an unmanned aerial vehicle (if a real craft, it has to be unmanned, as one of the remarkable things about it is that it can juke with higher acceleration than a human body can withstand) which can move at these speeds and which the US cannot intercept, cannot identify, and cannot in any way connect to you, you can just take one of them, zip into Washington, selectively blast the Oval Office, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and whoever else your intel says is necessary, and leave with full plausible deniability. Who's the retaliatory nuclear strike going to target? You can't just glass Russia *and* China on the suspicion. This type of weapon, if it really exists, is in fact the best way to *round* the MAD conundrum yet conceived of.
If the tic-tac is ours, then a lot of US Congressmen are doing a very convincing performance. They've passed bills ordering the DoD to investigate it, they've given interviews about how big a security threat it is. Obama has done this, Rubio has done this, Schumer has done this. Over the course of many years.
Do you think that's realistic that Congress would put on a show like this just to misdirect people? Do you think it's realistic that so many Congresspeople could lie so convincingly across multiple instances for so long? That's not a rherorical question. I've more-or-less ruled it out, personally, but it's possible I'm naive and that's a realistic explanation
I think it's likely that if the tic-tac is real, that congress would have no idea about it. But it's gotten enough press recently that people want their congresspeople to look into it (or congresspeople realized they can parlay the hype into getting attention).
And this is more-or-less fine. Bleeding edge military tech should prob be on a "need to know" basis, and congress critters def don't need to know.
Yeah, the situation you're describing is 100% illegal. Not in general, I know Congress doesn't necessarily know about everything the DoD is doing, but in this instance they passed a law in 2022 demanding that any relevant information be found and turned over to Congress.
It's possible that this was us and Congress just didn't know. But in that case, either they were told in the classified briefing in 2022, and everything since then has been misdirection; or else they weren't told in 2022, and it's a criminal cover-up, a rogue group inside the US government building military vehicles and harrassing US aircraft carriers then actively concealing their efforts from the Secretary of Defense. Those are the only possibilities, unless you accept that it's not ours.
And here's an excerpt where they specifically direct the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office to investigate the possibility that you're proposing:
> (ii)include a compilation and itemization of the key historical record of the involvement of the intelligence community with unidentified anomalous phenomena, including—
> (I)any program or activity that was protected by restricted access that has not been explicitly and clearly reported to Congress;
> (II)successful or unsuccessful efforts to identify and track unidentified anomalous phenomena; and
> (III)any efforts to obfuscate, manipulate public opinion, hide, or otherwise provide incorrect unclassified or classified information about unidentified anomalous phenomena or related activities.
We know for sure that Congress claims to have no idea who built the most advanced hypersonic aerospace technology known to man. Either they're lying, or Russia/China built it, or some alternative explanation which I don't consider a serious possibility (it's mass hypnosis, it's aliens, it's a non-government actor)
Neither a military man nor a pundit, but my impression is that the answer is 4. Russia's strategy is to publicly announce and hype up new weapon developments whereas our/the US' habit is to largely clam up about advancements until they're part of the last generation of military hardware, and this is directly connected to the fact that we are leading arms development: Russia wants to convey (primarily to its own citizens) that they are not behind in the race, which they are, whereas for us it's more strategic to keep our mouths shut about our capabilities until they can come as a horrible surprise to our enemies.
I think this is a lot of it. Russia in particular loves touting super weapons that they don’t have the industrial base to build in quantity, nor the integrated military capability to utilize effectively (e.g. the SU-57 and Armata tank).
On the Chinese side, they have a specific need for hypersonic missiles (land based defense against US Navy ships) that encourages them to invest heavily there, where the US does not have an equivalent use case.
I didn’t say they were bad, I said they lack the capacity to build a war-altering number of them and the military organizational capacity to employ them effectively. Which seems objectively true in Ukraine.
So let’s say he actually does fifteen out of the twenty-five years. Will the DNC return to his victims the millions the ‘effective altruist’ Sam Bankman-Fried so generously donated to the Democratic Party?
If, after he’s served his sentence, SBF is able to conjure the $32B he was convicted of making disappear through his cryptocurrency exchange and hedge fund, he will have earned a taste over $2B per year.
If he can only conjure up a sorry billion, he will have earned a mere $67M per year. Not bad, but pitiful for a gamer yearning to join the pop pantheon of tech savants.
But security could be is a problem. When one makes so much money disappear — and the vanishing includes the investments of others — some people will likely be unhappy. The more money involved, the more victims and the higher the losses will be. Some investors could be very unhappy. The good news is that victims of the thief know where to find him, which is bad news for SBF.
Housing would ordinarily be in a dorm with maybe a hundred other men, all one’s possessions in a 2x3-foot box. That would cost the government about $35 to $40K per year. But in a dorm, too many parties would be offering and counter-offering protection schemes, it would be impossible to keep track of all the shakedowns, and his safety would still be at risk. An open yard would be too stressful and problematic, and emergency medical care pretty rudimentary.
If he ends up in administrative segregation, the cost will about double; in full protective lockdown, probably triple. But either way, the abrupt change from the stimulation of gaming during business conferences, etc., to roosting on a bunk with no electronics — and the stark simplicity of incarceration — will be a shock. The immature 32-year-old should change considerably. The psychological tedium and carb-rich diet will take their toll. Electronics and the cyborgery will be quite different in two or three decades. Whether his incarceration will set back the development of cryptocurrency or ‘effective altruism’ remains to be seen. And the DNC is likely to remain pleased to be a beneficiary of Bankman-Fried’s effective robbery. For a libertarian, he sure flashed Democrat bona fides in giving away other people’s money.
He (directly or through associates) also donated to republican politicians, he just did it quietly. Bernie Madoff had the same class of enemies and died of a heart and kidney disease in jail. Not everything results in mass conspiracies.
No matter his stated political beliefs, his actions show him as a criminal first and foremost, that is how he should be judged not by loose political connections.
That money is long spent and no politician is ever going to disgorge the funding they received. But part of the problem is "so who gets it?" because it's not at all clear who is or should be first in the queue to get money back, plus the way SBF set up management (as in, 'he didn't') at FTX and Alameda Research, it's hard to say who signed off on what and where the funds came from and are they part of personal fortune or siphoned off from the clients' funds?
Some of them have pledged to return the money, and may indeed already have done so:
"The Democratic National Committee, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee all reportedly pledged to return more than $1 million in donations from SBF they had collectively received since 2020. CNBC reported on Dec. 20 that the Senate Majority PAC — supporting Democratic candidates — planned to return the roughly $1 million received from Bankman-Fried and $2 million from former FTX engineer Nishad Singh."
But what about the dark money SBF claims he gave to the GOP?
>> Although federal election receipts show that Bankman-Fried donated almost exclusively to Democrats, he claimed on a November phone call with YouTuber Tiffany Fong that he donated an equal amount to Republicans and Democrats.
>> “All my Republican donations were dark,” he said, referring to political donations that are not publicly disclosed in FEC filings. “The reason was not for regulatory reasons, it’s because reporters freak the f—k out if you donate to Republicans. They’re all super liberal, and I didn’t want to have that fight.”
>> Given that he donated nearly $40 million to Democrats in the 2022 election cycle—and he admitted to giving an equal amount to Republicans—his total political contributions may have actually been around $80 million.
If that's true, Republicans should step up and return the funds to the court. If not just for the ethics, at least to help stabilize and redeem cryptocurrencies.
But it's all getting very spooky: we're at a point now where someone could fabricate a momentous event and broadcast it around the world on the internet and video media, collect billions in subscriptions or fees or insurance in crypto currency to either support or defend against the staged event.
And Poof! Before we could determine the event was a phantasm and demand our money back, all the value could vanish. No Kool-Aid necessary.
I learned about the prophetic perfect tense from here a little while ago. I found, in the wild, as it were, a similar weird tense when talking about the weather forecast: something like, "it was raining next Monday, but now it's mostly sunny."
> I found, in the wild, as it were, a similar weird tense when talking about the weather forecast: something like, "it was raining next Monday, but now it's mostly sunny."
There is a school of thought that says that English only has two tenses, past and nonpast, and future reference is, in English, a distinction of mood rather than tense. That analysis is drawn from the syntax; English verbs do not inflect into the future, and future-tense verbs in other languages tend to be translated into English with the modalizing auxiliary verb 𝘸𝘪𝘭𝘭.
I think this is going a little overboard, but I'd say it is the correct way to analyze your example. "It's raining next Monday" is a normal way to indicate that the weather forecast for next Monday shows rain. If you want to apply the past tense to the concept [the weather forecast for next Monday shows rain], you might end up converting that sentence into the past tense, yielding "It was raining next Monday". It would be more felicitous to be more explicit about what you're describing, along the lines of "they had it raining next Monday, but now it's mostly sunny instead", but people have to speak in the moment.
Bitemporal tenses are interesting. What's the converse, where a past fact will be revised in the future? Some breezier form of "The UK wasn't in a recession at the end of 2023 but soon it will have been"? https://www.bbc.com/news/live/business-68680004
It’s a reference to the idea that kids think their parents are dumb when they are growing up (which is in my past and present) but are expected to realize in the future, when they have kids of their own, that their parents weren’t so dumb after all (in the future-revised view of the past)
Yeah, I get that. But okay, perhaps one can parse that "I'll be (at this present moment, as I am speaking) a genius when (in the future) my kids have kids of their own" instead of like "I'll be(come, in the future, after something changes) a genius when [I take noötropics]." But I think this potential ambiguity makes it a bad example.
I am kind of struggling with a personal decision and so I am doing the only reasonable thing and turning to internet strangers for help (because I am horribly unconfident in my ability to make decisions). I currently hold a full scholarship to a law school (it's a strong regional school, not a T14 or anything) and an offer from LSE for the MSc in Philosophy and Public Policy. I don't really think that I will enjoy law school, the people, or the intellectual topic there, (at law school events, I mostly spoke with the friend I brought and got blank stares from future classmates that weren't in philosophy or civil service already) whereas I have strong reason to believe that I would enjoy the program, topic, and people at LSE.
That being said, law school has a really clear path to a career, while the MSc definitely does not (the program emphasizes PhD placement). I'm really torn and don't know which to pick. Does anyone have any advice about it?
Things that are valuable are frequently not fun. School is supposed to be valuable, not fun. Don't think in terms of which option will give you the best 3 years, think about which option will give you the better life. Do you like the idea of being a lawyer in a likely-tedious-but-well-compensated low-risk career? Then go to law school. Do you lack the self-discipline to make yourself grind hard for many years and do you have the risk tolerance for getting a more open-ended degree? Then go to LSE.
What do you want your degree to teach you to think clearly about, and qualify you to get paid to do? Looking at real world info about jobs in the field and what degrees their holders have should help you decide that. Look up stats about income and hiring in various fields, blogs and professional newsletters in fields of interest, job application sites and Glass Door.
Also: I have gotten to know a number of students at my local, very high prestige, law school, and it's changed my picture of what law school and a law career are like. Positives I have learned about law school and a law degree that might matter to you:
-Students find law school very stressful, but generally are not depressed and lost the way many people getting PhD's are.
-Social life there is very lively, and it's a great place to network.
-A law degree improves your overall hirability because it is taken as strong evidence that you are smart, practical, hardworking and clear-thinking. If you have a law degree and also non-degree expertise in something else, especially something in STEM, you're in a really good position. You have a decent chance of getting a good non-law job in the area of your non-degree expertise.
-There's a lot of variety among law students' goals. Plenty of people are there because they want to be empowered to change the way various things run, not because they want to get rich. Students whose goal is to get rich doing corporate law respect those who have other goals.
I tried to do a law conversion course, and dropped out before the end. I don't think I wasn't smart enough (I passed the first year exams), it's just that I wasn't really interested, and I hadn't seen the path to any jobs that I wanted to do.
You say the scholarship's important - what happens if you don't complete the course? Would you be on the hook for the money?
Yeah, I know a little bit about the law and I'm just not impressed (someone described American Common Law as "legal fanfiction," and that seems kind of dreadful to me, but also accurate). I'm sorry to hear that it didn't work out for you!
If I go to the law school and drop out, I would not be on the hook for tuition or anything, but I would be out of the money that it cost me to move to the city the law school is in and a year of rent, neither of which is cheap (but I have enough savings to avoid debt).
"I know a little bit about the law and I'm just not impressed (someone described American Common Law as "legal fanfiction," and that seems kind of dreadful to me, but also accurate)."
This is a bit of a head-scratcher for me, so I wonder how confident you can really be about whether you would like law school or not. To be fair, most people seem to not like it, so I guess all else equal that would be the way to bet. I personally loved law school. It was really like a whole new domain of knowledge of which I was theretofore almost completely unaware, aside from criminal law TV shows.
Law school has a clear path to a career in *law*, if your objective is to make the law degree maximise its value. Otherwise, it offers the same entry point into (say) the civil service as the MSc, though potentially it'll be slightly more restrictive than a policy degree in the first instance. The complicating feature is the scholarship, which will certainly make short term life easier.
But I'd ultimately go for the MSc. You can make it do more work for you, and if you're posting here in the first place, law is likely to feel like choking death after a few years. The MSc is also less overfitted, and so more more immune to AI automation.
Oh yeah! This is a great point on two fronts. The first is that I do understand that a JD is really only useful as a degree if you want to be a lawyer (you can do other things with it, but you don't need the JD to do anything other than be a lawyer). When I consider these two paths, I conceive of two completely different careers and trajectories; I'm sorry if it seemed like I thought that they could lead to the same end!
The scholarship is a huge factor for me. Moving to London and taking out loans for the MSc would be difficult (I have never been in debt before, and it's extremely nice to not be in debt, not gonna lie).
On that last comment, what sort of probability do you put on the legal profession being automated in the United States by 2035? I feel torn because a lot of the work that lawyers do is rote and can be done by machines, but lawyers also run the world and will probably defend their jobs by hook or crook.
Lawyering is among the more automation resistant professions because your automation can't just be 98% accurate it needs to be 100% accurate to really be used.
I agree with you and think your argument is even stronger than you're presenting it as; I don't think even 100% accuracy is, *in itself*, sufficient, given that *somebody* has to be legally liable. You can't fine or imprison an individual instance of a large language model; consequently, either the legally responsible entity is the company making the AI, in which case they'll be swamped with autogenerated lawsuits in less than one second, or it's the law firm, in which case a human being has to go through the entirety of each AI-generated document or [thing, generic] with a fine-toothed comb to *verify* that it is in fact 100% accurate, attest to it in a way that makes the firm comfortable with giving the document its imprimatur — which will actually take about as long as a human just writing the brief-or-whatever in the first place. I don't think there's any meaningful efficiency to be gained in practice.
This is a live issue right now, and Eugene Volokh used to blog about cases that touched on the topic. Depending on how curious you are, you might try emailing him.
I don't know much about your opportunity cost (the value of the MSc and its career path) but I can tell you that getting through law school, taking the bar, finding a job, and being a lawyer (at a big firm) are pretty unpleasant if you aren't intrinsically motivated. Source: did that
So I've been reading about polyamory here and on the old SSC site for years now, and I still just don't get it. I've had friends that were in *open* relationships, but that was just about sex, and I've read here and elsewhere that polyamory is about being in a relationship with multiple people.
I've been married for almost 20 years and relationships are *hard*. You have to establish boundaries, build communication skills, learn to fight fair, deal with in-laws, baggage, hammer out a mutually agreeable position on children, finances, leisure activities, etc. I'm frankly having trouble processing the idea of trying to do that with more than one person at once (much less doing it in a way that bucks strong societal norms). Intuitively, at least to me, it seems like the following trilemma must hold and at least one of the following is true:
1. The difficulties of being in a relationship scale sublinearly to the number of participants
2. Poly relationships are shallower than traditional monogamous ones and avoid a lot of these problems
3. Poly relationships tend not to be stable long enough to hit the many of the above issues
2 and 3 seem to contradict the writing on the topic from poly folks, and I'm reluctant to discredit somebody else's lived experience. 1 if true would be *fascinating* and somewhat surprising. Any poly folks want to please explain this to my tiny traditional brain? What am I missing here?
(1) is definitely true. As Jeff said, relationship skills are mostly transferrable and scale well. In my case, I got into my first serious relationship late into college, and got to benefit from watching all the ways my dumb teenage friends blew up their relationships, and continued building on those lessons through later relationships.
It's harder in some ways with three people, but also less hard in others - having a partner that doesn't exclusively rely on you for all emotional needs helps act as a buffer when you, for whatever reason, aren't in an ideal state to provide it, which helps a partner not feel neglected. This might be part of what you're getting at with (2), which is almost certainly true "all things being equal".
However, I see a TON of monomuggle relationships (especially with people that have been together for a long time) that implode from one or more partners' needs not being fully met (emotionally, sexually, or otherwise). These relationships are often in a state where the monogamous couple invest less emotional effort in each other than I see in your average polyamorous relationship, and they grow to resent each other over what they're each not getting.
The monogamous assumption that you have to get *all* of your emotional and sexual needs filled by one partner often causes as much strain as it resolves (if all people involved have a low enough natural jealousy impulse to be a good fit for poly - what Aella calls "orientation-poly"). Likewise, not having to have the exact same boundaries with every partner makes it easier to compromise with each and still get your needs met.
As for (3)... maybe. In practice, most poly people I know have one stable "primary" and further relationships are more fleeting or shallow. I've always felt like the people who act like "poly" means "stable, equal relationships with multiple people" are sort of fooling themselves. The line between open relationships and serial polyamorous dating are blurry, but there are lots of examples of relationships that *do* remain in the "primary with various intimate partners" state for a long enough time that I'm comfortable using the word "poly" to describe the relationship dynamic.
To briefly address point one, when you learn to be a good partner and have a good relationship many of those things don't scale much with more people. Learning to fight fair for example, once you've learned how to do it with one partner you can pretty easily apply it to more partners.
We sort of have to unpack point two to talk about it because if we talk about relationships on a shallow to deep scale we're generally conflation two things, the level of emotional connection and the level of life intermingling. In a monogamous framework these things go hand in hand but in the poly framework they are less connected. As such when someone poly is saying "Our relationships are just as deep and serious" they're talking about the emotional connection involved.
Eric's observation is spot on. Just briefly touching on some shared hobbies (as a SFW sample of differences): I watch movies with one of my boyfriends. I roleplay with the other. I talk science with my girlfriend. We're different things for each other.
Beyond that, I think it's also a question of how lucky you get with compatible personalities. I have three stable long-term relationships, all 10+ years by now, but I credit part of that to that my partners are all introverted and happy to be left alone every once a while to recharge. Basically, my polycule is boring in the right ways. I can definitely imagine plenty of relationships in theory where even one would be too much for me to juggle. I'm just not in one of those.
Different parts are probably going to be true for different people, too.
1 and 2 work together, and I think those are true of, say, Aella's writings on the topic.
3 is likely true of most normies that try it, and I suspect there's a fairly strong inverse correlation between people that write about poly and people that have long-term success.
Related to Eric's response "kind of like friendships," part of it (seems to me) to be concurrent trends in the weakening of friendships and the weakening of the meaning of and/or desire for sex. There is, in some social circles, a desire to not require too much "emotional labor" of your friends- so for those that you are willing to ask "emotional labor" of, they're more than friends. When Facebook acquaintances become 'friends,' people you actually care about become need a new label. Possibly also some overlap between that tendency and a desire for a non-traditional concept of identity.
I also don’t get it. I wouldn’t kick down someone’s door or tell them to end decades old relationships, but I also don’t think there is anything there to get beyond a few surface level “yeah, I guess maybe in some situations. Still not something that’s going to scale.”
Many people in poly relationships are getting different things from different partners. So they may have kids with one, and kinky sex with another, and go hiking and having deep conversations with a third. Kind of like friendships, but you also kiss and or bump uglies.
I think the people who call poly relationships “shallow” have a bit of a point. It’s all well and good to say oh I have kids with Alice, funtimez with Brianna, and deep philosophical discussions with Carol.
But what if Brianna gets a great job offer in another state, do you and Alice and Carol and your kids with Alice all follow Brianna to that other state? Or do you break up, or pressure Brianna into not accepting the job? If Carol wants to have kids with you, does Alice get to say, no way, we can barely afford the money and time for the ones we already have?
If, heaven forbid, Carol gets into an accident and is in a coma, and Alice says it’s kinder to pull the plug but Brianna says that would be murder, who gets to decide?
There are some truly committed poly relationships out there, not just pairs but even an occasional triad. (Haven't heard of anything bigger surviving a true test.) But often, instead, it's a zero-sum game: there's only so much commitment to go around, and only one piece on the chessboard that can't be sacrificed.
With the exception of sex, it seems to me there's a much lower social cost to doing all of those things in the context of friendship. Being open as "poly" rules out the majority of the dating market, particularly those you'd care to have kids with (imo). Granted that in monogamous relationships it's possible to overstep bounds of comfort even without sex involved, but in general it can be achieved by leveraging group hangouts, such as with multiple couples.
I think primarily this is about sex, but that is still a perfectly understandable motivation. Despite the popular assurances that those in relationships have more sex, I think this is only because there are more persistent opportunities with a reliable partner. Frequency still wanes, enthusiasm tends to as well. Maybe you could chalk some of that up to age (or having kids, stress, etc) but I don't think it's the full picture.
Thank you! I *knew* I had to be missing something obvious here. I'd still love to hear some others weigh in if anybody sees this and is willing, but I think that probably covers a lot of the mental gap I had on this.
Eric is right, but most true monogamy fans would describe that kind of arrangement as shallow. The interesting questions (to my mind) are 1) what do we really mean by 'shallow' (and is 'deep' just a way of describing people who have grown together like two closely-spaced trees over a period of decades); and 2) Is there a sort of structural stability to spreading the distancer/pursuer dynamics over more people?
"The Labor Party (PvdA), an electoral juggernaut in the 20th century, has steadily lost working-class voters. Last year it had to merge with a second party, GroenLinks (Green-Left), to scrabble 16% of the vote. What does this consolidated party stand for? Gentrification, mostly—it wins neighborhoods convenient to city centers where public housing has been privatized and the old tenants pushed out, like those just east of the center of Utrecht."
This jumped out at me in an otherwise pretty boring essay. I'm not sure if this is some dig at the left but if any place was going to have an explicitly YIMBY political party, it would be a European country with a parliament and like 30 tiny parties fighting to be in a coalition. And a primarily YIMBY party would be really interesting. But I don't know anything about Dutch(?) politics and I thought I'd ask.
I can't speak for 'primarily', their housing policy could be described as YIMBY but as far as I'm aware, neither NIMBY ot YIMBY are identifiable camps in Dutch politics, and the terms are not used by anyone to describe their stance on housing. Quickly checking their site, Groenlinks-PvdA advocates for rental price maximums, building more housing, reducing vacant housing and improving tenants' rights. Housing is one of the bullet points on their election programme but not at all the main issue.
In case you're not aware, the Netherlands has focused their urban planning around maintaining walkable cities and avoiding car-dependent design since around the fifties. Traffic infrastructure gives more importance to bicycles, pedestrians, and public transport as it gives to cars. The restrictive zoning that produces US-style suburbs is far less of a problem here. I have never even heard of a homeowners association or any equivalent in this country. So, a party running on YIMBYism would be a solution in search of a problem.
The commentators here were very helpful in asking questions and engaging in respectful dialogue. We'd be interested to know what your thoughts on this piece are.
A few thoughts from me. I'll note here that I'm not an atheist, but I am a believer who thinks arguments like these are unproductive. I'll explain why below.
1. Is this "god of the gaps"? I'm not convinced by your argument. It feels very much like god of the gaps. Back before we split the atom, people thought atoms were fundamental to physics. Many arguments (both scientific and theological) were made based on the idea that atoms are fundamental, assuming this scientific understanding would forever hold. Thus, any argument based on the requirement of atoms being fundamental necessarily failed when it was proved that atoms were not fundamental. Indeed, I'm not sure you understand god of the gaps at its most basic level. This is always how it does. Something about the current state of knowledge is assumed to be necessarily true about the universe and this es explained as evidence for god. Later, we discover that this fundamental knowledge wasn't fundamental at all, but rather just a gap in our knowledge. Hence 'god of the gaps' as an argument is retrospectively observed, though seldom prospectively made intentionally. "But the constants of nature ARE fundamental! The mathematical equations ARE fundamental!" Sure. This argument will stand until we understand physics better. At best, it's a placeholder for future arguments. Now, maybe it will be a placeholder for a long time, say the equivalent distance from Newton to Einstein. Maybe not. Either way, I wouldn't bet my faith on it, given the history of such arguments. Nor would I recommend anyone else do so. I'll also make a prediction that if there comes a day that we discover more fundamental laws than these this same argument will be used to justify the existence or non-existence of god. It will be built upon the same shaky foundation as this argument.
2. What's going on with your entropy argument? First, let's start with the basics. Entropy is an observed law. It's not necessarily true, it's just that it's something we always observe, so we assume it to be true. Okay, fine. I'm willing to still call it a law. But it's a law defined as increasing disorder OVER TIME. In other words, time is part of the equation. If you're measuring entropy in a closed system while running a clock forward through time, you will observe entropy increasing. It's a circular argument to say, "We observe increasing disorder over time," define that as a law, and then say, "the fact that disorder increases over time is proof that god exists." If we had observed a past state that was more disordered to any degree, we wouldn't have defined entropy as a law - we would have updated our models to incorporate this new information. Similarly, if we do define entropy as a law of increased disorder over time, we can't expect the past to be anything BUT less disordered. Corollary: if you define distance = rate * time, you can measure rate and time and find that your derived distance equals your measured distance (ignoring relativity for simplicity). But the fact that you were able to do so is evidence you understand the system's parameters, not a probabilistic outcome that proves the system's rules must be externally derived.
3. Why are you so easily dismissing the biology question? I feel like you don't understand the arguments in biology well, given the way you discuss them. You act as though arguments about abiogenesis are ... good. They suck. We really don't understand abiogenesis, and all the supposed 'mechanistic' arguments about origins of life are terrible. It's been a few years since I delved into the literature on this one, but I'd be surprised if anything has gotten better since the last round of bad arguments, or the round before that, or the round before that... While we do understand much about evolution, there's a lot in the theory that very poorly explains the development of most biochemical mechanisms. Yes, I've heard all the arguments, and they're not that convincing even if they're not capable of explaining any SPECIFIC mechanism or of being falsified, or whatever. The theory of evolution works great for a lot of things, and it's a powerful idea that every biology student should be required to learn because it's so good. But let's not oversell its explanatory power, here. It quickly becomes useless (in its current form) at explaining most things at a biochemical level, and it has nothing meaningful to say about abiogenesis. The RNA world hypothesis is severely lacking, and we should stop teaching it to young, impressionable minds, along with a lot of the magical thinking behind most abiogenesis arguments. Now, I'm going to VERY EXPLICITLY say right here that I don't think we should invoke god to explain either of these processes. Especially not using the type of reasoning you've invoked. I'm just saying these are open questions in biology that need better explanations than the ones we currently have. That should be enough for everyone! The boundaries of our current state of knowledge should be something believers and unbelievers alike can agree about and agree to work to push backward. I would not suggest any atheist invoke the current inadequate hypotheses about abiogenesis and biochemical complexity as a foundation for their positions, any more than I'd advise a believer to invoke fine tuning as a basis for faith. Better to just admit to areas where knowledge is still developing, than to invoke poorly understood processes as anything like 'proof' in the existence or non-existence of god.
I think there are problems with current theories in physics and biology, sure. But I don't think arguments like these are at all helpful at addressing those problems. As a scientist and a believer, I need more from a "theory of god" than something that holds true only so long as we don't discover something new or more fundamental about the nature of the universe, or some brilliant scientist finally arrives at a unified Theory of Everything, or whatever. The problem with your approach is that it is always reactionary. Believers are always following the science, waiting for the next shoe to drop so they can craft a new argument for why this discovery doesn't necessarily disprove god. Believers who follow this approach are practically excluded from the process of discovery, because it requires them to tie a bow on the current science and say, "we're done here" instead of accepting that "wow, something feels like it's missing. I wonder if I could help fill in the gaps in our knowledge?" (And as I pointed out in point #3, I don't think this type of thinking is something atheists are immune to. Everyone can fool themselves into using the debate about a creator to accidentally shield themselves from pushing the boundaries of science.)
Thank you for your clear and well reasoned comments.
1. It's interesting how I can agree with you almost entirely, yet disagree about your conclusion. Meaning, I agree it's entirely possible that what the standard model of particle physics considers fundamental might be replaced by something deeper and "truly" fundamental. (For example, if string theory is correct, then electrons aren't fundamental, but rather strings are.) In fact, I would think that's it's more likely than not that at some point in the future both the particles and current laws will be explained by something deeper.
The question is how to interpret that point. You cynically say "I'll also make a prediction that if there comes a day that we discover more fundamental laws than these this same argument will be used to justify the existence or non-existence of god. It will be built upon the same shaky foundation as this argument."
I would interpret it in the opposite way. Whenever science show deeper laws, they too turn out to be fine tuned and designed. The design argument was applicable to ancient science and it's true now. It was true about classical physics and it's true about modern physics. The apparent design in biology is dependent on the design in physics. All explanation of design by deeper theories ultimately show even deeper design. It is greater intelligence to design a system of physics in which life naturally emerges. That is not a shaky argument, but a robust argument that explains the intuition that many people throughout history have had that there is tremendous order and complexity in the universe that can only be explained by intelligence.
2. It could be that we weren't clear about the entropy argument. We're not saying the existence of the second law directly proves God. We're arguing, like Roger Penrose, that the second law implies that the universe had a low entropy initial state. That highly improbably state indicates an intelligent cause. You can see a clearer presentation of the argument in episode 8 and 9 of our podcast (about half an hour each). https://www.physicstogod.com/podcast-episodes
3. We're not trying to take sides in the debate between biologists and those that argue for intelligent design in biology. I agree that the current scientific explanations for the origins of life are very weak. I also agree with you that we should look for a better scientific solution instead of just saying "God did it", as that would be a God of the gaps fallacy.
Our two main points are to show the superiority of the fine tuning argument from physics, and to point out that even if someone did accept the claim that biologists can fully explain the origin and evolution of life, all of biology (including RNA) is still dependent on fine tuning, design, and order in physics.
1. I'm still unconvinced by this argument. I'd like to start by pointing out that you've shifted from the bailey to the motte. The original argument was "look at these fine-tuned constants. They have to be exactly these numbers or nothing exists. Therefore we've finally come to the point where we can observe intelligent design." I challenged you that this is 'god of the gaps', because it essentially takes the viewpoint that "scientists don't have a satisfactory explanation for this so we're going to infer that intelligent design forced the constants to manifest the universe as we know it." It is only valid until some physicist discovers a new set of governing equations that somehow explain a phenomenon that currently appears to be fine-tuned.*
I think this bailey is not a strong place to be, so let's move to the motte: Your new claim is that all laws of physics point toward intelligent design. The claim appears to be that because we continue to see complexity governing deeper levels of the system this implies design at each level, thus every time we discover a deeper level of complexity this necessarily implies design. I'm not convinced. I can't say that I have a strong principled stance against this argument, so much as that it just doesn't feel convincing to me? I know that's not fair to you, since it doesn't give you much to go on. (But then again, I'm not the one making a claim to have a proof, here.) Maybe you could articulate it better and then I could take a stronger stance either way. As it stands, I feel like we do observe naturally-occurring phenomena that have emergent fractal levels of complexity. (By which, I'm not invoking self-similar fractals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gB9n2gHsHN4). But I should articulate my demand for a better argument as well. Non-self-similar fractals occur naturally, while simple examples of designed systems with only one layer of complexity are also observed. I'm not convinced that either a.) design is implied by multiple layers of complexity, or b.) the absence of multiple layers of complexity implies non-design. Thus you appear to have outlined a heuristic that cannot be falsified and is non-exclusive. In layman's terms, this looks like cheating unless you can define some limiting factors/features that actually point to design.
*Look, I'm not saying it's impossible that finally, after all these years, we've dug deep enough to discover the fingerprint of god in creation. But as of yet, we don't have enough evidence/clarity to distinguish between a fingerprint left by god and a smudge left by a passing dog. Maybe we don't know because we haven't figured it out yet and we will next week. Maybe we can't ever know. Whatever the case is, being good scientists, we shouldn't make assumptions that lean way out past what where the data lead.
2. The only thing entropy has to say about the probability of a state is that it's LESS probable to see a lower-entropy state when you go forward in the time direction. The corollary to this is that it's MORE probable to see a lower-entropy state when you go backward in time. So contrary to what you're arguing, if we're observing initial conditions the most probable state is one of maximum entropy. Indeed, we should be surprised to discover an initial condition that isn't at least very high in entropy. Unless you're trying to make some mathematical claim about the rate of entropy (which I haven't seen) then the base claim that a high-entropy state is unlikely is a fundamental misunderstanding of entropy. Am I missing something about your argument, here? (Haven't listened to the episodes you linked to.)
3. As much as over-exuberant atheists point to the flawed RNA-world hypothesis as a 'nail in the coffin' explanation for abiogenesis without looking deeper at their theories, I feel like you've done this with physics. You claim to have proven something as fundamental as whether god exists, but I'll be honest that the arguments (besides being ones I've seen elsewhere) are really only convincing to those who are already convinced. If you're going to make big claims, you need to bring strong evidence. This is true of both abiogenesis and the existence of god.
I'm reminded of the story of Watson and Crick discovering the structure of DNA. We tell this story poorly, IMO, because we like something clean and tidy. We talk about Avery's experiments with smooth and rough bacteria, Chargaff's rules demonstrating the AT/GC symmetries, etc. It's a nice neat story about how scientists made stepwise discoveries that led from the discovery that DNA is the genetic material, to the discovery of the structure of DNA.
This isn't how it felt to live that story, though. If you go back and read Avery's original paper it was ... terrible. He separated out DNA, sure, but he never did the negative controls. Anyone reading the paper wasn't forced to admit that DNA alone was required to transform those cells. Thus, it was largely ignored by most serious researchers outside the weird world of those interested in DNA for some reason.
No, DNA had largely been dismissed as the genetic material - even after Avery - because it was too simple. (Frameshift mutations and a triplet code wasn't figured out until Crick-Brenner years after the structure of DNA - in what was apparently Crick's first major foray into a biology lab.) More likely it was just an unimportant structural molecule. Proteins! Now there was where the action lay. Ribosomes and proteins had massive amounts of variation and everything scientists expected from what should carry something as complex as the genetic material. Contrary to your expectation that atheist-led theory would bias toward the simple, biologists expected life to be extremely complex, and something like the genetic code needed to be very complicated indeed if it were going to produce all of life.
What did it feel like to be Francis and Crick? They were working on a nothing molecule. Sure, the eminent Linus Pauling was working on it as well, but he got it wrong, too. His simple paper, if not followed/corrected by F&C, might have been the end of the matter. What's DNA? Some weird structural molecule. We'll get to it later.
What did Pauling get wrong, though? Go back and read his original paper with a triple-helical structure. He put the phosphate backbone at the center and faced the hydrophobic bases outward. He even admits to some Van Der Walls overlaps! Why postulate something so ridiculous? Because, Pauling says, the X-ray crystallography demonstrated a helical structure, but the bases wouldn't pair! He tried it every way from Tuesday and couldn't make it work.
What about Chargaff's rules? Nobody read the paper. Maybe F&C attended one of his lectures, but maybe not, it's hard to tell. Still, that clearly wasn't enough. Seriously, though if Pauling had just thought to pair the bases and try to match them ... but wait, he did, didn't he? He admitted as much. Why couldn't he get the bases to pair?
F&C were trying that, too, to no avail. Then one day, as the story goes, Crick was chatting with a chemist and he happened to be playing around with some cutouts of the bases. The chemist took one look at the structure and asked, "Is there a reason you're using the enol form instead of the keto form?" Turns out the whole messy business was cleared up by doing a little enol-keto tautomerization. (i.e. someone originally wrote down the DNA base formulas ... not wrong, exactly, just not with a good understanding of organic chemistry.) Suddenly the bases paired. F&C published their DNA structure (but of course they missed one of the hydrogen bonds between C-G) and overnight everyone realized there was this much simpler explanation for the transmission of the genetic code. Literally, the story went in the reverse of how we tell it to undergrads.
(Was Franklin important? Meh. Pauling had the B-form data, too, and didn't get anywhere with it. That doesn't make stealing her data right. But she wasn't robbed of the credit to the extent many have made it seem.)
What's the point of this long, rambling story? Sometimes, when you see a bunch of scientists working on the 11th epicycle of Jupiter's moons the thing to do isn't to say, "Wow look at how complex that theory is! That's evidence of god right there."
1. Our argument is still from the fundamental fine tuning of the constants, design of the fundamental laws, and ordering of the initial conditions. I was responding to your question that perhaps one day these will be replaced by deeper fundamentals. My answer was that even if that happens we have every reason to expect to find that they too will be fine tuned, designed, and ordered. This is based on historical precedent that every time science had discovered that the design and order of the universe is even deeper than we originally imagined.
2. I don't think your understanding the argument. I think you'll really enjoy the ideas, even if you don't agree with it in the end. Episode 8 and 9 spell it out well (I think).
3. Our hope is that undecided, open-minded people will benefit from the arguments. We know it's very hard to change an adult's mind once it's been decided.
Let's take another biology example: clonal selection theory and affinity maturation. The strength in this is that we now understand these ideas, even if they're not well known by most educated people. So if you don't look them up until after I've described the problem below, you'll see what it feels like to go from an improbable observation to a mechanistic interpretation.
Your body is able to make antibodies that specifically identify tiny markers (epitopes) on viruses, bacteria, fungi, etc. and then accurately identify which type and sub-type of invader that marker belongs to. What's fascinating about this is that your body can identify this unique epitope even if it's a completely novel mutation that has never been seen before.
(How many possible epitopes are there? Many billions - think of how many ways a 3D configuration of amino acids might organize - though admittedly restricted to the 3D pocket of an antibody's recognition arm.)
Let's say we made this observation based on the principles you've outlined. We have something highly ordered that couldn't possibly be evolutionarily determined. It's a dynamic response to a novel stimulus. And, indeed, we can even sequence the antibody-producing B-cell to discover that the antibody is genetically encoded - meaning that this novel gene was created to address this specific threat. Not only that, but this B-cell is unlike other B-cells in your body, so we know that this individual B-cell's genetic code specifically encodes the epitope-recognizing antibody to a unique virus, while that one over there specifically encodes the epitope-encoding antibody to a specific parasite. (In practice, you'll have multiple antibodies to the many different epitopes of each virus/parasite - or rather multiple antibodies to each protein on each virus/parasite.)
Improbable, sure, especially when we see tens of thousands of unique B-cells that have done this independently. We don't have to go outside this one human body to hit astronomical numbers for improbability that this is a stochastic event. If this were simple Darwinian selection, every woman would have to have more babies every hour than stars in the universe before one would be able to have this kind of immune system by chance.
But it gets more improbable! For each of these B-cells, there's a T-cell that independently encodes an epitope-specific T-cell receptor (think of a TCR as being like a cell-bound antibody - but separate from IgD) and that these two cell types work in concert to produce a virus-specific or parasite-specific response. So whatever that old probability was, you have to raise it to the new probability of having perfectly matched T-cells for every antibody-producing B-cell, and then raise that again by the improbability that the epitope is able to distinguish among many different types of invaders.
How else can we explain such complexity - all stochastically generated on the spot. We can't explain this as some long-run genetic process, because each B-cell's epitope-recognizing antibody is genetically distinct and capable of recognizing novel threats. And indeed, we can directly determine that none of these B-cell/T-cell pairs capable of recognizing specific threats were present at birth, demonstrating this is an acquired response.
We've effectively proven that this arrangement of DNA is clearly not evolutionarily encoded. At this point (unless you cheated) it's hard not to see the evidence of design at each step in this system based on the principles you've outlined. No way could we get there without an intelligent hand directing the process all along the way. Indeed, this is even stronger than the initial conditions argument from physics (despite the large double-exponent) because we observe the process acting in real time with each new babe that develops a novel adaptive immune response! Probabilities vanish into nothing when we consider that we can predictably rely on this happening every day, as ever much as the sun rises.
This must prove the existence of a creator! It's too fantastically unlikely this would happen in an ongoing way by chance. There MUST be intelligent design at work.
I know at this point you can see where I'm going with this: that there is actually a mechanistic explanation for all of these phenomena, but for the sake of the argument I'll ask you to play along as we double down on this one last time. After the second and third exposures to this pathogen, we go back and test these antibodies/T-cells only to find that they are a million times stronger in binding to the epitope. Something is going in and refining how well the antibodies bind. This is CLEAR evidence of directed design, no? There's no way to randomly come to that coordinated endpoint time after time without invoking a creator, right?
You obviously see the trap here, which is why I bring it up. I imagine that you read the foregoing and constantly thought, "yes, but there's already a solid mechanistic process describing how we got from all these individual observations to what only looks to an outside observed like an impossibly complex and improbable outcome. You're forcing me to see this as just a matter of improbabilities, but I know it's actually a defined set of mechanisms that drive all of these observations. You've just presented it in a way that it seems probabilistic when it's not."
Exactly! The only difference with the physics you've described is that we're all still outside observers, ignorant of the driving mechanisms that explain those probabilities. So when you pile improbability on improbability you're not proving design. You ARE demonstrating that we don't currently have an explanation for the organizing principle at work behind the order we observe.
What's inescapable is that where we see order, there must be some organizing principle at work driving that order. In the case of understanding the adaptive immune system a lot of hard work and many years brought us to the point where we finally understood the basics of clonal selection theory. Many more years of work helped us understand affinity maturation. We're STILL working on fully understanding principles like Danger Theory and deeper problems of immunology. These are processes that do not depend on the constant intervention of an intelligent designer to maintain highly-ordered, statistically impossible results in each instance.
That's never how we interpret new evidence that doesn't fit with current theory. It's entirely unhelpful to do so, and it's damaging to the scientific process to teach these kinds of intellectual habits. It virtually assures that the kind of people who buy these explanations will cede the ground of scientific discovery to those who reject them.
This argument from stochastic improbability is the CORE of your argument, and yet we see stochastic improbability all the time, driven by underlying mechanisms, whether well defined or poorly understood. If you want to argue that some force has to be the original organizing principle at the base of the stack of turtles, that's fine. But you're arguing about specific observed states, claiming that there's NO other explanation than that this is the level of analysis at which we must impose the will of a creator. The existence of a highly ordered state is not enough evidence to make that case - no matter how many zeroes you add to it, and no matter how many interconnected ordered states you invoke. All you've done is demonstrate that some set of organizing principles must be in effect. But nobody was arguing otherwise!
Now, if you want to argue against certain organizing principles as sufficient explanations I'm absolutely willing to follow you there. Multiverse is a sloppy import of biological ideas of selection without any evidence. It's grasping at straws, and trying to piggyback on the flawed MWI interpretation of QM. Simulation theory is so near to creation and god of the gaps that nobody can tell the difference.
I listened to the two episodes, and I think I see your point. (Although the thought experiment with flipping the single coin out of 100 is bad statistical analysis, the question of how you randomly get high-entropy initial conditions isn't.) You're saying that if we assume a random possibility for initial conditions it's effectively impossible to come to a highly ordered state - not with regard to the arrow of time, but rather to ask how we came to have an initial high-entropy state at all.
(This is all assuming the state must have been random in the first place. I have my own private thoughts on why we should expect to observe the initial condition we do. I think certain specific details have been ignored, suggesting the initial condition was natural - but that's all speculative so we won't go there.)
I will agree that this implies some organizing mechanism. But again, I think it's not good scientific practice to insert god at this stage. If every time you see order you point to that order and say, "This is evidence of an intelligent creator!" you're falling into one of two major traps, which I've outlined above.
Trap 1.) Over-reliance on the state of science as it is currently understood. This means that any revolution in scientific understanding upends your entire argument. (From epicycles to 4 humors, from natural philosophy to quantum field theory. And beyond.)
Trap 2.) God of the gaps. Despite your frequent protestations to the contrary, you still haven't escaped this problem. It doesn't help your case to point to other bad theories and say, "they're wrong, so we must be right." The popularity of multiverse ideas doesn't help you here. It's possible for everyone in the world to be wrong. That's always the case with every scientific principle that hasn't yet been worked out.
At root, the problem is that your philosophy is reactionary. It leaves believers perpetually in the lagging wake of cutting edge science. They will never be able to delve deeper into root causes for fear of upsetting the foundations of a temporary explanation for god. I know you insist multiple times that these are fundamental principles you're building on, but if anything all you've demonstrated is that they're not. They're either evidence of a flawed theory that will be replaced, or they are evidence of gaps in knowledge that remain to be filled.
It's interesting how much we can agree upon, yet still come to different conclusions. I agree that just because multiverse is a bad theory that doesn't mean that God is the correct inference. I use multiverse to show people without first hand knowledge that there must be a substantial problem if scientists are willing to say multiverse. This lends credibility to the point that fine tuning is real and demands investigation and a paradigm shift.
I think our argument comes down to whether there is validity in drawing conclusions from the fundamental laws of current science.
I'm saying that it's true things can always change but as far as we know an intelligent cause is what current science implies. It's not absolute knowledge but it is knowledge.
You're saying that since science can always change, even on a fundamental level, there is no legitimate inference to draw from it. Therefore, we should always say "we don't know" and look for other ways to establish whether or not God exist.
Science used to be dominated by believers who pushed the boundaries of knowledge. And while there are plenty of believers who are scientists (source: personal experience), the sad truth is that they run around excluding/pretending away their faith in their professional life because of arguments like these ones. I'm not saying believers have to stand up and give talks declaring, "QED, god exists!" Quite the opposite. I'm saying it shouldn't be the default 'understanding' in scientific circles that we've proved the non-existence of god (when we haven't) and anyone who disagrees should remain mute or suffer the mockery of the enlightened masses who 'know' god is a delusion. To my mind, reactionary theories like these only serve to push believers onto their back feet, forever unable to push science forward for fear of destabilizing the shaky foundations they built their faith on.
A better way: My personal heuristics include the following ideas.
1. Understanding how God created the universe isn't the same as disproving creation. The question "what came first" will never be answered, because it's an infinite problem. Fine. Leave god in the infinite and work on figuring out the finite.
2. A 'miracle' is, by definition, something that can't be attributed to normal, natural processes. If God intervenes, we're not going to be able to use statistics to explain that one-off event. We should stop trying to do so. This doesn't go the other direction. If we see an event we want to explain, we should absolutely use scientific processes to figure out fundamental explanations. I'm just not worried about figuring out a 'natural' explanation for why someone in South America saw a statue bleeding. Whatever, I'm not going to explain it, and I won't worry about trying to do so.
3. Faith is a subjective experience, while science is objective. That's not to say subjective experiences aren't important or real. Both love and pain are subjective and yet incredibly important and very real. You can't objectively prove someone is in love. You can't even prove that someone suffers from chronic back pain. Yet people get treatments for chronic back pain all the time, and I'm not about to tell them their subjective experience is unimportant and should be ignored, just because they can't provide objective evidence of it. Even so, some people fake both love and pain, for whatever reason, so I'm not about to stake my understanding of reality on the existence/non-existence of someone's chronic back pain. Similarly, faith in god is a subjective experience. Any argument that seeks to imbue faith in an unbeliever through objective 'proofs of the existence of god' will fail to generate any subjective faith in god. These two things are qualitatively different and must be treated as such. Failure to do so will, at best, create a poor foundation that will easily crumble in the future. A better approach is for believers to stop fighting atheists! There's no need to do so. (Unless you're one of the wacky few who believe the only way for god to exist is if the the entire universe were created from nothing in 7 days each 24 hours long.) It's enough to simply reply to those who believe they've somehow proved the non-existence of a thing (something that's been long admitted as impossible) that it's fine for them not to believe in god. That I believe for subjective reasons is enough, and I don't expect an unbeliever to be convinced from my own subjective experiences, any more than I can know whether someone is in love or has lower back pain just by them telling me so. I don't begrudge someone their loving relationship or their pain meds, and I won't be offended if they suggest that I should try out this love thing, or if they suggest that tramadol works great if I find myself with lower back pain. We run into problems whenever we treat subjective evidence with the same standards of universal acceptance as objective evidence. Both are real, but both should be treated qualitatively differently.
4. A fundamental problem I see in scientists today is a seeming inability to accurately answer questions of unknowns appropriately by declaring, "I don't know." Sure, we're often encouraged in PhD programs to speculate based on what we do know, but too many take these speculations to be likely answers and move on as though the question has actually been answered. To explore unknown problems, in my experience, it's vital to be able to hold open in your mind a space for things not known. To be able to hold open questions that aren't answered in your mind and operate in the world anyway, without fooling yourself into thinking you have the answers already, is part of the scientific process. It allows you to see anomalies and say, "I wonder how that might fit?" as opposed to simply trying to explain them away within the theory you currently understand. I feel like this is a skill I've developed over many years as a scientist and a believer. I think any good scientist needs to develop this skill and I find that, for myself, belief has helped me hone it well. I think it's a skill any atheist scientist can also build, so I'm not claiming exclusivity here. I'm just saying that explanations like yours feel like they get in the way of developing this skill in believers without providing enduring principles on which to build subjective faith in god.
Materialism aside, one could also criticize your conclusions from a theological perspective. You seem to be hypothesizing a "watchmaker" god, who wound up the universe and is letting it tick away without interference. Or is your creator god also driving/guiding the emergence and evolution of life and consciousness? And does your creator god involve itself directly in the affairs of the sentient beings that emerge in its universe?
Anyway, your arguments also suffer from a theological modal scope fallacy. You seem to default to the toned-down Enlightenment version of the Abrahamic creator god, when other god-scenarios could also explain the universe we observe. For instance, why does a god-entity that's powerful enough to create a universe *necessarily have to create* an actual universe? What if the god-entity is a Yaldabaoth-like god? The Gnostics believed that the universe we observe is a vast illusion promulgated by Yaldabaoth who actively deceives our conscious minds. Rather than go to all the trouble to create a material universe, the Yaldabaoth god-entity could just be feeding us the information that we perceive with our qualia. Of course, this would be a variation of the mind-of-god/cosmic computer hypothesis.
And even if you limit your god-entity to being a watchmaker, does the craftsmanship of the universe tell us anything about this entity? Even if the watchmaker is hidden from our observation, is it fully hidden from our reason? If you posit a creator-god, wouldn't you want to create theories about why it exists and what its motives are? The Jewish Merkabah mystics believed that the Earth was an emanation of Heaven, and it floated on top of Heaven (which reminds me of how our 4-D universe is supposed to be an emanation of a more complex 11-D universe). In their mystical trances, they'd try to descend through the earth to heaven to view Yahwah, and they attempted to measure him. (According to their visual calculations Yahweh was a giant humanoid being who was many leagues tall, but he had an enormous head compared to his body and he had very long arms, but very small hands, and very short legs.)
Then there's the Vedanta and Buddhist idea that the universe goes through endless cycles of creation and destruction. The Buddhist Mahayana philosophers went one step further and posited a multiverse of universes going through endless cycles of creation and destruction. Each universe has its own Brahma-deity who handles the creation of, the running of, and the destruction of their universe. Better yet, eventually, as we ascend the spiritual path through eons of reincarnations we could all become Brahma-deities with our own universe to play with! (The Mahayana see that option as a trap because Brahma-hood involves all sorts of karmic burdens — better instead to not reincarnate and settle into the blissful substrate of the metaverse.) I've been told by some LDS members that they believe they'll eventually get their own universe to play with (but I don't know if this is official LDS doctrine).
If you posit a single creator-entity, why not posit a society of creator-entities each with their own universe or their own infinititudes of multiverses? Anyway, once you posit a single hyper-powerful being, it's a slippery slope...
I can answer your first line of questioning now. The fine tuning and design arguments only point to a God who intelligently caused the universe. It doesn't directly prove anything about divine providence (in a positive or negative way), though it does set the foundation for a further argument to build upon. We think this is a very significant first step, even though we recognize that most people want more.
With regard to all your other questions, we're going to address them all (at least indirectly) in a satisfactory manner in season 3. I know that might sound like a cop-out but there is a reality of these arguments taking time to develop. At this point, I'll grant you that all we've shown is a compelling reason to believe the universe has an intelligent cause without fully justifying or explaining what that cause is.
it seems like you're ill-prepared to discuss these issues if you haven't already worked through a decision tree of responses to all the possible objections to your arguments. By delaying your responses to our objections until some future date it seems like you're avoiding any rational engagement on these questions. All of the materialist and theological objections I raised have been raised before by others, and you should be familiar with them. So you should be conversant enough with this material to be able to rattle off some counterarguments. "I'll get back to you" isn't a persuasive response. I'd certainly be interested if you had come up with a new proof for the existence of a god-entity, but nothing you've presented so far seems very convincing.
BTW, don't forget to check out Gödel's mathematical proof for god. A good discussion of it is in section 7 of this article. Very chewy! But using Gödel's reasoning, the author comes up with at least 720 necessary god entities.
On further thought (see my previous response), I think your arguments suffer from the modal scope fallacy. The seemingly fine-tuned constants of nature, the "design" of the laws of nature, the [questionable] ordered initial conditions of the universe can be explained without the necessity of invoking the god-principal. Granted, *none* of the non-god explanations (infinite multiverse, the universe as a simulation, or the fecund universe hypothesis) are falsifiable by our current science, but neither is the god explanation. And if we accept the god-principal, we then have to ask how did god come into being. Adding god to the mix just adds another turtle to the stack of unknowables. And if god is self-existent, that begs the question of why the universe can't be self-existent.
Another question we should ask is whether our universe is itself an intelligent entity that is directing its evolution for its own purposes—i.e. the universe *is* god. Although "I Am that I Am" is the common English translation of what Yahweh (as a burning bush) said to Moses, a better translation of the Hebrew would be "I will become what I choose to become."
Full disclosure: I am not an atheist. When it comes to god questions, I'm an agnostic. But I have a mystical intuition that universe has its own directed intelligence.
Our universe can't be self-existent because it had a bounded beginning in time, and nothing can cause itself to exist (because things that don't exist can't cause anything). Therefore something else besides our universe must exist that caused it. That thing could be self-existent, if it has always existed. Theists posit that thing is God, some non-theists posit simulators, infinite multiverse, etc.
We don't actually /know/ it had a bounded beginning in time.
Our ability to extrapolate the state of our universe at a given time in the past by applying our best theories to our knowledge of its present state breaks down when we go a finite length of time back - we hit a singularity, a bunch of zeroes in our maths, and we can't recover the conditions at that point for much the same reason that we don't know what got multiplied by zero to get zero when all we have is the result of that operation; but this is not quite the same thing as knowing the universe had a bounded beginning.
Other explanations than the ones listed are also possible.
To date, every experiment to recreate conditions closer and closer to time zero has validated the best known model we are using to predict them, but it may be that there is some scale / energy / etc past which our models do not match reality and we will need to fix them; just as there are situations where Newton's models fail to match reality badly enough that we can observe the discrepancy, and Einstein made a more precise model that gives answers closer to what happens in reality in those scenarios, so it is possible that ongoing experiments might lead us to realise we need something new here, and that new thing might avoid the singularity.
Another family of possibilities are the various cyclic models, which posit that time zero of the presently observable universe is the result of a previous universe collapsing - a variety of ways such a collapse could occur, and ways the universe we currently observe could end in such a state, have been proposed.
It seems more likely than not that it had a beginning, as far as I can understand the science.
Before the Big Bang theory the general consensus was that our universe was eternal in time, with no beginning or end. There was a lot of philosophical resistance to the idea of the Big Bang at the time because the universe not clearly being eternal and self-existent weakened philosophical materialism. As the astronomer Robert Jastrow (an agnostic) put it: "At this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation. For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”
The trouble with all the theories of the origin of the universe — *including the god theory* — is that require a causative agent which is outside our ability to observe or measure. If our universe was bounded in time by an initial singularity, then we have to assume there was something before the the (hypothetical) initial singularity of the Big Bang — unless you're one of those cosmologists who believe the universe exists in some sort of timeless quantum soup in which our universe is an enormous bubble of space-time. But that's an unsatisfactory answer, too — because we still have a theory that is unfalsifiable outside our limited view of our local universe.
If we posit that a god-being created the universe—or created the computer that runs our universal program—we then have to account for the god-being. It doesn't help us understand squat to claim, "Well, the god-being is self-existent and it is/was powerful enough to create our universe." Actually, that places an extra barrier of faith between us and understanding. God is an intellectual cop-out — and I'm not making that claim as an atheist — because I am definitely *not* an atheist. I make that claim as a mystic — who was raised by rational materialists and who understands the materialist cant — but who understands that any idea of infinite regress is infinitely unknowable.
Well something has to be self-existent. If there is nothing that is self-existent, and has always existed, then nothing would exist. The fact that our theories on what that self-existent thing is are not falsifiable doesn't mean they can't be closer or farther from the truth. There are a lot of true things we believe that aren't falsifiable, like that other people aren't p-zombies or the Pythagorean theorem. Just because it's not falsifiable doesn't mean it's not satisfactory, or a "cop out".
You're asking great questions and we're going to address them all in season 3 about God. Without answering those questions and presenting a clear, coherent, logical idea of one simple God, we haven't really finished the argument. I know we work slow but if we try to do it all at once it wouldn't be nearly as clear and convincing.
I'll await your next installments, then. But as of now, you've failed to convince this agnostic. I'm a bit surprised the radical atheists haven't chimed in, yet. I have fun arguing with them, too. ;-)
Not a science-based argument FOR god, but a way to avoid the god-implications of the Fine-tuning argument, is Lee Smolin's fecund universe hypothesis (aka cosmological natural selection). Smolin hypothesized that black holes can create new universes, and they can reshuffle the parameters of fundamental constants (masses of elementary particles, Planck constant, elementary charge, etc.). Each universe thus gives rise to as many new universes via some or all of its black holes. And the reshuffling of information about the constants of the originating universe leads to creation of universes with similar but not necessarily identical constants. Universes whose physical constants could generate more black holes would be selected for more than universes whose constants didn't favor black holes. Somewhere in his book _The Life of the Cosmos_ I think that Smolin suggests that the constants that favor black holes would also favor the emergence of the chemistry of life (but don't quote me on that).
We'll have a lot to say about Smolin in season 2 of our podcast "Physics to God" (we're devoting a full episode to him). In the meantime, here is an excerpt about one aspect of what is wrong with his theory:
Besides the fact that Smolin’s premises are unsupported, there’s a problem with Smolin’s prediction as well. While it’s very good for a scientific theory to make concrete predictions, it’s very bad for a theory to make false predictions. In 1992, Smolin originally predicted that astronomers would never observe a neutron star more than 1.6 times as massive as the sun. However, in 2010, a neutron star twice as massive as the sun was observed. Then, in 2013, Smolin wrote (in Time Reborn, page 281, footnote 7) that he was originally going to admit that his theory had been falsified by this observation. However, after looking into the matter again, the experts realized that his theory tolerated a kaon-neutron star being just up to twice as massive as the sun, but no larger. Then, in 2022, a massive neutron star was discovered with a mass of around 2.35 times as much as the Sun. While this would seem to conclusively falsify Cosmological Natural Selection, we don’t know if Smolin has responded to this observation.
See my second response to your post. Respectfully, I think your arguments suffer from the modal scope fallacy.
As an aside, I've often wondered why the proving or the disproving of god is so important to people. I suspect it's because our minds insist on a narrative framework to account for our observations. People don't seem to be able to stand back from the question, shrug their shoulders, and just enjoy their existence in an inexplicable universe.
I think you might be confusing the way we present the argument with how others do. Can you elaborate on why you think that our formulation suffers from the modal scope fallacy?
I think it matters to people what is real and some people are compelled to use their intellects to best determine that. Some people can shrug their shoulders and move on, but others can't. Our article and podcast if mostly for the later.
I think your arguments suffer from the modal scope fallacy because you're assigning an unwarranted necessity to the conclusion. The three issues you highlighted as indicative of a god-principal could also be equally indicative of a multiverse, a fecund universe scenario, or the universe as s simulation.
We are going to address both multiverse and the fecund universe in depth in season 2. What I can say here that will allow you to pursue it on your own if you don't want to wait is that the multiverse ultimately fails because of the measure problem and that the fecund universe fails because of what it's originator Lee Smolin calls the meta-law dilemma.
Why do you think that the universe being a simulation would help explain fine tuning, design, or order? Wouldn't it push the question to what fine tuned the complex computer the simulation is running on?
1. The arguments you present, taken at face value, would also be consistent with the argument that the universe is a simulation. In fact, give that the mechanisms of simulation are (in principle) accessible to us, simulation is more plausible than an inscrutable god. As you don't mention simulation but are surely aware of it, it makes me suspicious of your bona fides.
2. By the same token, you do no mention the anthropic principle. It is staggeringly unlikely that the materials conditions at the start of the universe would result in me, yet here I am. That's because I could not have this being unless the the conditions of being me were met. So too with the universe: there is no high entropy universe that would permit us to be aware of it. And because we live in a low entropy universe, here we are.
1. A complex simulation begs the question of what fine tuned, designed, and ordered the computer (or whatever) the simulation is running on. It does nothing to resolve the underlying issue but only pushes it back one step.
2. We discuss the multiverse which is based on the anthropic principle and we spell out the reasoning behind it.
Could you clarify how positing an intelligent being called god outside our universe who created our universe in some way that we can't begin to explain in terms of things we understand helps "resolve the underlying issue" instead of just "pushing it back one step" in any way that positing an intelligent programmer outside our universe who created a computer simulation of our universe does not?
I'm not sure how simulation theory is materially different from creationism. In fact, if I were categorizing simulation theory, is there a good argument for putting it in ANY other bucket? It literally posits that the universe is a creation.
It's a excellent question that we're going to develop in depth in season 3. The short answer is that the key difference is the idea of God that emerges from these arguments is a simple God, while an intelligent programmer outside our universe who created a computer simulation of our universe is a complex being. Therefore, it's sensible to ask what designed or fine tuned the complex programmer that has parts, while it doesn't make sense to ask what fine tuned and designed the simple God with no parts.
Interesting. So, is it that God didn't make computers and computer programs, or is it that he couldn't have used them as tools?
I guess we can pick this up after season 3. I look forward to finding out how an intelligent god is simple, especially given the watchmaker argument the text also spends significant time on which explains that a complex designer is necessary to create complexity in the world (fascinatingly, that analogy begins by contrasting a clearly intelligently designed object with its surrounding world before performing a bait-and-switch, but that is a separate conversation).
If you want to learn some of the background concepts in advance, this source lays out the idea of divine simplicity fairly thoroughly with a layman audience in mind.
General question: why do you expect to be able to unambiguously logically prove the existence of (the Christian, based on your text) God when the Bible tells us that faith in God is something that God grants people who seek him - that reaching God is not something people can do solely by their own effort?
Christians have been claiming to logically prove the existence of God since the early Church Fathers. I don't see any problem between logically proving the existence of God and Christianity. Belief in God does not equal faith (trust) in Him. Even the Demons believe, after all.
People have indeed been making the attempt, as you say; and yet somehow the matter remains stubbornly unsettled.
Meanwhile, e.g. Eph. 2:8-10: "For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith, and this not from yourselves; it is the gift of God, not by works, so that no one can boast."
Note that I am not attempting to argue against apologetics - finding flaws in proofs of God's nonexistence is also very much a time-honoured activity, albeit one with a considerable success record.
The Scholastics would say that the matter has been settled, and that any disagreement about it is the result of an inability to understand the proof. As I don't yet fully understand the proof(s) myself, I can't say for certain. But I don't think that having a logical proof of God is in conflict with salvation by grace, through faith, as a gift of God. Belief and faith are not the same thing.
We're not Christian and we aren't discussing religion. Also, we write in the first few paragraphs:
"To answer this question, we need to clarify what we mean by ‘prove’. If we mean an absolute proof, like a mathematical proof, then the answer is no. There is almost nothing other than mathematics that can be proven absolutely.
However, another meaning of proof is a science-based argument that clearly shows God exists. The argument must be able to convince a reasonable person that God is real. Using this more limited notion of proof, it’s conceivable that science is capable of proving God. That doesn’t mean that it’s easy to do - only that it’s possible."
But reasonable people have come to other conclusions via their own reasoning. Of course, the Principle of Sufficient Reason is the great bugaboo of Western philosophy and science.
Someone please explain to me how its RottenTomatoes approval stats (77% with the pro critics, 81% audience) are possible, because holy hot damn, is it wildly incompetent at storytelling.
First, my background: I went to technical film school, and, between the ages of 19 to 26 or so, I made it a personal mission to see *every* movie that came out in every theater in my region (first Phoenix, then L.A.). I made an exception for The Barney Movie (although I never quite felt right about deliberately breaking that streak), and certain special-interest releases (Christian propaganda, etc). After seeing a movie, I'd read professional reviewers, like Ebert, for further education. I usually wrote my own reviews on Livejournal.
In other words, while I am not a professional critic, I certainly had the viewing-and-reflection habits of a professional critic, and thus I tend to have broadly similar standards and tastes of a professional, not-ideologically-captured critic.
Which is why I'm so bewildered that *any* professional critic could give 3 Body Problem a positive review. The choice to relocate the story from China to England had dire consequences on the believablity of a story which requires draconian government control, a China-sized government infrastructure and resources, and a culture of isolationism.
The show attempts to recreate the CCP's draconian power by imagining an unnamed British shadow agency to whom all other agencies and government officials unquestioningly defer. They are fully empowered to do CCP-esque things like send a heavily armed strike force to arrest everyone at a peaceful semi-religious gathering of 100+ people with no probable cause, to commandeer military personnel and equipment at whim, to detain people indefinitely with no probable cause, to access and monitor people's home security cameras, internet and phone communication, to straightforwardly murder 1000+ people *including children* living on a retrofitted container ship in pursuit of a MacGuffin, and do it *IN THE PANAMA CANAL*, in broad daylight, like *TEN MINUTES AFTER A CRUISE SHIP GOES BY* and surely like *TEN MINUTES BEFORE THE NEXT SHIP IS SCHEDULED TO COME ALONG,* without said large-scale murder and extremely visible carnage being noticed and investigated by the Panamanian, American, or any other government.
The issue of scale and isolationism is likewise just as absurd; I routinely laughed out loud at the scenes of a dozen British scientists formulating an elaborate nuclear powered space probe plan to gain intelligence about a coming alien invasion without any seeming awareness of, or intention to, consult with NASA, Elon Musk, the European Space Agency, the Chinese National Space Administration, etc about said plan. There is even a speech about how these people in the room are so very critical to future, and the show certainly seems to want the audience to believe that the future of the species depends on these people in this room, particularly our protagonist, and and no one else executing their plan.
Not until said plan was fully formed, anyway, at which point Shadow Government Guy picks up the phone and tells an American, "Hey, we have a plan and you're going to go along with it, we gotta borrow Cape Canaveral and your nuclear bombs."
There are almost as many other problems with the script as there are scenes across all the episodes. In one scene, a human who's been having phone calls with the aliens (or the aliens' AI) for decades reads the story of Little Red Riding Hood, at which point it the alien starts asking questions like, "why did Little Red Riding Hood want to get eaten by the wolf" and eventually asks enough questions that the human realizes that the aliens *don't understand the basic concept of deception,* lying, fiction, and presumably metaphor, exaggeration, figures of speech, etc. due to their form of instant psychic communication.
First, how did this not come up sooner after decades of chats? This is the very first time the human is reading the alien a work of fiction which prompts the alien to ask a couple of illuminating questions?
Second, bullshit, because the aliens (or their AI, which would of course be a reflection of their knowledge) have built an advanced video game for humans, which would require the aliens/alien AI to be capable of imagining and envisioning things that aren't real and didn't happen, and thus capable of fiction.
Third, bullshit again, because in the very first communication with the aliens, an alien tells a human, "don't try to reach out to us again, our civilization sucks," and when the human does it anyway, the next aliens are like, "hey, we're great and come in peace."
Fourth, bullshit again-again, the aliens/AI later take control of every screen on the planet to tell all humans, "YOU ARE BUGS," which stands in stark contrast to Shadow Government Guy definitively stating in one of the strategy meetings *after* this event, "we know the aliens can't lie" as an expository rule of this particular universe.
Then there are the hundreds of little details which are just wrong, like a 40 million dollar estate which includes a business and homes being liquidated and distributed into the bank account of one of its heirs within two days; the existence of a somewhat dilapidated bungalow perched in perfect isolation over a deserted beach by what sure looks like the White Cliffs of Dover, an inability to track a helicopter and a general lack of awareness about a retrofitted container ship with a 150ft satellite dish perched on its deck (is that even seaworthy for a transatlantic crossing?), an extremely high-value target in tremendous danger of assassination being escorted into the UN building through the front door and then getting shot in a bullet-proof jacket by a sniper who doesn't bother to reload and try again, despite said character being very obviously unharmed and with an unprotected head, and on and on and on.
And then there are all the other more ephemeral problems of the series; disastrously awful casting choices, laughably inept visual effects sequences, flat cinematography, a score which is somehow intrusive *and* boring at the same time, and on and on and on.
With the exception of perhaps one or two well-acted scenes and one well-written scene, the entire show is just...utter...clownshoes.
So I ask...*how?* How can anybody watch this show and not notice these glaring, unforgivable errors?
Errors which purportedly cost $20 million dollars an episode to produce?
And no, critics are not supposed to "shut their brains off and just enjoy" a given work of art; their whole job is to analyze it for people who don't want to invest any time in a work which might disappoint them.
Practically all sci-fi is unrealistic because real science is boring, expensive, and slow in the best of circumstances. You simply wouldn't have a story where things regularly happen if you have to have a story that addresses all of those concerns. If you want to hew to perfect realism, just do actual science
Perfect realism is never a requirement of fiction, but consistent internal logic *is.* A piece of sci-fi or fantasy can introduce wildly impossible conditions, but so long as those conditions (explicit or implicit) are never sloppily contradicted within the story itself, the audience won't notice or care about the overall implausiblity of the premise.
3 Body Problem's biggest...problem...was its inability not to contradict its premise: It asks, what if extraterrestrials were headed here into the *real world* that we, the audience, live in? How would current-day humanity react?
And then it fails utterly to represent anything that remotely resembles the "real world" we all know.
And on top of that, it establishes (or appears to establish) several "rules" about the supernatural force coming to confront humanity and then contradicts those, too.
The Expanse is great, even though many things in it are unlikely or impossible, because the unlikely and impossible phenomena have their own set of "natural laws" (if you will) which are never contradicted. We accept natural law and so we can temporarily accept fictional phenomena that seem to operate under a natural law.
I'll happily go along with an argument that 3 Body Problem shouldn't have been made at all if it was going to have all the issues I outlined.
>I'm so bewildered that *any* professional critic could give 3 Body Problem a positive review.
Uh, The Fabelmans - easily one of the worst movies I've ever seen - won 2 Golden Globes and was nominated for 7 Oscars. If you have _any_ positive opinions of the current state of film criticism then you have much bigger problems than Three Body Problem.
I've had The Fabelmans on my queue for a while and now I might be intrigued enough to actually watch it! What made it "easily one of the worst movies?"
Despite my outrage in this thread, review aggregators are still almost always useful for identifying the very best, most competent media, especially when there is a unanimous or almost unanimous consensus a few weeks / months after release (96% or better on RT / Metacritic / etc). Sometimes that media isn't *for* me - it's a genre I dislike or has themes I loathe - but analyzing how a work executed its vision rather than if I just *liked* it is its own source of pleasure.
In fact, I can't think of 96%+ rated works that I would consider to be "objectively" bad the way 3 Body Problem's internal contradictions, plot holes, inconsistencies, and inexplicable character motivations make it "objectively" bad. I'm sure those works exist, but I'm not able to call any of them to mind.
Well watch The Fabelmans and get back to me. It's hard to explain how bad it is: wooden acting, no plot, self-indulgent self-worship, zero dramatic interest. It fails along almost every dimension. I saw it in the theater and my date and I spent the second half of the movie just making fun of it to each other.
Top Gun: Maverick has a 99% on Rotten Tomatoes. Need I say more? I generally use critics as an anti-signal when picking movies now.
Had I been writing a review professionally, I would have given Maverick a positive review.
Professionals (and near-pros) must judge according to what the movie is attempting to do, the way dogs are supposed to be judged according to their breed standard and not the judge's pet at home. While a critic's personal taste is inevitably going to play a part in reviewing, personal taste should never be the primary information in a review.
Maverick certainly managed to revive the tone and feeling of the first movie, and it had some truly exquisite flying sequences.
Would I have *personally* preferred to experience those exact same flying sequences but in a 45 minute IMAX documentary? Yes. I thought the story part of the movie was a little cheesy for my personal taste.
But it had a goal and it achieved its objective, and that makes it a "good" movie even if *I* didn't really enjoy it.
Really? How, exactly, does Maverick surviving a mach 10 ejection contribute to the movie's goals?
Also I disagree with your premise. If a movie decided to dramatize 1930's segregation in a way that justified the institution, I guarantee no critics would give it a positive review even if it succeeded at that goal. Critics absolutely weave their own tastes into their reviews, though some are better than others at distinguishing personal claims from universal ones.
I think you'd be surprised what critics can positively review despite their personal distaste for (virtually) universally objectionable content, case in point, A Serbian Film (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Serbian_Film).
While your hypothetical is ridiculous, in that such a movie could never be made and then receive the kind of wide distribution in 2024 which would merit professional criticism, I think that were such a movie to be made, the more intellectually honest reviewers would condemn its sinister effectiveness. Any reviewer with a formal background in film studies would be used to the practice after studying Leni Riefenstahl et al.
> How, exactly, does Maverick surviving a mach 10 ejection contribute to the movie's goals?
It's pleasing to the kind of audience who thinks the scene in the diner is so funny it's worth ignoring the absurdity of a mach 10 ejection...or not even being aware of or capable of noticing that a mach 10 ejection is absurd.
Now *I* am not that kind of audience, but I can understand when and why a given joke might land with a person who isn't me. Ditto certain kinds of story beats, overly insistent musical cues, impossible VFX, and so on.
Being able to say, "I didn't like this, but I can tell it's well-made, and people who liked [such and such similar thing] will love it" is arguably *THE* primary ability any critic needs to have.
"How, exactly, does Maverick surviving a mach 10 ejection contribute to the movie's goals?"
It gives everyone who would otherwise refuse to suspend disbelief re the many absurdities of the main storyline, the ability to opt out of that and enjoy the cinematically glorious final fantasy of a man being torn apart by a Mach 10 airstream somewhere over Owl Creek Bridge.
> Someone please explain to me how its RottenTomatoes approval stats (77% with the pro critics, 81% audience) are possible, because holy hot damn, is it wildly incompetent at storytelling.
You could say the same thing about A Song of Ice and Fire.
You know, it is weird that they relocated the setting to England instead of the US, considering the latter could plausibly get away with all of that.
Your post does make me wonder what the actual value of media criticism is, however. I'm in the middle of reading through Catch-22, a novel that has been praised to the point of being considered one of the best novels ever made. And I do really like it as well, it's just that... there's no way the average person would enjoy reading this. The way it's written is utterly unhinged and schizoid (which I personally find relatable). And of course, I was right: the initial reception to the book was incredibly divided. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catch-22#Reception (The New Yorker's criticism of it is particularly funny: "doesn't even seem to be written; instead, it gives the impression of having been shouted onto paper.")
Anyways, the point I'm trying to the make with this is that... what's the point of critiquing media in a way that is utterly irrelevant to most of the population? No offense to them, but the comment below me is infinitely more representative of the audience than you are. If the goal of a critic is, as you say, to "analyze it for people who don't want to invest any time in a work which might disappoint them" then the critics who rated this show highly are providing far more value to more people than you ever would. Why do you expect the world to cater to your tastes, or even give a damn about them in the first place?
I wanted to put in a comment here just to note that I loved Catch-22, and I'm not unhinged or schizoid! I wouldn't exactly say normal, but I'm a pretty middle-of-the-road reader.
I want to make the case for snobby criticism too. The function of criticism is definitely not only to sift things for the audience. Critics also notice what's new and important. I wouldn't say they get it right, exactly, but I do find when looking back that historical critics do home in on the novelties and important features of brilliant and/or controversial books, and recognise those things that will have an impact on audiences and other artists going forward.
Like... I'm trying to think of an example. I think I read some contemporary criticism of Arthur Conan Doyle, which took a negative view on the character of Holmes, and compared him unfavourably to other contemporary detectives - who have now been completely forgotten. That is, the critic spotted what stuck out, and even if they weren't able to appreciate it, they were right that it was the uniqueness of Holmes that defined those books - and in the end made them last, where other similar works have not.
> If the goal of a critic is, as you say, to "analyze it for people who don't want to invest any time in a work which might disappoint them" then the critics who rated this show highly are providing far more value to more people than you ever would. Why do you expect the world to cater to your tastes, or even give a damn about them in the first place?
Because the world indeed often caters to my tastes!
I fucking love truly great art, and it absolutely exists *for me and the people who have my taste.*
That's why Succession exists.
That's why Blue Eye Samurai exists.
That's why Arcane exists.
That's why Mad Men exits.
That's why Fleabag exists.
That's why The Expanse exists.
That's why Hannibal exists.
That's why Bluey exists.
That's why [etc a bunch of my other favorite highly-rated acclaimed media] exists.
That's why Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul and The Sopranos exist - even though I don't really *enjoy* them due to an idiosyncratic quirk. But I've seen enough of them to agree they exist to be great.
Because someone cared enough to make them *actually* good, so good that people just like me, people with an education and vast experience in media, universally agree not just that they're good, but about *how* good they are.
It sounds like many of the pro critics might have had their opinions stepped on a bit by Netflix, as was mentioned below, plus criticism has become considerably less reliable in an era of virtue-signaling. And to be fair, many of the top critics aggregated on Rotten Tomatoes offered qualified reviews, like:
"If one thing holds it back from greatness, it’s the characters, who could have used some alien technology to lend them an extra dimension or two. But the series’s scale and mind-bending turns may leave you too starry-eyed to notice," and,
"The themes are fascinating, the ideas fresh, and with a bit of fine-tuning, it could be great; here’s hoping Netflix bucks the trend and renews it for a second season."
But 3 Body Problem is so consistently clumsy that I'm legitimately stunned that the same community of pros who correctly post positive reviews for the titles I mentioned could offer positive reviews for 3 Body Problem.
I enjoyed this movie a lot. It is just a story, a fiction that is meant to be enjoyed not to make sense from the point of view of reality. Just like Star Wars or anything else that is a science fiction.
This movie also had some fantasy in political or social aspects. The same thing applies, not to be taken seriously but merely to be enjoyed, like a joke or fantasy.
Tastes differ. I don't like some fantasies. I couldn't finish watching Dune. It seemed too boring to me even though I cannot clearly explain why.
3 Body Problem however was mostly fun. I liked the characters, how they talked, how they acted, their accents, white cliffs of Dover, almost everything. Of course, the plot had too many holes and inconsistencies to take it seriously and likely it will not become a cult like Star Wars. And it doesn't need to. It is just for entertainment, to relax and have fun.
"Someone please explain to me how its RottenTomatoes approval stats (77% with the pro critics, 81% audience) are possible, because holy hot damn, is it wildly incompetent at storytelling."
Same way Rings of Power got good reviews; the Big Beast making the show (Amazon in that case, Netflix in this) leans on such organisations to remove "reviewbombing by trolls", that is, if the review is negative or critical, it isn't counted.
So you end up with only the "five stars at minimum" reviews being scored for viewer reviews. Less than that, you're a review-bombing incel misogynist racist homophobe which is why you hate the Diverse Inclusive show, not that the show stinks.
Professional critics working for paying news media get the message that they're threatening to pull advertising if this gets a negative review, so they give it a positive one. Or reviewers who give negative reviews aren't invited to screenings, get the press packs late, and so on, so they can't issue a review in time.
Erik Kain talks about Rotten Tomatoes in the context of "True Detective: Night Country" and why the critics' reviews are so high:
Taking a closer look, a lot of the Top Critic reviews are qualified (lots of folk saying the acting is bad, but the ideas are interesting!), *and* it's worth noting that many times a critic is previewing the first 2-4 episodes, before the story has really had a chance to step on its own dick yet.
And of course RT is a measure of how many people agree a thing is "C+" or better; you can easily have a "high" RT score which reflects 92% of people agreeing a work is a "B," not that 92% = "A-."
I now do a lot of extra math to account for virtue signalling; my current personal algorithm includes both the aggregator sites scores *and* reviews by critics I've been following so long I have a deep understanding of their personal taste.
None of the latter had taken on 3 Body Problem yet when I saw it, but I can't wait until they do.
Edit - That Erik Kain video was satisfying, thanks for sharing. I had no idea Rotten Tomatoes automatically assigns a positive/negative, not the individual reviewers.
Yes, Erik's explanation helped me understand a lot better how it can be "Why are the critics on Rotten Tomato all giving this a 90%?" He's a professional critic, writes for Forbes, so he knows how it works.
As you say, he also says critics sometimes review based on the first two or three episodes of a show. He was the same with Rings of Power - based on the first two episodes, he was positive and telling everyone to give it a chance, it looked really good and he thought it would be good. Then the third episode made him revise downwards on that, and subsequent episodes converted him into One Of Us (the deplorable trolls and racists review-bombing, if you believed the studio). Looks great, writing is terrible.
Always interesting to see how the sausage is made!
As mad as I am at RoP for being incompetent, I'm even madder at it from distracting from House of the Dragon, which I think was mostly excellent! There were a few stumbles here and there, but it was satisfyingly free of many tiresome agendas, including inexplicable token casting and relentless Girl Boss-ism. It sure didn't *look* that way from the early publicity, but the story on its own was perfectly coherent and mostly very satisfying.
Oh, House of the Dragon definitely ate Rings' lunch, most people seem to consider it a much better show. Just better writing all round, in part because the creator is still alive and can advise on it, in part because they had room to extemporise as there wasn't "this is the story in canon" laid down as solidly, and in part because there was very little of the "updating for a modern audience" nonsense.
I think people who saw both agree that HotD was much better, but I suspect it didn't get nearly the attention it deserved because people were (rightly) still wary about how GoT ended, but also that when two somewhat similar works get released at vaguely the same time, "normies" will only ever see one of them.
And for whatever reason, it's usually the shittier one!
So you have Armageddon/Deep Impact, Volcano/Dante's Peak, now RoP / HotD.
"Trolls" might influence user reviews, not critic reviews. And there has been plenty of time for people to review the show now even without advanced screening.
Critics are extremely averse to being seen as trolls, in league with trolls, and/or dupes of trolls. So if there's a broadly accepted narrative of "the racist misogynistic trolls are trying to convince people not to see this great movie", professional critics are highly motivated to give that movie a good review, or a meh review phrased to count as positive, or to suddenly find that they are too busy to review this particular movie. Doesn't matter whether that narrative is due to actual trolls, or studio PR flacks, or some combination of the two.
Note that even the 2016 "Ghostbusters" remake got 76% favorable reviews from critics on Rotten Tomatoes. Perhaps we can draw the conclusion that the Three Body Problem series is *very slightly* better than Ghostbusters 2016? Though I don't think the "racist misogynist trolls!" narrative is as strong with 3BP.
As for why critics are turning coward over this, note that critics are a subset of journalists. There have been high-profile incidents of journalists being hounded from the newsroom by staff revolts re their Crimes Against Wokeness, and the ability of journalists secure reliable paying jobs is nose-diving as a precipitous rate. It's not worth the risk, just to give a few honest reviews of crappy movies and TV shows.
I didn’t like it compared to the books but I think for some people watching it they probably hadn’t ever heard of the Fermi Paradox before, so it was probably so mind blowing they didn’t pick up on the other stuff.
Also, I’ve always thought the books had a little bit of a blind spot with the sophons. Simply revealing that sophons are possible would be much more insightful and valuable than particle collider experiments. We’d have direct evidence that there are extra dimensions than we now and that one of the things you’d an do with it is make a proton the size of a planet.
The book doesn't depend on China specifically having an authoritarian government, rather there's an international effort against the enemies of humanity (the US/NATO is explicitly part of it). China alone could not interfere with the Panama Canal, but the US of course created the country of Panama so it could have such control in the past.
The "bugs" thing is not a lie. Mike Evans tells the aliens their enemies are "pests", and they ask him to explain what that means, and he tells them it means easily disposed of.
I am not going to argue with you about plot holes because it heavily depends on accepted premises what counts as such an error.
In any case, the Netflix TV show is an amalgam of all three books of the trilogy (Remembrance of Earth's Past), not just the first book as sources like Wikipedia claim. Roughly: things that happen in China, the game, and fight against ETO (ship scene) are from the first book; everything to do with Wallfacers is second book; sending a probe with the dying's friend brain is third book. Many characters occur only in one of the books, and the group of friends as depicted in the series does not exist.
In the trilogy, most of the issues you mention make a lot more sense because the world around them has been constructed in more detail. In the TV show, the events are constructed to depend on each other; in the books, many events happen in parallel without a connection (that I recall) other than happening in the same era.
On to your question, "How can anybody enjoy that show": You have a point regarding many issues, but I was too drawn in by the theme: What happens if humankind receives the attention of a vastly superior civilization?
Edit. I totally forgot: If you want to nitpick, a crucial part of the story's premise is flawed. As far as we know, quantum entanglement does not help communicating information faster than light. Entanglement is possible over large distances, but querying the states would break the entanglement.
>On to your question, "How can anybody enjoy that show": You have a point regarding many issues, but I was too drawn in by the theme: What happens if humankind receives the attention of a vastly superior civilization?
My problem is that I've experienced the theme executed much better, elsewhere, so I can't be forgiving of the absurd clumsiness of 3 Body Problem in this, the Year of Our Lord 2024, especially not when it was produced by show-runners as powerful as David Benioff & D. B. Weiss.
If Netflix wanted to spend $20 million an episode adapting a sci-fi novel trilogy about humans receiving the attention of a vastly more advanced civilization, they should have adapted Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis (or Lilith's Brood) series.
Likewise, the movie adaptation of Michael Faber's Under the Skin, while diverging wildly from much of the content and the tone of the novel*, also managed to execute the theme far more skillfully.
* The novel is the best horrible thing I've ever read. It was so disturbing I had to treat it like the videotape in The Ring and immediately give it to a friend.
Given that the aliens in Independence Day were taken out by a Mac laptop, we can argue whether or not they were in fact "superior," but I'd argue that even that goofy movie is much better at what it's trying to be than 3 Body Problem, and mostly with better-executed, far more exciting VFX.
It's just not okay for something like 3 Body Problem to suck as much as it does.
The scientific inaccuracy that bothered me the most (in the first book, the only bit I've seen) was the depiction of the three body problem itself, which the author clearly did not understand despite naming the book after it.
To me all that stuff was justifiable. The part that came off completely ridiculous and artificial was the gang of protagonists (they gathered every important character in the books from across centuries and made them all college friends for some reason) who're supposed to be brilliant scientists but all act like a college improv group (especially the angry-social-activist woman who's supposed to be a scientist/CEO but acts like a college social justice activist, where they try to make up for her implausibility by having everyone constantly talk about how brilliant and amazing she is). The only characters that acted remotely realistic (or at all like their book counterparts) were Jin and the cancer guy, and they hardly got any scenes together (which is a shame because the scenes they did get were some of the few the show really pulled off).
There's something here about hollywood diversity - they took a story that was genuinely different than most of what hollywood writes (and was written in an actually different culture), removed most of the actual diversity in the tone (to the point where, as you point out, what parts of it are left stop making much sense), then stuck in a bunch of female/black/brown/LGBT characters who all act like hollywood writers and their college friends to achieve "diversity". It's very frustrating to watch (but had just enough good scenes that I still did).
I LOLed so hard when one of the characters observed the nano fiber chick was "beautiful, but in a boring way," and "looks like the lead hot girl in a Speed 3 sequel."
It was much, much funnier than they intended it to be, I think.
The only LGBT person is the son of the detective, barely a character.
Changing the culture is actually a matter of contractual obligation. Tencent made a Chinese version, so the rights to a Chinese version were still exclusive. Netflix was permitted to make another version only if it wasn't Chinese, with the amount of Chinese dialogue being limited.
You don't have to shut off your critical faculties, but if you're going to criticise...
There are several errors in your understanding of the plot. For example, Mike Evans has not been having conversations with the San Ti for decades. Communication was extremely slow before, as it was limited by light speed. The sophons, which allow instantaneous communication, arrived in the solar system only recently - in fact, it's their arrival that kicks off the events of the show.
The video game was not created by the San Ti, but by the human organisation, aided by San Ti technology.
Wade is portrayed as British in the show, but works for a multinational agency. In the books, he was CIA.
You are bugs is a metaphor, not a lie.
And did you not learn from Snowden and Zero Dark Thirty that western governments are capable of some pretty shady stuff?
...
That said... yeah, there are a bunch of plot holes.
I liked it, and I assume it got good reviews because other people liked the core element of Ye Wenjie. A bit like the way Orson Scott Card explored the idea of the extermination of an entire intelligent species, this story looks at the convulsions of China and asks, is this enough to make you lose faith in humanity? Would it make you exterminate them? And what would that mean for the rest of your life? I thought both Rosalind Chao and Zine Tseng were good, and held the whole thing together.
But I admit that the rest of it was very average; and my enthusiasm may in part be driven by the fact that I like the book, and like Chinese-international flavoured media in general.
I wonder if something like the Rotten Tomatoes scores happens because it's an aggregate of up/down votes. In other words, if 100% of people think a show is 51% good, it'll get a 100% RT score. Meanwhile, a show that turns off 30% of it's viewers to say it's only 49% good (only 2% different from the other movie), but the other 70% of the voters think is the GOAT, it will only get a 70% RT score. This despite the fact that most people will agree that the movie that got a 70% RT score is much better than the one that got a 100%.
This is a good point, but I always skim the "headlines" critics submit to represent the tone/content of their review, and there were many glowing ones!
Though to be fair, many of the reviews marked as "positive" were decidedly qualified.
Yeah, I didn't read the book, so my criticism is taking the show exactly as it is presented.
I did watch the show with two other fairly savvy and sophisticated media-viewers, and the fact that none of the three of us picked up on many of the details you cite, including that Mike Evans only recently started chatting with the San Ti (how recently, exactly?) is sort of its own proof of how bad the show is at communicating extremely critical details to an audience completely unfamiliar with the book.
And there are still holes to poke even in your explanations - if instant communication only began with the arrival of the sophons, how did the human organization get the tech for the video games, which (I think?) existed before the sophons which disrupted the collider data (as that is the first scene of the show)? Like, literally, how was the headset tech even delivered to the human org? Where did they get the materials to manufacture them, and who manufactured them? Like, where are the facilities to make the 100+ years in the future headsets?
And why do the San Ti even have a tech for experiencing fiction if they don't understand the concept of fiction?
We can quibble if the scale of Wade's power is remotely plausible even as a CIA executive, but if the show is saying he works for a multinational agency with access to global resources, why is he limiting his team to a handful of British physicists and not collaborating with, you know, everyone else?
Forgive me, I don't mean to swipe at you or your enjoyment of the show, but poking at plot holes is as fun for me as popping bubble wrap.
I can imagine San Ti not understanding lie and at the same time enjoying fiction. On the Earth we call it autism. Many people don't understand autism. San Ti could be extreme version of autistic group mind that somehow they missed the concept of lies. They could probably understand the concept when they are explained of it but they might never actually engaged in it so far.
The problems with the plot I noticed immediately was about entanglement that actually doesn't provide instant communications. Just have to accept like faster than light travel.
Another thing where I needed to suspense my disbelief was accelerating a proton with extra dimensions. Would the laws of physics really make it possible to hide the mass and yet allow to accelerate it without additional energy?
The origins and purpose of the futuristic game wasn't really explained enough.
Social aspects: Someone from Sat Ti sent a warning that they are going to exterminate. But they didn't. From their capabilities through sophons they could really do it, kill all intelligent life on Earth and arrive to pristine planet with all resources. Instead San Ti behaviour mimics humans. Respecting other life but also worried that it could kill or subjugate them. Potential fight for earth resources after their arrival could turn unpredictable, so both sides were panicking.
The answer is simple – San Ti don't want to kill humans or significantly harm them.
They just wanted to stop human scientific progress so that when they arrived, they wouldn't be destroyed by humans.
Some believed that San Ti are evil, others believed them to be benevolent like gods. Maybe neither would be truth.
I was reading about tribes that lived in the Canary Islands and how they all got wiped out or made slaves after being discovered by Spanish. And yet, many other tribes who were more advanced all around the world survived contacts with others. Apparently both civilizations have to be approximately on the same level for both of them to survive.
...in the most traumatizing and intimidating way imaginable if their intention is to eventually peacefully coexist with humans, despite being "afraid" of them?
If that is their plan, this action is, frankly, the r-word that we're not allowed to say anymore, in the very specific '90s slang meaning of that word (which sadly has no contemporary equivalent).
Edit to add: Also, if the San Ti intend to peacefully co-exist with humans, how come the very first message from a San Ti to earth was "Yo, we suck, absolutely do NOT try to call us again?"
It's fiction in that the players are able to take actions that didn't occur in history. They aren't witnessing a record of historical events, they're interacting with it, which makes it not-history anymore.
Also, given that the Santee claim to not have human form, casting them as humans makes it historical fiction, at best.
The point about human forms is a good one! I don't know any way to square that that lines up with the Netflix presentation.
I can think of counterpoints to the other objection, but they all rely on knowledge/presentation from the book, not the Netflix series. The TV writers did a lot of work compressing and streamlining the story (and, honestly, made it a much better *story* for their trouble - go watch the Ten cent Production version to see a more faithful reenactment of the book to see what I mean) and in the process they lost some number of important details that make the whole thing hang together.
Yeah... working at Oxford (home of the Oxford Particle Accelerator!) doesn't really make you British. The lead has a Kiwi accent and comes from China; the nanomaterial scientist speaks with an American accent and comes from somewhere else.
The idea of holographic/full sensory communication doesn't really imply fiction. You could use it to communicate truth over a distance, as many highly truthful Netflix documentaries do.
I dunno, you're obviously right that it leans hard on a lot of tropes. It's not making the effort to create a new or realistic vision of the future. It's like: imagine if we lived in the land of Sci-fiOpia - you know, the place where The Creator and Edge of Tomorrow and Tomorrow War and Inception took place - now here's a story to present my ideas about how/why civilisations die. If you don't like the show you start picking holes in the underlying tropes; if you like the show, you let the tropes carry you along.
All right, conceded, not every core character is British, however, they're all apparently *living* in England when the story kicks off, and so Wade was able to collect them from an incredibly localized pool of experts. What a lucky coincidence they were all school chums living in or making an extended visit in the same general area!
One of my disappointments is that many of the professionals reviewers are saying there are fresh new ideas in this show - which is a load of utter nonsense, as you observed. The reviews plus folk raving about the novel ten years ago motivated my watch group to give the show a shot, and I'm still just boggled that the public "consensus" was so misleading, even with the plausible explanation of Netflix stepping on the different review aggregator sites.
Sci fi doesn't have to be tropey and/or bad. The Expanse was executed almost perfectly. Sense-8 was executed almost perfectly (aside from the rushed ending due to cancelation). The OA was executed perfectly, RIP.
So far no one has made a very passionate or robust defense of the show, but I'd still be interested to hear one.
I mean... compare anything to The Expanse, and it's going to come off badly. I loved that show too, but it didn't quite escape trope city. The crew of the Rosi just happening to end up at the centre of every galactic crisis... the first mate just happening to have a child with the most dread pirate of the solar system... one of the others just happening to be bezzie mates with various supercriminals back on earth... I mean, talk about the small group that turns out to be at the center of everything trope! And in series 1, the renegade cop who no one listens to... But in The Expanse they didn't grate.
It is worth realising that if you've seen about 10 years' worth of TV, you know more than most TV reviewers. It's a badly paid job for newspaper interns. And these days, increasingly captured as part of the hype machine.
If you have any interest in the sci-fi aspects of Three Body, you could check out the best sci-fi channel on YouTube, which is called Quinn's Ideas (must be no relation to the Al Quinn below!). He has liked the books and the show, and will tell you all about them in excruciating detail.
LOL alright, fair enough re: The Expanse; there were a number of coincidences that brought the core Rosi crew together for most crisis.
And I completely forgot about the first season, which I consider to be pretty damn weak.
BUT. In my defense, the last couple seasons of the show were so strong I literally forgot the first season was kind of weak. That's a neat trick, and everyone who produced the show should get some credit for that!
I'm ironically watching the show, having read (and hated) the books, which were a complete illogical mess. Given what they were working with, I don't think it's *that* bad yet, but it is certainly not at all good.
I think nearly everything sucks, especially given the low-brow aim most media has these days. But I did want to second your endorsement of The OA--best thing Netflix has done by far. The only other Netflix series I would consider good is Unbelievable (a limited series).
Aside from the jolly fat guy who gets murdered, everyone gets sucked into one of Wade's projects / plans. They might not be his direct reports on a corporate or government org charge, but objecting to "working on a project he's spearheading" vs "working *for* him" is pedantic.
And The OA perfectly executed its storytelling *objective* (well, until cancellation was forced to leave it hanging), thus the word "perfect" is indeed justified here.
Jackass is another example of something which perfectly executes its objective - whether it's to your personal taste or not, you can't deny it does what it sets out to do.
I love The OA but I'm very aware it's not for everyone.
(It's a data science challenge I'm currently running on LessWrong; should take an evening or two to play, depending on skill level; if you post an answer before next Monday you get bragging rights when I release the solution.)
I have kind of a strange question that's sort of about music theory kind of but not your typical music theory concepts such as chords, scales, etc. Maybe it has more to do with the psychoacoustics than music theory. But I also don't hear psychoacoustics people talking about this either. I was going to ask it in Reddit, but I don't even know what Reddit would be appropriate for this, what category it falls into.
My question is kind of about how we perceive rhythm instruments. I'm wondering why is it that drums are so important to music, especially modern music such as rock and jazz. Why is it that we need to have a separate instrument that doesn't really play notes, but just hits the rhythm? As anyone who is a great musician will tell you, when you're playing, listeners should always be able to feel the pulse of the rhythm through your playing. This stands true whether or not you're playing guitar. piano, or just about any other instrument.
Every instrument in the band makes its own rhythm, so why is it important that we have another separate instrument devoted entirely to just creating the rhythm? Drums add so much to music, but I'm not sure I understand why. Especially when there's a backbeat, drums make the music feel like it moves, whereas if they're not there, the music simply feels much more static
Taking a wider ethnomusicology view, the role of drums in various genres of music around the world is quite diverse. In some African music it's all about the drums and polyrhythms and the role of melody and harmony is small. An Irish air has no drums at all, maybe not even a meter.
Not every genre with drums has a backbeat. It could be argued, depending on how you define it, that the backbeat only dates from the early 20th century with the precursors to jazz, from whence it spread to blues, r&r, American pop, and now, thanks to American cultural imperialism, the whole world.
The back beat in the kinds of 20th century American music intended for dancing makes them extremely easy, indeed near irresistible, to dance to--you can't lose the beat no matter what the other instruments are doing. And because rock and roll in particular began life as music to dance to at parties, the backbeat became an integral part of it across time and genres. You might say the form grew around them.
You don't absolutely need the drums to tell you what the groove is supposed to be when you're listening to "Baby I'm-A Want You" by Bread or "Where the Ocean Meets the Eye" by the Stratford 4, and you're likely not dancing anyway, but when a form of music has evolved over decades to include a backbeat, it will sound very odd and static without them, and the artists will only omit them when they're trying to make it odd or static.
Hmmm. Until the 20th century percussion was as much about accent and timbre as rhythm e.g, a snare drum alongside a flute in colonial patriotic songs.
The best explanation I’ve heard for drums in rock and jazz is that it puts sex in the music, a primal feeling that takes a song from merely an interesting melody to lustful (or martial in some cases). I’ve heard it theorized that the original evolutionary use of music was drums leading up to battle. The synchronization makes the fighting force seem bigger and more disciplined.
By which I mean anybody can come up with a "just so" story about how some aspect of culture evolved, but I wouldn't take any of them too seriously.
A relevent Chesterton quote, from "The Everlasting Man":
"Science is weak about these prehistoric things in a way that has hardly been noticed. The science whose modern marvels we all admire succeeds by incessantly adding to its data. In all practical inventions, in most natural discoveries, it can always increase evidence by experiment. But it cannot experiment in making men; or even in watching to see what the first men make. An inventor can advance step by step in the construction of an aeroplane, even if he is only experimenting with sticks and scraps of metal in his own back-yard. But he cannot watch the Missing Link evolving in his own back-yard. If he has made a mistake in his calculations, the aeroplane will correct it by crashing to the ground. But if he has made a mistake about the arboreal habitat of his ancestor, he cannot see his arboreal ancestor falling off the tree. He cannot keep a cave-man like a cat in the back-yard and watch him to see whether he does really practise cannibalism or carry off his mate on the principles of marriage by capture. He cannot keep a tribe of primitive men like a pack of hounds and notice how far they are influenced by the herd instinct. If he sees a particular bird behave in a particular way, he can get other birds and see if they behave in that way; but if he finds a skull, or the scrap of a skull, in the hollow of a hill, he cannot multiply it into a vision of the valley of dry bones. In dealing with a past that has almost entirely perished, he can only go by evidence and not by experiment. And there is hardly enough evidence to be even evidential. Thus while most science moves in a sort of curve, being constantly corrected by new evidence, this science flies off into space in a straight line uncorrected by anything. But the habit of forming conclusions, as they can really be formed in more fruitful fields, is so fixed in the scientific mind that it cannot resist talking like this. It talks about the idea suggested by one scrap of bone as if it were something like the aeroplane which is constructed at last out of whole scrap-heaps of scraps of metal. The trouble with the professor of the prehistoric is that he cannot scrap his scrap. The marvellous and triumphant aeroplane is made out of a hundred mistakes. The student of origins can only make one mistake and stick to it."
While I rarely agree with Chesterton on much, I do agree on this. Prehistoric physical evidence (particularly evolutionary evidence) is _sparse_. And there are far too many just-so stories. I've seen articles spin whole prehistoric diet hypotheses out of a handful of 16O/18O isotope ratio measurements - barely sufficient to broadly constrain the ratio of two very broad food groups.
I'm aware it's not your blog, but you are the one who said "The original evolutionary use of music was to scare of predators." Which was the sentiment my comment was aimed at.
"Of all singing creatures, humans are the only ones who use rhythm."
...Wait what? Obviously birds have a sense of rhythm as well, have they not heard them sing? They'll also perfectly capable of dancing to rhythm as well, as seen in plenty of videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8pMJuEIOd8
More precisely, humans and some birds are the only known creatures that can entrain to a rhythm. Other primates cannot. When, how and why humans evolved this ability is controversial.
I think that’s the piece I first heard it from. It seems like for natural predators, such as lions, yelling and throwing rocks would be enough. (On hiking trails in Colorado I never saw advice to sing if you see a mountain lion.) But for human-ish predators chanting and moving in rhythm would be more intimidating, which is what that piece says.
I often hear advice to make noise on the trail *preemptively* to alert human-averse animals like black bears of your presence, so as not to startle them and provoke a violent response.
Since this is something you're supposed to do every so often, rather than in response to an attack, it does lend itself both to singing and "drumming." Sometimes I make up fun bear-related lyrics and sing them to the tune of popular songs.
Lion evolution occurred in an environment where humans traveled in packs. Almost certainly the evolved response to a single human includes the suspicion that there's probably a pack of them not too far away.
As a drummer and someone with a Master's degree in music, this might one of the few questions I'm able to attempt an answer for. My sense is it comes from different things happening at once:
Music can be divided simplistically into three parts -- melody, harmony, rhythm. Often, an instrument will primarily contribute to one of those elements. E.g., in a jazz trio, sax = melody, piano = harmony, and drums = rhythm. While each instrument overlaps somewhat into the other categories, having the drums lead the rhythm helps bring to the fore those elements that otherwise aren't being lead so well by the harmonic and melodic instruments. A good example is in a phrase of music. The melody will often have a contour (e.g., ascends, hits a high note, then descends to starting note) that gives it a sense of complete-ness. In the harmony, you'll have the chord progression ending with a cadence (e.g., a V - I). To accomplish the same thing rhythmically, you'll have the drums play an ostinato (the beat) followed by a fill at the end. All three elements--descent to starting note, cadence, the fill--contribute to a stronger sense than any one instrument alone.
You mention 'drums make the music feel like it moves'. There's an excellent book called 'Note Grouping' by James Thurmond (highly recommended). In it, he tries to explain the mechanics of why certain musical performances feel like they 'move' or have motion (but not from a human psychology perspective). To summarize (overly) simply--he says it's placing accent or stress on the 'weaker' beats of a measure or phrase. E.g., in a bar of 4/4, putting the accent on 2 and 4. I agree with him and I think drums are a straightforward way to accomplish that in both genres you mention.
There's probably more to mention, but hope this is a helpful start!
Thanks so much! I'd love to know more about what you're saying about the backbeat. That's another niggling question that's alway been on my mind that I haven't been able to find by searching online; why does a backbeat particularly feel so powerful and moving? I'll look up Note Grouping, too
You can imagine a performance of 'Amazing Grace' with a straightforward crescendo up to the high note and then diminuendo to the last note. Thurmond's point is keeping that crescendo / diminuendo but adding subtle stresses to notes on weaker beats (and vice versa for notes on stronger beats) in the phrase will help give the phrase much more motion. E.g., at the end of the first line, putting 10% more emphasis on the 'the' in 'the sound', helps with the motion. I think a backbeat is a distillation of this principle.
In a 4/4 bar, beat 1 is the strongest, followed by beat 3. So at the level of the downbeat (talked about in 'Note Grouping'), the snare in a backbeat puts stress on the two weakest of the four downbeats, giving it a simple kind of motion mentioned above.
As to why that provides motion, my best guess is it relates to tension and release. In a simple chord progression, like I - iv - IV - V - I, the V chord has that strong pull to resolve to I, and when it does, it provides a nice release of its tension. I think a similar thing is going on rhythmically. In 4/4, you feel a pull to end things on beat 1, so beat 4 has a similar pull to beat 1. By emphasizing beat 4, you are heightening the tension, so to speak. The same can be said of beat 2 in relation to beat 3.
I think this is also why, if a drummer is going to drop one of the two snare hits in a backbeat, it's almost always dropping the hit on beat 2, since it's the hit on beat 4 that provides the most rhythmic tension. In jazz, you see something similar with its standard drum beat (ride pattern with hi-hat on 2 and 4), but taken further with the use of 'the big 4', an extra emphasis on beat 4 in certain styles.
This is all very well put, and certainly may help explain why so many modern songs and genres routinely include backbeat drums even when the music isn't meant to be full of primal sex or aggression.
Wow, that's really interesting! I think a lot about tension and release, particularly about how beat 4 leads into beat 1, etc. I've read Hal Galper's Forward Motion, which focused on that a lot. But I never really thought too much about how backbeat hits on 2 and 4 are a part of that principle, too.
So if i'm understanding you correctly, you're sort of saying that it's kind of a mini phrase that happens every beat 2 and 4, with the start of it on 2, and the end of it on 3 (and same for 4 to 1). I always used to think of it the opposite way, as a call and response between (in rock) the kick on 1 and the snare on 2.
Just a listener, but drums have a physical effect that other instruments don't. A loud enough bass drum will make my heart beat with it, or at least resemble the effect.
Most questions like this are best answered by music history, since music is no less affected by fashion than literature or visual arts.
The quick history is that military style bands (think Sousa) are the direct ancestor of jazz writ large, and therefore rock and hip hop. Military bands music is designed for entraining coordinated movement in large groups. Sound familiar?
Percussion (unvoiced) is the most refined tool for marking time and coordinating movements, whether military drills or dancing. It has a clearer transient than any other instrument type, and the broad spectrum noise “cuts” through the ensemble.
That being said, you’re right that anything can groove, but percussion is the most “insistent” way to do it.
I think the drums do a lot of work in those songs, except maybe the last one since I couldn't really hear them at all. But take that first song for example. Really try to imagine what it would sound like if the drums laid out for a chorus then came back in, really visualize it. I think for that chorus, to me it would sound like a bit of a rhythmic break was taken, then when the drums came back in, it would feel like the piece was actually starting up again, and moving again. Yes, the piano keeps the rhythm, but it doesn't "drive forward" like it would when drums are in.
This is a great question! The following is a guess from someone who doesn't really know what they are talking about. But my guess is that there is a tradeoff between how much initial transient response you get from a sound vs how nicely distributed the sound is over the frequency spectrum. In order to get the hard-hitting crack of a snare drum, you have to let in a range of frequencies that deviates from the harmonic series, which means you're no longer playing a recognizeable note.
A piano can be considered a type of a percussion instrument: when you press a key, a hammer hits a string. And piano can be played very percussively, e.g. Bartok, ragtime, etc. But you'll never get it quite as percussive as a snare or a kick, because you're still demanding that the sound has the right overtones.
So the benefit of adding percussion to a song is that you can strengthen the sense of rhythm by adding this special ingredient that maximizes the initial transient. Blueberries have some sugar in them, but you can still make your blueberry pie taste better by adding some refined sugar to the filling.
Come see about me and my slice of Internet bullshit when we ask the question - why do some people feel the need to do unpaid PR for those more powerful than themselves? I wish I had the answer, but come see what I wrote about it anyways 💋
I know that people have different opinions on things than me, yes. I'm curious what part of my words came across as opinion, though. For instance, it's not my opinion that Neil's actions and reasons contradict his previous ones, it's that they meet the definition of the word. And that's kinda the point. If you're going to aggressively push back on that observation, you either don't know what a contradiction is, or you have some other agenda that I cannot understand. I'd love to know which one it was, or if it's something I haven't thought of yet, but people only ever launch into personal attacks at this point. Which I'm going to keep taking as a sign that they don't have any other actual points to make.
In this post, I argue against the extermination of hard video games, that is games that are hard to beat, even on the easiest difficulty setting. Those who wish to exterminate these games usually do so by broadly advocating for the implementation of easy modes. I deal with two main arguments, the "narrow liberal" argument and the argument from accessibility. The narrow liberal argument simply asserts that the inclusion of an easy mode does not harm those who wish to play on a harder setting. I refute this by showcasing advantages of unique difficulty settings. The argument from accessibility states that accessibility concerns should trump concerns regarding the enjoyability of the game. I show why this doesn't make sense. Lastly, I take a broader perspective and end up with the metapolitical implications of applying a "narrow" or "broad" liberal worldview.
I don't think It's necessarily true that adding easy modes will detract significantly from dev efforts. To take a kind of joke-y example, I wanna be the Guy scaled its difficulty by removing saves the higher it goes, Doom Eternal scales damage and number of AI decisions per time down (this was already a parameter they could tune, and presumptively did when play testing). Slay the Spire is very winnable at low ascensions, where I think basically everyone can win, until Ascension 20 heart where it's basically impossible for a blind player to succeed.
These are examples of the culture correctly segregating into hardcore vs more casual people, and as far as I can see this can be accomplished by having the devs state a particular canonical difficulty level, or to have an easy base game and a very difficult (but still playable) set of hard mode modifiers.
Imo it's not true that everyone has to do game design if there is a difficulty slider, Doom Eternal for example has the director saying that Nightmare is the intended difficulty, and as far as I can see everyone into hard games did just that, while my more casual friends played on Hurt Me Plenty or ultraviolence. (although, yes I agree with you that people who are asking for easier DOOMs because they godstomped 2016 are wrong!) although it's funny, all of my hard game loving friends complained a lot about the BFG, a weapon with highly limited ammo that can trivialize any single encounter: they don't like having to guess which encounter will be the hardest, and thus hold onto ammo overly long! Talk about not wanting to do game design!
Also if you're unaware, Sekiro, while being undeniably the hardest from game to complete, does have consumable plus sub weapon usage as a way to substantially trivialize fights. All of the damage buffs can substantially shorten fights, and some sub weapons can reduce a phase to sub 10 second affair. This is not obvious and considering how much grinding you'd need to find this out it's not surprising most people don't discover it.
Anyway if you want some hard games, here's a list:
Doom Eternal, with both DLCs and all master levels.
Recommendation: Nightmare, although I think doing ultraviolence first in the base game then Nightmare for everything else is better if you get stuck for, say, 2 hours on the first level
Lies of P
Recommendation: It's a soulslike. It's a really good one too.
Aeterna Noctis
Recommendation: Noctis mode, since that was the only mode until devs listened to complaints about the game being too hard
Ravi Ribi, alternative item mode
Recommendation: no consumables or town buffs. First playthrough Hard into second playthrough Bunny Extinction
Note that both Aeterna Noctis and Rabi Ribi are 2d metroidvanias.
Sure. But FromSoft games are always the target of these articles. It already feels like they almost incorporated a form of easy mode in the ash summons. And, as I wrote in the post, there really aren't all that many alternative games that offer unique, difficult challenges.
* games are probably better for having an easy mode
* if they don't then that's the dev's choice and that's fair
* if people would like to enjoy the game but it's too hard then they can complain and that's fair too
So I read your post and honestly started skipping somewhere in the second sections. I was just disagreeing so much already.
I do not feel it would be productive to go through it point by point and express why I disagree, so let me pick 3 disagreements I have with the first section, in case you want to discuss.
1. You argue that the statement "Just add easy mode, literally no cost only benefit" is wrong and disrespectful. This is only technically correct, I'm left unconvinced that it is meaningfully correct.
* You show that there is greater than zero cost, but that feels pretty uncompelling, because I what I actually believe is the weaker version "Just add easy mode, little cost mostly benefit". I feel that's the actual argument to beat if you want to change minds, because that's probably what most people that want easy modes actually believe. Your arguments do not seem strong enough to support "Easy mode introduces significant cost or little benefit", which is what you would have to show to convince me that "no cost only benefit" is not at least approximately correct.
2. You argue that having easy mode available devalues / lessens the satisfaction of beating the game. Beating the game on "hardest" is just not the same.
* I played Cyberpunk 2077 a while ago on the hardest difficulty and in one of my saves I went with the secret ending. It comes with the warning "very hard, expect to die a lot" and it absolutely was. But after some hours of dying I beat it and felt great accomplishment, even the next couple of days it still made me happy to remember. I felt that sense of accomplishment because I did something very hard and managed to beat it through stubbornness and skill. The fact that the game has an easy mode or easier endings did not detract from that one bit.
* If only want to argue "there is some non-zero cost" then you saying "it costs me, personally, satisfaction" is enough. But I don't believe this is universally true and I would argue that spending 3 hours to finally beat a boss on whatever-difficulty-it-is-you-are-playing-at feels like an accomplishment regardless of the whether or not higher or easier difficulties exist.
3. You argue that it is disrespectful to say "there is no cost to easy mode" because it does cost you (and other people) and not acknowledging that is disrespectful
* If you assume that somebody saying "Easy mode has no cost only benefits" actually means "literally zero cost, I'm aware of your feelings on the matter but they do not count" then I would agree that that's offensive. But I would argue that precise and concise communication is hard and rarely worth it in casual conversation. As a result people say slightly-wrong things all the time and this is probably more good than bad overall. As someone who would say "easy mode only has benefits" is approximately correct, I would say that it more accurately translates to "I believe the trade offs for introducing easy mode to be easily worth it", at least when i say it. Which you are free to disagree with, but I feel does not merit the "disrespectful" label.
I'm aware that you made many more arguments, many of which I've not addressed here. But this post is far too long as it is and there's probably no point litigating every detail anyway.
PS: Frohen Ostermontag, hoffe du hattest auch frei heute :)
1. I set my post up in such a way that I first counter the argument that is literally being made every time the topic comes up, and then I steelman it successively to what people probably mean. I think that, depending on what you value, the cost can be significant. I don't mean to convince anyone that they now also have to like hard games, just show that reasons exist why other people might. My argument against the steelmanned version of the argument is that looking at it from a game by game perspective is flawed. The vast majority of games is already easy, therefore the cost of reducing the last remaining hard games is high.
2. That's cool. I don't mean to argue that this is the case for everyone, or that the satisfaction is completely gone. I just noticed for myself that when I grind against a game that I play on a difficult setting, I wonder "What am I doing with my life? Why am I doing this to myself?" but playing it on a lower setting is also boring. I usually don't get that feeling when there is just one difficulty. The answer is obvious, I want to progress in the game and grinding against it is the only way forward.
3. Do you think that the downside of having an easy mode is not important for you or for other people? If it's only for you, then it's not disrespectful, but it also doesn't merit the conclusion that hard games should be exterminated (which is what I am arguing against).
If it's for everyone, I find it disrespectful because it's just blatantly disregarding what many people have already stated about their own frame of mind. Generally, this should be respected, unless there is some strong evidence to the contrary.
If you acknowledge that some people find it important, but you still think that the benefits of including easy modes are more important, it's not disrespectful. Here, I would refer back to the broader perspective of the entire industry, in which difficult games are rare.
I'm not in favour of the extermination of hard games, but for what it's worth, I'm always happy when a game has an easy or story mode. I respect anyone who plays video games as a test of skill (and I can play a lot of games on hard mode if I bother), but I prefer video games as a story-telling medium or immersive exploratory experience, both of which tend to get disrupted by repeatedly dying.
I'm not going to demand an easy/story mode for any game, though. If the devs want to include it, that's great. I'm happy SOMA, for example, had a story mode added; it's easy even without it, but I can savour the environment more in story mode, and pace myself in my exploration as I like (and with all honestly, the scary part of SOMA is the *story*, not the monsters).
There are also some exceptions to the rule of 'disruption'; I don't know what it would mean to make an easy version of, say, Super Meat Boy, or even of Super Hexagon. That seems contrary to the idea of those games. But they're also not about a story (well, Super Meat Boy I guess technically has one, but it's window dressing for a hard platformer).
So, long story short: Agree with your premise. Mildly disagree with some of the arguments presented on an individual basis - games usually mean something different to me than to you, and they almost always gain when they are given a story/easy mode.
That said, I do also mostly play games that don't have modes at all, and wouldn't work at all with them (e.g. Manifold Garden, Antichamber, Baba Is You, et cetera). And I do break myself against some of them, and it's fun; I am still doing Manifold Garden's "The Game Is Not Enough" run, for example. I've solved it, technically, but I think there must be a more elegant solution for the last couple of steps somewhere (the things I'm doing seem overly elaborate compared to the rest of the run) - I've been aggressively avoiding all walkthroughs. There's a meditative quality to the game for me, but it's all exploration, no dying; just endless searching and searching and trying cursed things with cubes.
Folks here might be interested in this: https://www.wired.com/story/deaths-of-effective-altruism/?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us. It’s a pretty critical piece on EA. The author is Leif Wenar, “the Olive H. Palmer Professor of Humanities at Stanford, where he is Professor of Philosophy, and, by courtesy, Professor of Political Science and Professor of Law.”
Ok, Firefox and/or the adblocker on there got rid of the article-blocking subscription pop-up. Apart from the malevolent sleight-of-hand about Saudi Arabian Islam in the first couple of paragraphs, it brings up several objections I usually have when EA comes up, and definitely seems like it's worth digging into in some fashion.
I was coming here to post the same one. I never got that deep into EA, but are Wenar's characterizations of Givewell accurate? I was under the impression that they were a lot more rigorous than this. No ethnographies?
Perhaps I shouldn't give this piece the oxygen - as Scott says, it is terrible. But I have to say that I very much enjoyed the description of rationalists as "mensa with orgies". That's just a funny phrase.
It's also amusing to note that this piece was inspired by a trip to Bali, where the author really got in touch with reality in a whole new way. Dude.
In general I want people to avoid spreading Bad On Purpose To Make You Click things here and enriching their creators, even (especially) if they're about a topic we care about.
If you genuinely think this article is valuable and enlightening, ignore this comment.
As someone who thinks the concept of EA is good but doesn't identify with the EA tribe, I think the article was...surprisingly not that bad. I didn't get the vibe it was deliberately bad on purpose merely to get clicks; I think the author very likely believes the things he wrote: that any given act of charity is likely to have unintended consequences, even when people try really really really really hard to think of all the potential consequences beforehand, and - ahem - maybe take a bit of pride in doing so better than most other people.
But even if the article was nothing but mustache-twirling propaganda against EA, shouldn't all EA evangelists be familiar with its content and able to calmly debunk its points should the article be brought up at a cocktail party or whatever? "Oh yeah, that Wired article. It brought up mosquito nets being used for fishing, but actually that's not a legitimate gotcha because [insert reason here]..."
Like, I dunno, man. Announcing an intention to deliberately ignore mainstream criticism about EA, especially after it's experienced an extremely embarrassing public relations fiasco, doesn't seem like the best defense strategy for EA.
Yeah I thought the article was great and don’t get the hate for it. I have read the replies to it in Reddit and other forums, and no one has challenged the main thrust of the article— instead attacking minor points like “oh fish nets”.
I see a lot of cognitive dissonance in the EA community. If the Catholic pope or the Mormons had bought a £15 million manor in Oxford all the while claiming to help the poor , these same people would have been pointing their fingers and laughing. I suppose people in the cult don’t realise it’s a cult.
The main criticism of the article isn’t even new— Over educated white guilt types who think they can solve other countries problems because they know how to use a spreadsheet and can make everything look “mathematical”.
As someone who grew up in India , I’ve heard this debate a million times before but I’ve never seen such a cultish fervour to a clearly bad idea.
"Announcing an intention to deliberately ignore mainstream criticism about EA, especially after it's experienced an extremely embarrassing public relations fiasco, doesn't seem like the best defense strategy for EA." Yep, that's what I think too. The article linked was harsh, and took a couple of pot shots, but the author is a legit scholar with the proper background on this topic and gave some real criticisms. We're not talking Alex Jones here.
I've been studying factors that correlate with the COVID death rates of US states. The correlations are not all in the same direction, because some factors are good things when high (like GDP per capita) and others when low (like obesity rate.) Here are the correlations I've found, from strongest (largest absolute value) to weakest.
+0.70 Poverty Rate
-0.68 Social Capital Index (State-Level)
+0.58 Gini Coefficient of Inequality
-0.57 Life Expectancy
-0.56 Average IQ
-0.51 % of Adults with High School or Higher
-0.49 % of Adults with Bachelors' Degrees or Higher
+0.46 Obesity Rate
-0.43 % of Population Vaccinated (Fully)
+0.42 % of Population Black
-0.35 GDP Per Capita
-0.33 % of Population Vaccinated (One Dose+)
-0.27 Tax Burden
-0.23 % of Adults with Advanced Degrees
+0.16 % Republicans
-0.083 % of Population White
-0.045 % Democrats
+0.0019 % of Population Urbanized
I'd be happy to add other factors to this list if you point me to decent sources, or discuss the data I've used or other details. We all know about confounding variables, and how spurious correlations can trick us.
Anyway, based on this data, it looks like a lot of things help keep the death rate from a pandemic like COVID down. Being generally healthy helps. Being clever or educated, helps. Being in a rich state, helps. But from a public-policy perspective, if you want to make things hard for the pandemic, what you need to do is get poverty down.
I'm guessing what's going on here is that poor people live in ways that make things easy for the virus. They live in crowded apartments that are often multigenerational. They have employment precarious enough that they can't afford to take days off when they're sick, so they go to work and infect people there. And they delay seeking medical care, because they have trouble affording it.
Edit: Added correlations with vaccination rate (one dose and full) and Social Capital Index.
Most of these are just things that make you more likely to die for any health condition. It'd be helpful to see the same values but for different common disease like heart disease or viruses like the flu. Being poor, overweight, or undereducated is almost always associated with bad health outcomes.
There are statistical approaches to data of this kind that take into account the fact that many of the variables predicting death from Covid are correlated, and would give you a figure for the individual contributions of each variable with the effect of confounds filtered out . I believe regression is what you’d use, though I’m no expert. You should talk to someone who is.
Yes, I suspect there are more powerful or appropriate statistical tools for this sort of thing. I did take some very mathy stats courses back in the day, so I have some idea of what I'm doing, but it has been a long time. Perhaps a masked statistician will step out of the shadows to show me what's what.
Ha, yeah my stats courses are way back in the day too. But I'm pretty sure knowing what stat would work for your data does not require advanced knowledge. And there are some very mathy people on here. I once asked a stats question I knew was pretty hard, and got multiple sophisticated answers, plus a chance to watch a debate among the Mathics regarding some fine points about the optimal approach.
Interesting stuff. I feel like if you did some kind of dimensionality reduction on it, you could probably reduce this quite a bit since there are clearly correlations between several of these items. Take IQ, education, and GDP per capita, for example -- likely pretty tightly correlated. So I suspect you might see a highly predictive factor emerge that ties those things together.
I can't point to a case study, but the Communism Panic (McCarthyism) of the 1950's-1960's was a social nightmare against creatives, there was a ton of shrill debate, they didn't catch a single commie, and the USSR really did have spies, and really did intend to spread communism by insurgency or war.
Thinking about this a bit, it seems like this heuristic is very sensitive to how widely you're looking for people willing to debate. Like, if you want to debate:
a. Evolution didn't happen
b. Vaccines cause autism
c. 9/11 was an inside job
d. The holocaust didn't happen
e. Sex with animals and children is fine
etc.
you will find that most people will not want to debate you on these matters. There are people who will debate you on all five of them *someplace* in the world/on the internet, because the world and internet are big places. But like 99.9% of people and forums are going to tell you to get lost with your "the holocaust never happened, fight me" bit, because life's too short to argue with either trolls, crazy people, or idiots, and approximately everyone who wants to have that debate with you is one of those three.
Similarly, people will get very mad at you for (d) and (e). The reason isn't the rightness/wrongness of the claim (young Earth creationism is more counterfactual than holocaust denial, in the sense that there's more contradictory evidence to explain, but most people don't get that mad about it), it's the emotional and social and political implications and overtones. For that matter, (e) is a moral argument which no factual evidence can really answer, but you're arguing for violating some very basic moral intuitions in our society, so people are going to get very emotional about the matter.
So I don't think these heuristics are all that useful, neither the calmness one nor the willing-to-debate one.
The calmness heuristic also has the property of biasing your conclusions when the position is more emotionally salient for one side than another. If you're proposing taking away everyone's children and having them raised in state-run creches, parents are going to be a whole lot more emotional and angry about the whole plan than non-parents, and yet I don't think that tells you whether the proposal is a good one.
Have you ever see one person (kids, usually) verbally torment another after getting under their skin (metaphorically speaking)? One appears calm and smiling, and the other is a foaming ball of rage.
Well, I personally see nothing wrong with these heuristics. When I talk about wanting to kill people, everyone's like "waaah, you can't just kill innocent people, human life has intrinsic value!!!" Pure hysterical nonsense, of course. And then when I try to debate them on the possible utility value for killing people, they just keep making excuses, like that "murder is abhorrent and unethical no matter what" and "please start taking your medication again". Obviously they're just too scared to admit that I might be right.
Then Caplan ought to embrace 'far-right' views on race.
Leftists on race: Hysterical screeching about "nazism" "white supremacy" "oppression", use of threats, abuse, actual violence to silence dissenting views, construction of elaborate oppression narratives and hostility to any disagreement with these, significant use of 'lived experience' (anecdotal) evidence, intolerance of dissident speakers from even appearing on a university campus, trying to get dissident scholars fired and their access to databases cut off , think it should be literally illegal to claim race differences exist
Rightists: Dispassionate posting of data, statistical analyses, scientific studies, interested in falsifiable claims that can be tested, support s|c|i|h|u|b and think that scientific studies should be freely accessible to everyone and that scientists shouldn't be beholden to ideological restrictions on their research
Obviously flattering my own ideological convictions here, but this is pretty trivially true from a broad perspective.
And "grey tribe" aren't a thing - they're just the more reasonable blue tribers.
I think there's not a royal road to getting the right answer without evaluating the actual arguments. Most controversies don't matter enough to worry about, some do and then you actually can't get by on deciding which side has more red faces and raised voices, any more than you can get by on which side has more women and people of color, or which side has better-dressed people advocating for it, or whatever.
Many fringe ideas with diehard supporters fit this. Consider: I'm not willing to debate Mormons that stop by my door. Or consider people being emotional towards Holocaust deniers.
IMO heuristics arise when a correlation is observed. There's definitely a correlation between debate/discussion and finding truth. But a high correlation only lets you speak generally, not about specific instances.
But there are plenty of people who debate Mormons, I can find a hundred Mormon debates on Youtube if I want to. Same goes for Holocaust deniers. I'm not saying that anyone who refuses a debate is wrong: I'm saying that if one side systematically refuses to engage in debate it's likely wrong. The anti-Mormon side and the anti-denier side does not systematically refuse debate.
EDIT: I guess the Holocaust deniers actually doesn't get debated much even though they want to. It's hard to find a serious debate with David Irving, for example. Also the laws against it in e.g. Germany. I guess this is the exception I was looking for.
I guess the other category of people who wouldn't want to debate would be people who believe that public discussion about a topic is going to do more harm than good.
Maybe I don't want to debate you on vaccines causing autism because I think more discussion of the matter is in general going to "raise awareness" of a goofy non-issue and convince more idiots not to get their kids vaccinated for measles, and lead to more suffering in the world. (That is, I think your claims are wrong but debating them in public will lend them credence.)
Maybe I don't want to debate you on the cause of the black/white IQ difference because I think it's better that fewer people know about it at all--I may agree with you on the factual question but think it should not be discussed in public because most people ought not to hear about it. (Maybe because I think most people are waiting for an excuse to put on Klan robes and this will do it, maybe because I think most people will come to dumb conclusions when they try to understand the difference between a population, population mean, and individual drawn from a population and will end up thinking black physicists are dumber than Asian janitors.)
Maybe I don't want to debate you on it because I think it's some kind of infohazard--for example, maybe I think civilization relies on widespread shared religious belief, and so a public debate about the existence of God has the potential to wreck civilization. This could be consistent with me agreeing or disagreeing with you.
(1) In the Mellow Heuristic, how "emotional" is emotional? What are the signs of (bad) emotions? Raised voice? Agitated body language? that's just good public speaking, there is a reason that both politicians and evangelists (defined broadly as those arguing for a religion) converged to it across hundreds of cultures and thousands of different eras. Good pedagogy and good public speaking are not how you know Evil, Evil just so happens to independently rediscover that good pedagogy and good public speaking are excellent ways of convincing people of what otherwise is laughable and/or indefensible. But "All people using good pedagogy and good public speaking techniques are Evil/Wrong" is a pretty terrible lesson to take from that.
After you filter out the usual signs of enthusiasm, what remains as signs of (bad) emotions are just obviously bad things that we already have bad names for. Ad-Hominem for one. You don't have to be emotional to use it either.
(2) Separately but relatedly to (1), people use Russell Conjugation with emotions all the time. You're "Crying" or "Bitching" about X, but I'm "bringing Y to the attention" of people. You have "hysterical fear" from X, or are X-phobic, but I merely have a "rational disdain" towards Y. The Mellow Heuristic naively assumes that words for emotions are the emotions themselves, it can be fooled as easily as renaming "Anger" to "Irritation" or renaming "Disgust" to "Repulsion". That's not a rare skill, every corporate manager and HR personnel have learned to master it. I had a job where instead of the manager saying "We're firing you" (bad, aggressive, emotional), he says "We can't commit to extending your contract after ${date}" (calm, cool-headed, not emotional). What difference does it actually make? Not much, but according to the Mellow Heuristic it's a Night-And-Day distinction. (insert a meme about "I Sleep" vs. "Real Shit" here)
(3) Separately but relatedly to (1), how much, time- and space- wise, emotion is "emotional"? Can I continuously goad an opponent into lashing out by - say - repeatedly mis-representing their views and/or repeatedly implying sexual jokes about his mother, then edit and post the one 3-minutes segment they lashed out in on my YouTube under the title "${opponent name} RAGES OUT AT ME" and sit back and relax while the Mellow Heuristic does its magic? Can I pick my opponent from among a dispossessed and/or poor subset (e.g. a pro-Palestine advocate who is actually a refugee from Gaza, or - if you like - a 1930s-era pro-Jew advocate who is actually a refugee from Nazi Germany) and then watch as the naturally angry and emotional (because poverty) opponent fall on the wrong side of the heuristic?
(4) Assuming the debate and/or communication is happening over text, as a lot of debates and communications are nowadays - how are you going to reliably detect emotions at all?
(5) All the usual points about some debates/arguments being extremely emotionally asymmetric, where one side does indeed have a very good reason to be angry/emotional (in a bad way), which other people have made so I'm not going to repeat. But again, in an echo of my points (2) and (3), this asymmetry can in some sense always be manufactured if you know what you're doing: I know the exact words to use and the exact framing to frame things with in order to goad a Pro-Israel commenter - especially one who lives in Israel or have family there - into lashing out, and if the Pro-Israel commenter is smart he/she also knows plenty of things to say which can make me lash out worse than a volcano (if I'm not aware that this is exactly his/her intention, and counter it accordingly). As a matter of fact, **I** know those things too, which is a partial defense against falling for them when the bad faith Pro-Israel commenters use them.
It's Bad On Purpose To Make You Fall On The Bad Side Of The Mellow Heuristic.
(6) In the Debate Heuristic, why is it always assumed that verbal swinging is the one true way to arrive at truth? Mathematical Proofs aren't decided like that, Science isn't settled like that, Computer Programs aren't judged like that, vast swaths of human knowledge and expertise isn't expressible in Natural Language, let alone spoken Natural Language in a debate format. Do you want an argument about Quantum Computing to be settled by Scott Aronson on one hand talking in Natural Language in a debate format with one of his random crank emailers?
(7) Separately but relatedly to (6), Debates select for plenty of qualities other than being right, such as having plenty of time and money, being comfortable talking in front of an audience, and being of a generally equal status to your debate opponents (same rough amount of perceived attractiveness, education, money, ...). In particular, Debates select for people who feel safe enough to express their opinions in a debate: that's very non-trivial, Atheists living in the Middle East don't tend to debate the religious, for obvious reasons.
This point can prevent a debate even downstream of an obvious sacred cow, let's say I'm Vegetarian, atheist, but I also want to pretend I'm a Muslim, the very obvious problem with this is that Islam explicitly and repeatedly tells Muslims to slaughter animals. Vegetarianism isn't - at face value - particularly connected to whether there is a God or not, but because the Islamic God made it particularly clear that Vegetarians are cringe, every Vegetarian must either be ready to declare they are atheist (and fight the whole resulting mini-war) or debate with one hand tied behind their back.
(8) Debates are only as good as your opponent, your audience, and your debate moderators, a debate about Heliocentrism moderated by 15th century Church Fathers and the audience being ordinary people of the time who can't multiply numbers because Latin numerals are hard isn't going to arrive anywhere meaningful anytime soon, no matter how "rational" and "calm" it is.
It seems to me that you're nitpicking, which is fine but just know that's the vibe. I like the debating game so lets go. I'll focus on the debate heuristic since I'm more interested in that one:
> (6) In the Debate Heuristic, why is it always assumed that verbal swinging is the one true way to arrive at truth?
I call it the debate *heuristic* and not the debate *one true way* for a reason. Obviously there are situations (e.g. engineering) where you can just check who's right because their solutions work in reality.
>(7) Separately but relatedly to (6), Debates select for plenty of qualities other than being right, such as having plenty of time and money
Sure. It's a heuristic. Still I can't think of any major case where it has failed. Atheists in theocracies are a pretty good example of the heuristic: the theocracy bans debate while the atheists seem to want it, so heuristically the theocracy is wrong.
>(8) Debates are only as good as your opponent, your audience, and your debate moderators
Sure. Debates aren't perfect and will never be. It doesn't affect my argument.
Eh, does it count as nitpicking when you post a (very flawed) heuristic and explicitly ask for failure modes, and I post many many failure modes? I don't think it should.
> Obviously there are situations (e.g. engineering) where you can just check who's right because their solutions work in reality.
But this is still not a bulletproof way. Consider a new programming language, nothing has been written in it yet, and that doesn't prevent it from being a legitimately superior language to all the ones with millions of lines of code.
The confounder is always present, whenever you have a heuristic for shortcutting to a truth, there is always plenty of situations where it shortcuts against the more truthful positions. I'm not claiming that you don't know this, I'm saying it anyway because your original post is (or phrased as) too impressed with a very faulty heuristic so as to give the impression that it works unusually well.
> Atheists in theocracies are a pretty good example of the heuristic: the theocracy bans debate while the atheists seem to want it, so heuristically the theocracy is wrong.
Right, that's how you choose to interpret it, but the theocracy begs to differ. The "Theocracy" isn't really one unified thing, it's a distributed mass of people who are all very angry you don't want to admit their God is right. No one is particularly in charge of this, they all independently want you dead or just to shut up. From the Theocracy's point of view, it didn't even incite against you, you're just so utterly and pitifully wrong that people are independently wishing you were dead so you can finally shut up.
Consider a pilot or an astronomer who wants to debate Flat Earth is right, but is afraid of the professional consequences, which would translate to severe loss of income. Consider a biologist who wants to debate Evolution is wrong. Your interpretation of the Debate Heuristic would seem to claim that they're right, after all no one is giving them an opportunity to debate.
> Debates aren't perfect and will never be. It doesn't affect my argument.
I mean yeah it does, because 90% of everything is shit. 90% of people haven't done their homework. The vast vast majorities of people everywhere believe laughable religious stories. Debates, especially when posted on social media, attracts those majorities and make whatever party telling them what they want to hear "win".
Your argument is blaming those who don't want to debate, and I'm telling you that this isn't reasonable when they're almost certainly going to lose no matter their arguments or the truth value of their claims because vast majorities of people "emotionally" (but in a crowd sense) hate them. That definitely seems relevant to your argument.
I still feel like you're typing words to win an argument and not really engaging with the idea. But whatever.
>because your original post is (or phrased as) too impressed with a very faulty heuristic so as to give the impression that it works unusually well.
Please give examples of actual real world situations where the heuristic fails (as I asked for in the original post), not artificial thought experiments about atheist Iranians that doesn't hold up anyway.
>Right, that's how you choose to interpret it, but the theocracy begs to differ.
No, the theocracy does not differ. They are very explicit that they don't want any debate. They pass laws to against apostasy. When someone tries to arrange a debate, they shut it down. If you ask a leader of the theocracy if debates should be allowed, he will say "no".
>Consider a pilot or an astronomer who wants to debate Flat Earth is right, but is afraid of the professional consequences, which would translate to severe loss of income.
People used to die for the truth, but I guess we're down to this. Yes, in this case, I would see that no-one wan't to defend flat earth in a debate and I would conclude that flat earth is false. Is that a problem?
>Consider a biologist who wants to debate Evolution is wrong.
That biologist would likely earn more money on the creationists side, but whatever. There's already a lively creationism vs. evolution debate so the loss of this brave soul isn't back-breaking.
>Your argument is blaming those who don't want to debate, and I'm telling you that this isn't reasonable when they're almost certainly going to lose no matter their arguments or the truth value of their claims because vast majorities of people "emotionally" (but in a crowd sense) hate them.
Well, I don't care if they win or lose debate, I just care that they debate. If one side claim that they cannot meaningfully debate because the vitroll from the other side makes it impossible or unsafe, it's usually quite easy to see if they are correct (if so: win goes to them) or lying (if so: win goes to the other side).
For some reason, a meta-demonstration of point (4) in my first comment about how it's generally impossible to determine tone from text has just accidentally occurred, and you seem to infer a hostile tone in my posts that isn't really there. I will assume this is a mistake, and I reiterate that I'm not attacking you or trying to "win" some imaginary fight in my brain on your expense, but I'm legitimately arguing against your heuristic because I think it's a terrible and quite naive/wrong/out-of-touch heuristic that can only be believed by someone if their views are socially dominant (at least inside a bubble).
> Please give examples of actual real world situations where the heuristic fails
I thought that people already gave you plenty of this in other comments, that's why I didn't bother with more examples in my first comment and focused on a more abstract takedown. If you want a novel example, consider Revolutions. Revolutionaries aren't good debaters, and Revolution happens because debate failed to move the country forward. This doesn't need to imply any sort of Free Speech repression by the way. In some bad regimes it's perfectly okay to criticize the leaders till the cows come home, and the regime loyalists will then take their sweet sweet time to debate you. All the while, the status quo (the actual regime) is going to move forward with actual material decisions that have devastating practical consequences for you anyway, no matter who won the debate.
> not artificial thought experiments about atheist Iranians that doesn't hold up anyway.
Not all theocracies work like Iran, and you implicitly assuming this is a subtle fault in your mental model of religious societies.
> People used to die for the truth, but I guess we're down to this.
I mean, this is fine, but why won't you call it instead "The Truth Jesus Heuristic" then? People generally don't want to die for the truth (or die for anything really), yes, and assuming that people who don't want to die for the truth are automatically the wrong side in the debate would lead you to ridiculous conclusions.
How many of your beliefs are *you* willing to die for anyway? Willing to lose your job for? Willing to be made fun of and be the butt of jokes for the rest of your life for?
> Is that a problem?
Sure it is, because that would lead you to assume that since no one wants to debate God doesn't exist in comparatively "tolerant" religious societies that will "merely" fire and ostracize you for being an atheist, therefore those people are wrong and God does in fact exist.
Again, you take a "Freedom of Speech doesn't mean Freedom from Consequences" view that I find - quite honestly - really naive and obviously wrong. Yes, absolutely, the Creationist or Flat Earther who fears the loss of income is in an exactly analogous situation of millions of atheists everywhere, and that doesn't mean Creationism or Flat Earth is correct (unlike atheism, which *is* correct). Therefore, your heuristic is quite wrong and almost worse than useless outside of very narrow niches.
> Well, I don't care if they win or lose debate, I just care that they debate.
But why would *they* care about what you care? Let's I'm a revolutionary in some faraway country, I have an option where I'm 20% likely to defeat the regime by doing <some non-debate activity>, or an option of debate where I'm perhaps 1% likely to defeat the regime through pure words but 100% likely to get the admiration of outsiders who know nothing about the country or its history and social structure and have 0 chance of ever helping me, what option do I pick?
It's only you who would bet on the wrong side and lose (assuming you care about the truth) if you follow your heuristic, but people in the midst of socio-political or economical struggles with massive life-long consequences generally don't have the option of debating, or debating well, or debating convincingly, they lose nothing by ignoring your heuristic.
Not relevant to my point (and probably false as well). Once again, it's "Assume that the side willing to debate is right", not "Assume that the side who is good at debate is right".
>Revolution happens because debate failed to move the country forward.
Not relevant to my point.
>In some bad regimes it's perfectly okay to criticize the leaders till the cows come home, and the regime loyalists will then take their sweet sweet time to debate you.
I guess my heuristic can't be deployed then.
>Not all theocracies work like Iran, and you implicitly assuming this is a subtle fault in your mental model of religious societies.
Sigh. But sure, no hostile tone here. Moving on. Please enlighten me on the theocracies that promoted open debate while the atheists refused to engage.
>People generally don't want to die for the truth (or die for anything really), yes, and assuming that people who don't want to die for the truth are automatically the wrong side in the debate would lead you to ridiculous conclusions.
My heuristic assumes that the people who do the killing are on the wrong side. I don't understand how you can keep missing this. You keep trying to invent bizarre theoretical scenarios in which the correct side is simultaneously unwilling to debate due to threats while also these threats are so subtle that no observer can detect them. That never happens IRL. Threats are obvious: else they don't work.
>Sure it is, because that would lead you to assume that since no one wants to debate God doesn't exist in comparatively "tolerant" religious societies that will "merely" fire and ostracize you for being an atheist, therefore those people are wrong and God does in fact exist.
Same error as above. Why on Earth would I think that the people who fire and ostracize people who debate are willing to debate?
>but people in the midst of socio-political or economical struggles with massive life-long consequences generally don't have the option of debating, or debating well, or debating convincingly, they lose nothing by ignoring your heuristic.
Even if the poor faraway revolutionaries or whatever are too busy to debate (and I don't fault them for that), there's usually some western fanclub and I can observe their debate-willingness. But if the faraway revolutionaries and their western fanbase refuses to debate even though they are well compensated for it then I think it reflects badly on them. But once again, we are talking pure theorethics here.
A good common example of a place this breaks down now is evolution vs creationism--I think it is more common for creationists than evolutionists to want to debate, but the evidence for evolution is really very strong.
This demonstrates more of a higher level point, which is that all these debates are more often false binaries than not. Many serious successful people these days think both sides of the evolution vs creation debate are laughably wrong, because they think it obvious we are a simulation.
I think there are plenty of evolutionists who are happy to debate. So the heuristic isn't needed here: I can just watch the debate and see which side has the strongest arguments (and especially which side is able to make testable predictions).
Can both sides even agree on the rules of the game? I wouldn't debate a creationist, because I would assume that the rules of the game are set in their favor.
Imagine that the creationist gives 20 examples of "this could not have evolved", and the evolutionist explains 19 of them, and says "well, we do not know yet how this one thing could have evolved" about the last 1. I suspect that most people would summarize this as "the creationist won the debate". Because it does not matter how much the evolutionist can explain, but how much they cannot. (You can't really prove evolution, you can only falsify it, right?)
In other words, the evolutionist needs to be omniscient in order to win the debate. The creationist only needs to give enough examples to hit one of the evolutionist's blind spots. As I do not consider myself omniscient, I would avoid the debate. (Unless perhaps the creationist would agree to provide all their examples of "irreducible complexity" before the debate, and agree not to add new ones on the spot after I did my homework explaining the provided ones.)
I’d say, in general (as in the cases of women’s suffrage and slavery above) the heuristic fails when the point at issue is a genuinely outrageous status quo. (“Genuinely” is, I realise, doing a lot of work here.)
It doesn't. People around you might try to make you pick a side, but they also tell you the side they want you to pick. In the vacuum where you're using this metric, "don't get involved" is the correct choice.
I don't agree with OP's heuristics, but I'm also of the opinion that this type of "Swiss neutrality" isn't really possible. First, it's against instinct, you naturally tend to judge anything that comes before your eyes.
Secondly, neutrality is just favoring the status quo, on things that require actions. "Not doing anything" ? That in and of itself a thing that you just did, a thing which advantages one side and disadvantages another.
>Secondly, neutrality is just favoring the status quo, on things that require actions. "Not doing anything" ? That in and of itself a thing that you just did, a thing which advantages one side and disadvantages another.
I don't think that either conclusion, lab leak or zoonosis, particularly favors the status quo. Even if either conclusion were proven absolutely definitively in the case of Covid, it wouldn't change the fact that we already knew that lab leaks can happen and have killed people, and we already knew cross-species infections can happen and have killed people. Neither conclusion, even if definitive, would alter the risk landscape by much.
My own conclusion from that debate was - yeah, zoonosis looks a bit more probable than lab leak, (so, in that sense, I'm close to Swiss neutral) but the more frustrating lesson for me was that, even with both sides presenting their evidence and documenting their reasoning in detail:
>The six estimates span twenty-three orders of magnitude. Even if we remove Peter (who’s kind of trolling), the remaining estimates span a range of ~7 OOMs. And even if we remove Saar (limiting the analysis to neutral non-participants), we’re still left with a factor-of-50 difference.
>50x sounds good compared to 23 OOMs. But it only sounds good because everyone except Saar leaned heavily towards zoonosis. If raters were closer to even, it would become problematic: even a factor of 50x is enough to change 80-20 lab leak to 80-20 natural.
which sounds like a disaster for systematically evaluating the odds of a factual, non-value-laden, question with systematic presentation of detailed evidence, and (unlike AI questions) no issues of trying to estimate the odds of novel technological developments.
"Every choice is picking a side" is just linguistic nitpicking. My decision to take a nap this afternoon is not "supporting the status quo", and a definition that says it is should be thrown out. "Those who are not with us are against us" is a self-destructive ideology that will make you far more enemies than you would otherwise have.
You should not be trying to overthrow the status quo based on vibes. You need a decisive reason to do it. It's there because people wanted it there, and on percentage you win far more often leaving it alone than fighting it.
Your decision to take a nap this afternoon is not supporting the status quo because you deliberately chose this example to be so in order to make the statement ridiculous, but your decision (e.g.) to not protest in support or against the Iraq war was a support of the status quo, your decision to not protest in support or against the Gaza war is a support of the status quo, and so on for all topic that people are arguing/fighting about.
>"Those who are not with us are against us" is a self-destructive ideology that will make you far more enemies than you would otherwise have.
The statement you're objecting to doesn't necessarily have to be interpreted like this, that's a naive interpretation.
> You should not be trying to overthrow the status quo based on vibes. You need a decisive reason to do it.
Mmm yes, and? When did I say I am against this? I'm of the opinion that "Swiss neutrality" is not possible, therefore you should read about and follow as much arguments as possible, so that you can actually take whatever decisions you can (if possible) based on informed opinion, not "vibes".
In practice, sometimes you're too powerless and an issue is too remote that "Swiss neutrality" is indeed well-approximated, approximated but never entirely true, as there is nothing that your info stream makes known that isn't the topic of debate **somewhere**, and globalization makes it harder to argue that your actions don't have consequences *somewhere*, by however amount.
> It's there because people wanted it there
No, not at all. The status quo is there because dead people wanted it, dead people that had desires and beliefs that doesn't necessarily align with those of the actual people that the status quo affects right now. It's also there because the occasional (m/b)illionaire wanted it, because a state imposed it by violence, or by pure Brownian motion. It's definitely not there because some mysterious coherent "Will" of some people chose it.
Every heuristic has an error rate. I think that those have a reasonably high one, but probably low enough to be useful in the absence of other information.
Basically, but IRL Hitler wasn't very calm or interested in calm rational debate. I don't know everything about the political climate in Germany in 1930 but my impression is that the Nazis did a lot of emoting and debate-refusing.
Maybe if Hitler had been calm and prepared to debate rationally, he wouldn't had been a Nazi?
But isn't this just because he had power? He had submarines and the Luftwaffe under his command, why the duck would he debate you when he can simply order Junker ju-87s to rain hell down on your head? In an alternative reality maybe Hitler *could* have won the third Reich purely by debate charisma, I know Mein Kampf's writing is atrocious according to those who have read it, but that's because it was his first piece of writing, he was what, 20-something at the time? He had plenty of time and legitimate grievances to hone his writing and debate skills in order to convince you that Jews *are* to blame for Germany's defeat in 1918. Not that he has to do this himself, there are plenty of philosophers and writers and storytellers and academics who can wield Language like a devastating weapon.
This has modern analogs in real life, if Jeff Bezos/Elon Musk/Biden disagree with one of their employees, this isn't settled by debate, this is settled by firing the employee in question or at the very least simply ignoring them and going ahead with the leader's opinions anyway. This mostly doesn't happen because a smart CEO/president knows to not have opinions on the subject matter of the experts under him (or, if the CEO *is* an expert, he doesn't ask another expert at all), but it occasionally happens. Even in the hypothetical situation where you are indeed locked in a debate with Jeff Bezos, Jeff Bezos can utterly demolish you with nothing else but paying lots of philosophers and PR people to phrase his position in the most flattering, galaxy-brained vocabulary, and by always retreating to his wealth ("good argument, but I can't help but notice that it haven't brought you a single million") when you have a good point, which convinces way more people than you would think.
You seem to misunderstand my heuristic: It's not "Assume whoever wins the debate is right" or "Assume whomever strongest right". But you seem to misunderstand everything I write so whatever.
I do think I understand your heuristic correctly, it's "Assume whoever refuses to debate to be wrong", isn't it? Do correct me if I'm wrong.
My examples are instances where it's very rational and intelligent to refuse to debate: refusing to debate millionaires and refusing to debate your boss. Your heuristic would lead you in those cases to assume "Hahaha dumb afraid-of-debate opinion-havers", whereas in reality there is a very good reason to refuse to debate and *you* would probably refuse to debate in the same circumstances too, no matter how much you think you're right. It's in this sense that I think your standard is (a) not sincere (b) unfair.
Is Grey Tribe always keen to engage in debate? Is there some way of demonstrating this beyond just vibes?
One issue with "willingness to debate" as a criteria is that it's fairly easy to *define* a reasonable debate in a way that tacitly assumes the foundations of your side's worldview.
So, take creationism and postmodernism. These are, we can agree, ridiculous ideologies. And yet their ridiculousness relies on accepting certain foundational assumptions like the objectivity of the scientific method. But no *true* creationist or postmodernist will accept those things.
So, you either say "we're willing to debate you, where debate means staying within the bounds of scientific objectivity". Which is to them no different from communists being willing to debate you, where debate means staying within the bounds of marxist-leninist doctrine.
Or you try to debate from absolute first principles, without assuming anything. And that, it seems to me, relies on *solving* some centuries-old long-standing problems in philosophy.
You start from first principles (and getting anywhere takes years, if you even can). Or you start from assumptions, and the other side can always claim the debate was rigged from the start.
Tl; dr the meaning of "debate" is doing the work here, and I see no easy way around this.
Grey tribers/autists/nerds/malebrains/whatever-you-want-to-call-it seem to enjoy debates. "A rationalist is someone who disagree with Yudkowsky", as the old saying goes. I don't know if there's a demonstration to your liking, I'm sure you can poll people on "how much do you enjoy listening to political debates?", "do you ever argue online?" and such and you will get huge over-representation in the demographic I describe.
I don't think your objection is an actual problem in practice. Usually debates don't happen because one side is openly against debate, not because they can't agree to the bounds of the debate. (And there are plenty of creationists who are willing to debate within the bounds of scientific objectivity (even though they often strain against it). The entire point of Intelligent Design is to give the impression of staying within the bounds of scientific objectivity.)
On the first point, I don't have any particular reason to think this is false, but a few assorted facts make me a bit unsure. Less Wrong banned political discussion as "mind-killing" and Scott seems to have very conspicuously avoided talking about many political issues in a clear way in recent years. Silicon Valley has been falling over themselves to censor content in the last few years. And many "nerd" environments were among the absolute first places to be taken over by speech-stifling woke ideology.
If you say those are really the fault of Blue Tribe, that just makes me question how meaningful the Blue-Grey distinction really is. How much of a tribe are you when large amounts of your tertitory are under the firm control of another tribe?
On the second point, my feeling is that this *is* a primary reason for a lot of debate refusals. A lot of wokists and feminists don't want to debate someone who won't accept what they regard as "their basic humanity". This is defined in practice as agreeing with all of their controversial beliefs as a matter of assumption. But, while some of them are definitely just power-hungry and trying to avoid scrutiny, many do seem to actually believe that, say, not acceping the necessity of defunding the police *means* not accepting that black people have rights. We regard this as an insane and toxic attitude, but how do you break through this dogmatic belief-structure?
And if you say we simply don't accept any initial assumptions that aren't subject to debate...well, this isn't true because we want the existence of objective truth, the validity of science, the reality of an external world separate from our own minds and so on, to be accepted without having to be proved. Some religious apologists would say that *these* assumptions are unreasonable (as we think the woke ones are), and that you shouldn't be allowed to just assume an objective ordered universe, you should have to prove this a priori.
Coherent debate isn't really possible without some assumptions. These assumptions could range through "accept the scientific method", "accept that anything a black person calls racist, is by definition racist", and "accept that Great Leader Stalin is correct about literally anyhing". I have my own opinions on where that line should be drawn; you have yours. Maybe they're very close (though I think a lot of things rationalists accept largely as unquestioned assumptions, such as the existence of the external world, are in fact unsolved problems in philosophy).
But all I'm really saying is that when people disagree on where that line should be, and they nearly always do, resolving that is very far from a trivial question.
Could you elaborate on that connection? Are you saying that grey tribe lets blue tribe take over their spaces because of their fear of red tribe? Or are you saying something else?
What you are referring to as the blue tribe engages in what Barro refers to as stolen base politics. The idea that you don't actually have to compete with opponents, you declare their opposition illegitimate so people don't have an actual choice but to support your side. Freddie de Boer similarly claims that others on the left engage in "working the refs" even though there are no refs: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/there-is-no-such-thing-as-justice
Of course, while there aren't refs to win your election for you, there is management/HR in the organizations where many such people work. And thus "In the 21st century, the main question in American social life is not “how do we make that happen?” but “how do we get management to take our side?”" https://scholars-stage.org/on-cultures-that-build/
As the others above. This is just another name for tone policing, which has long been regarded as a fallacy. It's calculated to work in favour of those who are already in a position of power, who can always dismiss people arguing stridently for their rights as "hysterical". Fairly basic conservative strategy.
I want to explain why I think that, although there is such a thing as a Tone Fallacy, most of the time mentioning it is not contructive and is fallacious itself.
Basically it's often used to promote bad arguments, and even people arguing in good faith don't realise they're doing this.
Consider four hypothetical (and linguistically anachronistic) suffragette statements:
1. "Well personally I think women should be able to vote, but I totally respect different opinions" -- nice tone, terrible argument
2. "Let's reason respectfully about this. Here are ten reasons why giving women the vote follows naturally from the principles of democracy we all claim to accept." -- nice tone, good argument
3. "Let me make this crystal clear. I *demand* the right to vote, and that is *not fucking up for debate!" -- nasty tone, terrible argument
4. "I'm so fucking sick of dealing with you morons. Over and over it's been explained to you why women's suffrage follows from the principles of democracy [citation], and you fuckers never respond, you just appeal to your butthurt neckbeard misogyny. Fuck you all." -- nasty tone, good argument
A few points.
First, if you make a statement like 3 and are told to calm down or grow up, don't assume the objection is to your emotion rather than the fact that your statement was *only* emotion, and contained no argument (or anything resembling an argument) whatsoever.
Second, a tone objection is only a fallacy if used against statement 4. From a logical perspective, statements 2 and 4 deserve full respect, and statements 1 and 3 deserve complete dismissal and contempt. The latter don't make the position they advocate wrong, but they do suggest the person making them has never thought about the issue in any depth and has no business being involved in a public discussion of it.
Third, even though in theory 3 and 1 deserve equal contempt, in practice many people (including me) will be willing to somewhat forgive 1's bad (or non-existent) reasoning, and even help them out and make their argument for them to advance discussion, something we certainly won't be doing for 3. So it might seem to speakers of 3 that they're being denied respect because of their nasty tone, when in actuality they and 1-speakers have not earned any respect at all, since they've made no attemped arguments...but some of us will give 1-speakers respect anyway as an act of niceness or charity, since they were nice themselves.
Fourth, my experience is that 4-statements are not very common, probably because when a speaker is putting all their energy into their emotion, there's not much left for reasoning. So although in theory Tone Objections are appropriate half the time(in response to 3) and inappropriate half the time (in response to 4), in practice they're probably appropriate the vast majority of the time. And again, not because of the presence of emotion, but because of the absence of anything *but* emotion.
So... Yeah, I get your classification, and your examples are good. But there are a couple of problems here.
1) You're assuming that the people judging the nastiness and quality of the arguments are in fact competent to do that. One thing that can be seen in lots of historical examples is that the people who were in power (men who already possessed the right to vote in the suffragette example) were in fact no smarter than the people making the arguments. And in fact often engaged in egregious motivated reasoning to claim that an argument was bad; and in fact often engaged in egregious setting of arbitrary standards in order to enable themselves to classify argument X as nasty.
2) There's a conservative bias built right into the structure of your reactions. You say you'd entertain a polite bad argument much more than a nasty bad argument (completely understandable on a human level, of course). Seeing as we know all too well that most arguments are bad, that pretty much means that you're going to spend most of your time entertaining the ideas of people who butter you up. That's not really a way of seeking the truth; it's a way of building patronage-based relations with a veneer of debate on top.
3) You ignore the differential impacts of the issue on those who already have and those who have not. The goal of the "don't tone police" heuristic is to ensure that a majority who is blissfully ignorant of the plight of the minority doesn't ignore them because they get so stroppy, when their rights/livelihoods/lives are at stake. To avoid the "Beatings will continue until your manners improve" syndrome.
But there's something lurking behind all this that needs addressing, which is the fundamental dishonesty of the positions that say "X should not have various rights". The real problem around the women's movement, the gay rights movement, the black rights movement, etc. was never the tone of the arguments made by the victims. The problem was that the system they were protesting was corrupt. There never were *good* arguments for denying the rights of women.
Heuristics like "don't tone police" are restrictions which people who hold authority should impose upon themselves. They are a reminder to ourselves to keep listening to the arguments of others, even when they grate on our ears. They are supposed to help us stop ourselves falling into the self-satisfied assumptions that we are right, and that we don't have to listen to X arguments, because we have judged them, and found those arguments wanting.
Thought about this way, it doesn't respond very well to Caplan's heuristic (which I still don't see much value in, but that's a different question). He's talking about looking at arguments as a third party. I think the "don't tone police" reminder is most effective as a rule for debate participants.
>One thing that can be seen in lots of historical examples is that the people who were in power (men who already possessed the right to vote in the suffragette example) were in fact no smarter than the people making the arguments. And in fact often engaged in egregious motivated reasoning to claim that an argument was bad [...]
And, let's not forget, often did not themselves deign to engage in anything resembling thoughtful debate. "Stop fussing and get your pretty self back into the kitchen" isn't an argument no matter how kindly the tone.
This is a reasonable comment with some good points. But since elsewhere in this thread you've openly said you're not bothering to read my responses to you because they're "too long", I'm really not sure if it's worth engaging with you.
Well, I'm going to try one more time, if only for the sake of observers. I don't know how long it's going to be, and I'm not going to simplify things for the sake of low-effort and low-attention readers. If that's a problem for you, I suggest you might be happier on TikTok.
(If, however, you could decide that participating in a text-based discussion on an intelligent forum requires actually putting in the effort to *read* other people's posts, then maybe we can have a productive discussion.)
1. This is a valid point. The main problem I have with it is that it Proves Too Much (https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/13/proving-too-much/). Once you start saying we can't state some fact (in this case, "your tone is nasty") because people can't be trusted not to use motivated reasoning to falsely state that fact when it suits them...well, you've effectively ruled out ever acknowledging any fact that has the slightest possible subjectivity. Importantly, this exact argument can be used to dismiss anyone arguing for "their rights" or even anyone claiming that some policy is hurting them: people have an incentive to claim that anything they want is their right, and to claim that anything they don't like (no matter how trivial the reason) is "hurting" them.
So, although I mentioned in a reply to MedievalCat that "deciding within what bounds to hold a debate" is a difficult question with no clear answer...I think it's clear we need to be able to acknowledge *some* widely-held standards for discussion, even if it's theoretically possible that some people will misuse these standards for an unfair advantage. For people at all familiar with our general culture, things like "using as many expletives and personal attacks as possible" are clearly not within those standards.
If you disagree, you'd need to bite the bullet and accept that "anyone who argues for position X will be murdered by my brown shirts" is as much a legitimate argument as any, and shouldn't be disallowed. Or that someone speaking in a language they just made up has to be listened to, and it's other people's fault for not understanding them.
Short version: your position, if followed consistently, makes all basis for coherent discussion impossible.
2. I disagree that "most arguments are bad" is true, in the sense that I'm using the word "argument". The statements 1 and 3 above are not just "bad" in the sense that I don't find them persuasive; they're bad in the sense that they don't even attempt an argument at all! I don't think it's remotely difficult or controversial to draw a line between "we should do X because I want it" and "we should do X for reasons *beyond* my wanting it", where the latter can be any attempted appeal to the good of society, objective moral principles, widely-accepted social values, or weighing up different people's needs. Anything, really, beyond the purely selfish desires of the person speaking.
So my definition of a good argument is pretty broad here. The fact that so many "arguments" still fall short of it only shows how little effort most people put into thinking about anything.
3. This, I think, gets to the crux of the divide between opponents and supporters of free and respectful debate. To the opponents (who either want to restrict debate, or want to remove any requirements that it be rational and/or respectful), there's an "obvious assymetry" between the people whose rights are being restricted and the people who want to restrict those rights. To the supporters like me, it never seems to have occured to the opponents that which group's rights are being violated, and whether something is a right in the first place, *is the entire basis of the dispute* in most cases.
I challenge you to give me a single example of a currently debated issue (in the west at least) where one side says that their rights are being violated by the status quo, and the other side *agrees* with that statement, but supports the status quo anyway. If you think the second side is doing that, I think you haven't understood their arguments. Nobody says "we think your rights *should* be restricted". They dispute that the thing being claimed as a "right" is in fact a right at all. Or they assert that recognising this right would cause more harm, to more vulnerable people (e.g. children, in many culture war debates), than it would mitigate. How do we resolve these disagreements? My preferred method is with calm, reasoned discussion and debate. What's your alternative? Because giving special consideration for the people "whose rights are at stake" is just assuming one side of the very thing under dispute! And this can just as easily be used to favour the opposite side to the one you hold on any given issue.
"But there's something lurking behind all this that needs addressing, which is the fundamental dishonesty of the positions that say "X should not have various rights". The real problem around the women's movement, the gay rights movement, the black rights movement, etc. was never the tone of the arguments made by the victims. The problem was that the system they were protesting was corrupt. There never were *good* arguments for denying the rights of women."
There are...so many things wrong with this, it's hard to know where to start.
First, I've already explained in another comment why women's suffrage was about 10,000 times more complex than "denying the rights of women". Oh, that's right, you didn't read it because it was too long. Well, here's the short version: you're wrong. If you prefer short and stupid to educated discussion, we can do that I guess.
Second, as I explained above whether something is a right is usually precisely what's in dispute. Tell me, do you intend to accept *all* of the following as inalienable rights? A right to an abortion, a right to life from conception, a right to carry a gun, a right to pollute, a right to health care, a right to clean air, a right to live in the place your ancestors 200 years ago did, a right to live in the place your ancestors 2000 years ago did. If you can figure out a way to simultaneously accept all those rights, as well as anything anyone else ever claims as a right, you're welcome to try. If not, maybe consider accepting that debate over "people's rights" is necessary, because the answer to controversial social questions is not, believe it or not, simple and easy and obvious.
Third, even if you only want me to agree that something really obvious from the past, like slavery or nazism, was indefensible and that that should not be up for debate...while I'll certainly accept "indefensible", I won't accept "not up for debate". The reason goes to the heart of why I'm a free speech absolutist.
Even if I wasn't committed to the intrinsic value of freedom of speech (to the extent that banning nazis would make us, at least in the realm of freedom, fundamentally no better than them), and even if I could be absolutely certain that a ban on nazism would never be applied against anything other than *actual nazism* (despite that having been disproven several million times over in the last decade alone)...I would still oppose it, because of what happened to Martin Luther in 1519.
In a public debate against John Eck, he was tricked into "agreeing" with the heretic John Hus, who had been burned in the previous century. In didn't matter whether his point of agreement was the same as what Hus was burned for: the mere fact that he shared an opinion with a declared "heretic" was socially and legally catastrophic. This is the sort of dishonest, intimidating "debate" tactic that you enable by declaring anything beyond debate.
You also disallow some of the most philosophically effective arguments on otherwise intractable issues. For one example, Peter Singer argues for abortion and suffering-infant-euthanasia, not by the standard method of arguing about what qualifies as a human life, but by conceding that anything alive and of the human species is a human life but then denying that taking human life is always wrong. This was such an effective argument that it single-handedly turned me pro-choice for seven years. For another example, one of the most effective arguments against race-conscious thinking on the left is to simply ask its proponents "why, if you don't accept colour-blind individualism, is racism even wrong?"
By treating even really obvious things like "taking human life is wrong" and "racism is wrong" as unacceptable to consider, you make much insightful debate impossible. You stop people, all of whom agree those things in their normal form are wrong, from exploring the reasons for their wrongness, and the boundaries of that wrongness, and thereby gaining new insight into much more complex issues. You likely force everyone into the same tired, unresolvable debates of "yes it's a human life!", "no it's not!", "x is racist!", "x is not racist!", and so on.
One last thing:
"They are a reminder to ourselves to keep listening to the arguments of others, even when they grate on our ears"
Coming from someone who won't read responses to their posts that are longer than a few paragraphs (and has very likely not made it this far in this one), this is beyond ironic.
More generally, nothing I'm saying here is advocating not listening to people's arguments. It's advocating not letting people (who've never considered alternative viewpoints to their own) simply declare themselves right by assumption, and shut down or shout down disagreement or at least make productive discussion impossible by bringing in substance-free aggression in the place of actual arguments.
It thus has the exact opposite effect to the one you claim.
I mean... OK. I came back and read your punishingly long posts. I can refute:
1) Your other punishingly long post is all about the *bad* arguments for female suffrage. To which we say... wut? What are you talking about? Female suffrage was a good idea. It is a moral right. Any attempt to obfuscate that with "actually it's really complicated" is just vicious. No. Women should have the same political rights as men. If women sometimes did the arguing wrong, then that's more reason to listen to bad arguments more in future, because it turns out, some of them are right!
2) In this post, "your position", "the one you claim".... you don't seem to understand what I've suggested. So all of that is wrong.
Overall, the reason you're not connecting with me, is because I'm not in this conversation with "a position". I didn't come here knowing the answers and sneering at anyone who stupidly thinks different from me. I don't know the answers. I spotted a comment in the thread where I thought I had an interesting response to offer, and offered it. After some thought, I'm now less sure that the idea of "tone policing" is relevant to Bryan Caplan; but I still think "don't tone police" is a good rule to apply to oneself in an argument.
"I'm really not sure if it's worth engaging with you."
It's not! I'm not a real person. At least as far as you're concerned. The only value I have for you is if what I say makes a little bit of sense. You shouldn't care about me. You shouldn't try to guess whether I'm "worth engaging with". The man doesn't matter. Here at ACX, only the arguments count. I'll try to read yours later.
The belief that tone policing should be regarded as a fallacy, has also long been regarded as a fallacy. It's calculated to work in favor of obnoxious loudmouths, whose arguments are so weak that their only hope is to be so obnoxious that nobody wants to debate them and they can claim victory by default.
If you want to convince me of anything other than you are an obnoxious loudmouth, police your tone. And my response to obnoxious loudmouths is *not*, "make real political concessions and give them what they want so they'll shut up". I don't think I'm alone in this, and I think the people who feel this way are numerous and powerful enough to block whatever it is you're trying to accomplish.
The idea that tone policing is a fallacy seems to be coming from the same place as "shutting down roads with protests is good, because it will raise awareness". Mostly it raises awareness of how unlikable your movement is.
How many roads did King shut down? The only example I can find is the march from Selma to Montgomery, which may possibly have blocked traffic while the marchers were, well, marching. The first march got stopped by state troopers on "Bloody Sunday" which was a boon for the movement: peaceful marchers being brutalized makes for great headlines and engenders sympathy. The second march went to the bridge, stopped to pray, and then went back where they came from. The final March, and the biggest one, had it's route approved in advance by the authorities and the marchers were offered police protection.
None of those marches seems like an apples to apples comparison to the kind of road shutdown protests that have become popular today which are not approved by civic authorities in advance, and rather than marchers making their way to the capital and disrupting traffic briefly on their way we have protestors stopping all traffic and sticking around. This seems far less likely to engender sympathy, and very likely to engender resentment by those stuck in traffic.
I don't mean to sound rude, but have you heard of King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail"? That's Birmingham, Alabama; and he didn't book that room like an Airbnb, he was put there after being arrested for parading without a permit during the Birmingham Campaign. That campaign took place two years before Selma, and isn't exactly obscure--you have perhaps heard of "Bull" Connor, or seen the footage of firehoses being turned on marchers? Both of the main marches in that campaign (which also included public sit-ins in the business district) were large enough to--and in fact did--effectively shut down the roads on which they took place, in no small part due to the logistics of the police throwing up blockades and clearing out white bystanders so that they could beat the shit out of black protesters without undue collateral damage, but also due to the number of marchers. Both were done without permits, which is to say that they were very much not "approved in advance by the authorities."
Now, I suspect you will have a hard time believing this, but it was actually pretty difficult for black civil rights organizations to secure approval in advance by civic authorities in the 1950s-60s South for their public demonstrations of dissatisfaction with being second class citizens. In fact, believe it or not, the local police were often downright hostile! Thus a fairly common strategic technique for civil rights organizers at the time was to ask permission, be denied as expected, and then do the thing anyway. The thing was often a march, and almost always resulted in the blocking of traffic for reasons you appear to understand, even when police weren't wailing on the marchers.
(IOW, it wasn't just Selma, and it wasn't just Selma and Birmingham, but I'm not going to google them all for you.)
As to the question of sympathy or resentment, I'm not sure it's as simple as you make it out to be. I don't have hard data here, but my observation over the years has been that people's reaction to disruptive protest often correlates to their preexisting sympathy for the cause. This can have odd, and downright comical, effects during Interesting Times like these. We had folks who had cheered on lawless protesters in Ferguson in the mid 2010s cheering on the police as they cleared out lawless antivaxers blocking entrances to vaccine clinics; and rightwingers who had spent the whole period from 2014 to 2020 calling for violent crackdowns (and vigilante vehicular assaults) on peaceful roadblocks suddenly deciding en masse, at midday on January 6, 2021, that riots were the language of the unheard after all, and that those arrested that day for trespassing, assaulting police officers, and disrupting the business of the United States Congress were political prisoners. Admittedly I may be concentrating too hard on people with distinct political tribal affiliations and not enough on the great "apolitical" swing-voting masses. Maybe the latter really do just get mad at anyone who disrupts their commute.
Sometimes they are being hysterical, though. I often get very heated over things important to me, and I have to calm down and make the argument reasonably, rather than YOU ARE GENOCIDING ME, LITERALLY GENOCIDING ME, BY WHAT YOU THINK!!!!
To quote a comment on Steve Sailer's blog a few years back: Activists trying to cancel you say "you are making me unsafe" for the same reason cops who are beating you up say "stop resisting."
Women's suffrage. Women's rights. Gay rights. Black rights. Etc., etc. This is not a difficult question. If you thought it was, you're missing some basic historical knowledge, or you misunderstood what I was saying.
It's indisputably the case that the hysterics of the suffragettes delayed women getting the vote and was thus bad for their movement and objectives. Second-wave feminism had a terrible image problem for similar reasons of stridency and virtually all of the changes wrought by it were also bad, so more conservatism would have been in order there in any case. Gay rights were dead in the water until AIDS and I don't think rhetoric had much to do with the ultimate outcome either way compared to the sympathy elicited by the disease, but it's clear after the fact that the Mattachine society was right and the Stonewall rioters wrong: assimilation and emphasising similarity is what has gotten homosexuals to a place of broad-based social acceptance, not angry shrieking (vide the transsexuals, who did not learn this lesson and have not been successful at screaming the median American into obedience in spite of what has to be considered a Herculean effort). Black rights were similarly far more effectively advanced by Martin Luther King (and even, I'd argue, Cosby) than by either the Black Panthers or BLM.
Huh. I would have thought that you were engaging in precisely the strategy that I described, except... you pointed out that everything you were saying is "indisputable". And that has really persuaded me!
That was sarcasm.
The way you describe angry activism as "shrieking" is just an example of tone policing, not an actual argument.
I'll make an actual argument for you, so that you know what one looks like:
For thousands of years before the early 20th century, women's political rights were completely ignored. Throughout much of that period, many women had been very reasonable indeed. However, they only got the vote after some of them made very unreasonable demands. That suggests to me that perhaps unreasonable "shrieking" was in fact a necessary part of social change.
Wait, my argument seems to be missing something... oh, yes! Everything I've said is indisputable! There. Now I know I've convinced you.
I want to add to the record that I find you coming off as incredibly obnoxious in this thead, despite your first few posts being reasonably phrased. Anonymous was not sarcastic or insulting, yet you responded with mocking sarcasm. Are you trying to escalate the tension? Are you trying to make some meta-point about the unimportance of being civil? I don't see why, since you're not, in your own words, protesting or "arguing for a cause that you really believe in". You're just discussing what makes an effective argument.
What are you trying to acomplish with this attitude? (That's an honest, not rhetorical, question.)
More substantively, I think your description of the background to women's suffrage is over-simplified to an extreme degree. You speak as though democratic western society existed for "thousands of years", and women tried many times asking for the vote, and were refused, and then eventually started aggressively protesting and were successful.
When it's more like...many pre-historic societies were matriarchal, with women as more dominant/valued. The rise of organised societies based on military might shifted most of the world to a patriarchal model. Ancient empires treated women particularly badly as the rule. Civilising forces like the rise of cities and the spread of monotheism helped make their position on the whole significantly better (e.g. by suppressing polygamy, prostitution, and infanticide in Christian Europe). Through the middle ages a tight caste structure prevailed with strictly differentiated rights and duties for noble men, noble women, serfs of either sex, priests, monks, nuns, free commoners, and members of the royal family. Women were obviously worse off (notwithstanding exemption from mandatory warfare), but that was just one of many complex and overlapping hierarchies. In early moderm times absolute monarchs became the norm, and several of those were queens, a minority but disproportiantely among the most-renowned (e.g. Elizabeth, Catherine, Maria-Theresa). Countries varied greatly in their acceptance of reigning queens and the rules governing succession. Most had no concept of "free men, with women as their property", so much as "*everyone* the property of the monarch".
Then the first democracies from the late 18th century. There was at most a single solid century of "democracy, but only for men" before the suffragettes. Of course, that was actually a period of constant volatility and chaotic struggles over the restriction or expansion of the franchise for various classes of men. In early 20th century Britain, about 40% of the male population was still disenfranchised. The sufragettes were thus effectively for "votes for rich women as well as rich men; the lower classes of both sexes are still excluded". In Australia, there was a grand total of *one year* between the establishment of a national democracy, and the extension of the vote to women. Only the United States had a long status quo of "universal suffrage for men, none for women", at least putting race issues and literacy tests aside.
The situation at the time of the suffrage movement was thus extremely complex, with numerous different groups with valid grievances and the potential for the satisfaction of one group's grievances to lead to the worsening of another group's. The actual arguments over suffrage were equally complex. Some were sexist, claiming women were by natural temperament unsuited to political decision making. Others (e.g. President Taft's) focused on the claim that most women weren't in practice interested in voting, and those who were were disproportionately drawn from the "less desirable classes". It isn't hard to see how some of the "pioneering" tactics of the suffragettes (screaming protest marches, smashing up shops and churches, chaining themselves to gates) were among the worst possible responses to these accusations.
Other arguments were that suffrage would give married men extra political power; the same sort of argument can be (and is, when the issue comes up) used against giving children the vote today. Not at all innately sexist, this argument relies only the assumption, that any feminist would agree with, that the majority of women at the time were socially under the control of their husbands.
On the other side, support for suffrage was sometimes associated the most non-feminist forces imaginable. Utah was one of the first states to give women the vote, as part of a demographic struggle to keep Mormons in control of the state. Texas and Wyoming would later, in the 1920s, use women's suffrage in the most cynical way possible: as a way of allowing corrupt governors who had been impeached and removed from office to continue to govern through their wives.
A different source of support for suffrage in the US was from capital-p Progressives. A group of reformist men who saw enfranchised women as a useful "tool" against corrupt entrenched interests, a different sort of power struggle associated with far-from-particularly-feminist Puritans, who were also generally in favour of strict bans on alcohol, abortion and "lewd" material. Others in the movement (e.g. Wilson) were staunch segregationists.
Of course, the actual overwhelmingly decisive deciding factor for suffrage..was the conscription of millions of men to be killed in the trenches, and the conscription of millions of women into forced labour to replace them...and the need for new ways of managing, and justifying, this horrific social upheaval.
(In the end, of course, female suffrage did not appear to have any major social effects at all, for at least a few decades. Neither the distortions of the political process its oppenents feared, nor the newly empowered female voting-bloc its supporters hoped for--no major change, notwithstanding the events in Texas and Wyoming mentioned above, despite apparently convincing arguments from both sides that social changes would result. The reasons for this are probably a confluence of social factors so complex, I'm not even sure if we understand them now, let alone could have predicted them in advance.)
But...(and I hope you see how annoying this kind of sarcasm is even if only used one)...*do continue* about how women's suffrage was an absolutely clear-cut, black-and-white issue of one single oppressed group simply standing up for their rights!
You're tone policing too, though, with "aw yeah if they ask you to lay out the facts then this is just basic conservative strategy so you know they're in the wrong without having to do a second more of looking at the question".
So would you prefer I "angry activism" at you about being a conservative, Phil? If you find yelling and screeching the convincing way to win your opinion, I can do that!
I described *one* thing as indisputable, the first point, because it's not under any sort of objective argument by historians of the matter.
The rest of your post is ironically (or is it just consistently?) too butthurt to be worth engaging with. An actual argument would, for starters, look like you grappling with the fact that women did not by and large *want* the privileges and obligations of men for most of history; upper-class women only started to feel they were getting the short end of the stick (and as such, demand immediate revision of a system they had previously seen as favoring them) in the 18th century, and in fact, in America women *still did not want the vote*, as a group, in the early 20th century! Only when assured that they would not have to suffer equality in the form of registering for the draft by the same act as registering to vote, as men did, did American women as a whole swing to majority approval of women's suffrage. If you could not somehow subsume these circumstances in your shrieking-based hypothesis you would have to abandon it, but instead you seem to have opted for militant unawareness of modern history.
Nitpick that I'd call this fallacy a Tone Argument (i.e. "you asserted x in a unreasonable tone, therefore x is false") wheras tone policing is really just telling people to speak in a reasonable tone, which is not fallacious at all.
Also, making this political claim would require some actual argument. On what basis do you assert that conservatives are the ones in power, and non-conservatives are "arguing for their rights". There's a whole littany of issues, including everything involving cancel culture, where it's pretty clear that the exact opposite is true at the moment.
Er, I dunno! I guess my objection wouldn't hold. I haven't really thought it through other than to note the similarity to an existing heuristic, which works in the opposite direction to the Caplan heuristic.
I kinda feel like the Caplan heuristic is nonsense, because as someone else in the thread notes, you can always find an example of someone on the side you don't like being "emotional". My feeling is that this heuristic is just an excuse to not listen to arguments.
But I agree that my argument, as stated, would cease to have force in the case that you suggested.
I'm going to guess your average Ukrainian is going to be more emotional about the War in Ukraine than your average Russian, but that won't stop me from believing that, in this war, Ukraine is in the right and Russia in the wrong.
You might guess that, but I've seen an awful lot of Ukrainians speaking in a tone of calm determination or calm resignation, and an awful lot of Russians who are practically frothing at the mouth as they call for bloody war against the "Nazis".
Not a historian, but women's suffrage and slavery abolition both had some really passionate advocates who made big emotional displays, and it's not hard for me to imagine that the detractors of those movements had little problem being dispassionate and calm about it. Similarly, people have set themselves on fire to protest ongoing wars and atrocities, that doesn't make the wards and atrocities good actually. Basically the heuristic may fail when there's enough at stake that strong emotion is appropriate in people who actually care about the issue.
I think the debate thing generally fails on things that have enough widespread social acceptance that having a debate is just giving a platform to a tiny crowd of wild cranks. Like, there are plenty of people who would love to have public debates with notable scientists and public officials and so forth about whether the earth is flat and whether aliens are real and whether the moon landing was faked and etc. It's pretty reasonable that people don't want to spend all their time debating those people, especially on a public stage.
There were pretty passionate people on the other side of women's suffrage and slavery too. I think Bryan's heuristic needs to be focused on the "best" debates that occur between the two sides, not the median activist. But maybe that's me steelmanning it too much.
There are plenty of people who debate and debunk flat earthers: I think they do a valuable service and I would be much more likely to be a flat earther if they didn't exist. But I agree that notable scientists shouldn't join the debate (unless they really want to, or for short but valuable input): some dedicated amateurs and youtube debate bros are more than enough to uphold reason. IRL it's mostly the flat earthers themselves (at least many of the more well known ones) who refuse to debate while the debunkers take on anyone and any argument. Which is according to my heuristic. EDIT: Obligatory link: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/trying-again-on-fideism
This raises a good point about toxoplasma. Both sides probably have thousands of proponents who either are or are not 'emotional' or 'eager to engage in calm rational debate'.
*Your impression* of which side those labels apply to usually has more to do with your filter bubble and media consumption habits than any true population average.
('you' meaning 'any given individual', not you)
Unless you're doing a lot of work to get a fair and balanced cross-section of the entire movement, to avoid selection bias on your impression of the state of play. But at the point where you're going to that much effort to compile accurate data for your heuristic, you may as well just evaluate the argument at the object-level instead!
I mean, I've done some work on the issues that matter to me but it's usually pretty obvious which side is prepared for calm rational debate. Calm debates are pretty rare, so finding a representative sample isn't hard. Usually you find a few big figures on one side who have done a lot of calm rational debates with insignificant proponents from the other side (so you can be pretty sure that their intentions are genuine), and these figures will complain about how no-one significant on the other side are willing to talk to them. And when you check the other sides they are either completely silent about the possibility of debate or openly dismissive of the idea.
Example: You don't need to look at many flat earth videos to notice how the most prominent debunkers do debates all the time and have standing invitations for the most prominent flat earthers, but that the prominent flat-earthers seldom debate anyone and never talk to the prominent debunkers.
And in some cases the heuristic doesn't since both sides have people who are willing to do calm rational debate (good examples: evolution vs. creationism, Israel vs. Palestine). But then I can just watch the debate and draw my conclusions from that. And the willingness of each side to debate is also informative.
The two different scoring methods used both started by calculating the Metaculus Peer Score for each question answered by each contestant. The difference comes from when these are combined into a contestant's overall score:
- the scoring in the original winners post takes the average Peer Score for the questions answered by the contestant
- the second scoring method used divides the sum of a contestant's Peer Scores by 50 (the number of questions)
Effectively, the second scoring method, which is what Metaculus uses, gives you a score of zero (the average Peer Score) for a question you don't answer. The original scoring instead heavily incentivises only answering questions where you think you'll do (much) better than average. SmallSingapore's strategy of skipping questions where he had no prior information was therefore a key to his victory, along with doing extremely well on the questions that he did answer.
I think that the second method is better, and that in a contest to find who can predict well, you don't want to punish people who attempt difficult questions.
The rubric stated, "If you skip, we’ll give you an “average” score (that is, you lose the average amount of points that forecasters lost on that question, NOT we average out all forecasters and let you benefit from the wisdom of crowds)."
That seems clear to me that the second method will be used.
ETA: Looking at the first version of the blind score hash spreadsheet, we can see the "correct" method has been used for calculating these scores: if you sum the scores for each question and divide by 50, the answers match the stated totals, which differ from calculating the mean of those questions with answers (which luckily is what Excel's "average" function does). In particular, row 11 has a score of 0.36 using this second method, which agrees with the initially announced winning score.
The recent spreadsheets only have the scores, but since they agree with the previous ones, I believe that these are the "correct" scores, so you should take the distribution from the spreadsheets and ignore the previous chart.
Where a participant did answer all 50 questions, there scores will of course be the same under both methods. Incidentally, Metaculus failed to answer question 24 (presumably from a squeamishness about running an assassination market), so the stated score of 0.27 will be an average of 49 scores. Subject to possible rounding errors, their correct score should be 0.26.
This does mean that Ezra Karger's result (of 0.34) looks very impressive, since the next best score is 0.31.
Has anyone plotted the results (at contestant level) using Brier vs. MPS? How many contestants would be far off the diagonal and why? I imagine this is something that affects extremists with lots of 1% and 99% forecasts and not the folks who were in the top decile. (In my annual forecasting contest, the extremists rarely do well.)
Here's a CSV of scores that I haven't dug into deeply: https://pastebin.com/yd7eEenf (Participants with less than a quarter of the questions answered were omitted.)
The "_50" fields mean that unanswered questions get a score of 0 (Peer) or the average for that question (Brier). The "_n_ans" fields mean that the participant's sum of scores is divided by the number of questions answered.
But you might want to incentivise people to know better which questions they are likely to be good at. Knowing what you *don't* know might be as important in prediction as knowing what you do know.
I resolve some of the pervasive confusions about it, such as the idea that people should use either halfer or thirder probabilities depending on what is the betting scheme or that thirdism has any advantage in regards to betting.
There is also a riddle about betting in an alternative version of Sleeping Beauty. I'd appreciate if you read it very carefully and did your best to solve it, especially if you are a thirder, before you spoil the answer to yourself and then share whether you managed to answer it correctly.
Posting the riddle here separately, in case someone doesn't want to read the whole post but still wants to try themself at a tricky probability theory problem.
Here is the description of regular Sleeping Beauty experiment, in case you are not familiar:
Sleeping Beauty experiment, but every day the room that the Beauty is in changes its color from Red to Blue or vise versa. The initial color of the Room is determined randomly with equal probability for Red and Blue
So, suppose you participate in a Technicolor Sleeping Beauty. While awakened in the experiment you are proposed to bet on Tails but in such way that you can make only one bet per experiment. If tyou have two awakenings and you've agreed to bet on both of them, only the last one counts.
The odds for a bet are between 1:1 and 1:2. Usually, making such bet would be a bad idea unless you think the coin in this experiment has come Tails with 2/3 probability. In regular Sleeping Beauty the optimal strategy is to always refuse the bet.
What is the optimal decision in Technicolor Sleeping Beauty? Should you always refuse the be as well? Why? Why not?
I've made an open source browser plugin to remove AI recommendations from Instagram, and otherwise let you customise the interface to be less addictive (e.g. remove Explore tab).
Would love some feedback - bugs, features people want.
Regarding the Hungry Brain/metabolic set point stuff: from memory, the idea is that we have a weight that our bodies consider to be the right weight - our "set point". It will adjust our energy expenditure and hunger in order to return to that set point. But something in our modern western diets or lifestyles pushes that set point up, making many of us stubbornly overweight.
My question is: has dairy been considered as a contributor or cause of this set point shifting? Some reasons it seems plausible:
1. Dairy is mostly only a thing in western diets, which is where most of the obesity is.
2. It would seem to make sense for milk consumption to signal to our bodies that it's time to gain weight - that is what babies are supposed to do after all.
3. Anecdotally I have noticed strong links between the amount of dairy I'm consuming and my ability to motivate myself to lose weight.
Obviously dairy is a factor in weight gain just for its caloric content, but my question is might it also increase this set point?
(Although, it seems dairy consumption has been decreasing in recent decades, so maybe not?
> 2. It would seem to make sense for milk consumption to signal to our bodies that it's time to gain weight - that is what babies are supposed to do after all.
Hormones? Microbiome stuff? I don't know exactly, but breastmilk has all sorts of weird positive effects. It regulates babies sleep for example, and prevents diseases. Perhaps more relevantly, breastfed babies have significantly less obesity when they grow up:
My assumption would be that availability and therefore consumption would have shot up with industrialization, and that would increase the effect. But I don't have any data saying it has (and it seems from my link that consumption has gone down a bit since the 70s).
I would imagine there are two factors in play: something that raises our set point to make us want to consume more calories, and an increase in the availability of calories. Maybe milk raises our set point, but it didn't make us fat until we also started eating crisps and sitting at desks all day?
Milk contains a high concentration of animal protein and that triggers mechanisms that results in the production of growth hormones.
From my favorite book on nutrition „The Diet Compas“ by Bas Kast
„ „Let’s begin our critical look at milk with a little context — what we already know about animal protein. Without overstating it too much, we could describe the cow’s milk we usually drink as a kind of animal-protein turbo-concentrate. By analogy with fruit juice, it’s like giving yourself an intravenous infusion of amino acids. The amino acids shoot into the bloodstream and promptly activate all the growth switches we have met so far: insulin, IGF-1, and mTOR (a basic requirement for the activation of our cellular ‘construction“ „manager’ is plenty of freely available amino acids in the cell).5
In other words, milk is a growth drink. Indeed, it’s the ultimate growth drink. That isn’t a bad thing in itself: for a baby that needs to grow quickly, breastmilk is certainly the ideal drink. We require no other nourishment for many months of our lives.
The unusual thing about us humans compared to all other animals is that we continue to consume this baby-growing drink into adulthood. But there’s another curiosity, too: what we pour into our glass is not human breastmilk, but the milk of another animal species. That’s not just unusual, it’s also relevant, because cow’s milk contains almost three times as much protein as human breastmilk (around 3.4 grams vs 1.2 grams per 100 millilitres), and four times as much calcium. This is one of the reasons why a human baby requires a full 180 days to double his or her weight, while a calf manages it in just 40 days. So when we drink cow’s milk as adults, we are consuming an ultra-growth drink during a phase of our lives when we are no longer really growing. […]
A team of Swedish researchers set out to get to the bottom of the connection between drinking milk and early death — without funding from the milk industry. The investigation of more than 100,000 Swedes was published in 2017 in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, one of the most influential nutrition-science publications in the world. Their analysis showed that avid milk drinkers had a 32 per cent higher risk of mortality compared to people who don’t consume much milk (roughly speaking, they compared people who drank 2.5 glasses of milk a day to those who drank one glass or less per month). But the study also revealed a noticeable exception to this: when consumption of fermented milk products was examined, the situation was reversed. People who consumed more yoghurt or cheese were found to live longer!“
If the animal protein in milk were a significant factor in causing obesity, wouldn't things like meat have an even larger effect by a very large margin?
I believe it is not only the overall protein content but also the composition.
Nevertheless animal proteins, especially beef and pork, have a pretty significant effect on obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular health. The concrete mechanisms are afaik not fully understood yet but the statistics in large long term behavioral studies points strongly towards this direction. See:
Milk is known in the bodybuilding community as a bit of a life hack for gaining weight/muscle as an easy way to consume lots of calories quickly (just google GOMAD). Don’t see any evidence though to support is having an special effects beyond that.
I just started a monthly substack post bringing together the best long form content I have stumbled across in my internet travels. It is called "The Long Forum" and features a mix of podcasts, lectures and long form articles. Little islands of human curated internet are our only hope to push back against the tide of algorithmically optimised dreck.
With regards to twin studies and such. As I understand, much of the human microbiome is inherited from the mother at birth. Might it not constitute a factor that is somewhat between "genetics" and "shared environment"? On the one hand, it acts like the former, following adopted children to their new homes. On the other, it's not routinely tested for, i.e. "genetic assays" look only at the DNA of human somatic cells, so that it escapes any recognition as a factor, and in addition it's not fixed but potentially variable over time and in relation to the environment.
If it's indeed shared and if the twins are not separated. Anyhow my point is that perhaps it should be treated differently, at least theoretically (I don't suppose that with current technology it is feasible).
It's not feasible. Obviously it has the potential to confound things and overestimate the extent to which people think environmental interventions can equalize outcomes, just like the effect of womb environment.
When I attended the Hong Kong meetup announced for last fall, I had fun arguing with a philosophy professor who also showed up. Other people seemed to talk about Sam Bankman-Fried.
There was one guy who showed up because his child followed SSC (as opposed to the more typical case of people showing up because they followed it themselves), and he chided me for talking to the philosophy guy about a topic that was not of general interest.
When I attend my local RatGroup we mostly work on our pet projects to improve the local community. There's also chess (which is the greatest board game of all time), and usually some light philosophical debate (found out recently that the guy who runs it is into a eudaimonistic conception of utilitarianism, so we discussed that for a bit).
Just start up a conversation about something that interests you that's been discussed in the last few months? Statistics, geopolitics, literature, video games, whatever.
Probably it's safest to avoid waging the culture war, though, and the Gaza actual-war seems like another thing to avoid. But I've seen conversations turn out well if they stay in the technical weeds and don't invoke ideology.
Until recently I didn't really understand the success of BAPISM. Sure BAP was pretty funny but this didn't explain his insane cult following among even seemingly normie GOP staffers. Was it just a matter of admiration for the sheer force of will required to write a screed as long and narcissistic as Bronze Age Mindset was? Was it the ability to enjoy racist/sexist... memes in a context where you could always pretend you were laughing at it's absurdity, a kind of literary 'I like Borscht, do you like Borscht'? Both probably. But recently I started playing with turning his most insane rants into music, and now I understand it entirely, they work perfectly as hard rock pieces:
(Of course being only human, I was damn right going to capitalize on this discovery)
"I saw once a jaguar in zoo, behind a glass, so that all the bugs in hueman form could gawk at it and humiliate it. This animal felt a noble and persistent sadness, being observed everywhere by the obsequious monkeys, not even monkeys, that were taunting it with stares. He could tell—I saw this! He could tell he was living in a simulated environment and that he had no power to move or live. His sadness crushed me and I will always remember this animal. I never want to see life in this condition!
I wonder how many writers are in effect really song-writers, and whether this might be the main way they'll be thought of in the future."
Lab leakers and natural spread proponents agree that COVID originally came from bats. SARS originally came from bats. Ebola originally came from bats. Probably bats will produce a new pandemic every few decades. But they're all clustered together in a few big caves. Can't we just bomb them? Or gas them? Or barricade the caves so they can't get out, and they starve? We don't need to bomb all the bats, just the ones in Yunnan with all the weird diseases who keep causing the pandemics. We don't even need to get every last one of them, just decimate the population to the point where it's too small to produce new viruses very often.
This will probably make environmentalists sad, but there are many worse things we are doing to the environment for much less compelling reasons. Why is nobody talking about this?
I would prioritize eliminating high concentration animal confinement facilities such as factory farms and animal labs and their affiliates such as meat markets. get one's own house in order before decimating other creatures.
This was tried in Kitaka Mine in Uganda after the 2007-2008 outbreak of Marburg hemorrhagic fever. The bat colony in the mine was almost completely eliminated.
In 2012, another Marburg outbreak occurred in a nearby town. An investigation found the bats had repopulated the mine, albeit at much reduced numbers (1-5% of original population)
Testing at the mine found 13.3% of the bats were actively infected with Marburg virus, which was a higher percentage than found in earlier studies prior to the extermination attempt. Genetic analysis indicated that those bats were thesource of infection.
There are many animals that transmit diseases to humans, not just bats. But bats tend to live near humans (just like pigs or birds) so are more likely to transmit the viruses. In your recent COVID post you noted raccoon dogs as one example of an animal that can transmit viruses to humans; but they aren't as common as bats so transmissions are more rare!
Bats are amazing creatures that are a huge benefit to our ecosystems. We should want MORE bats, not fewer.
Super-weird question, I know - but why don't we stop eating bat soup? Is this really harder to do, than to destroy species? Is it too big an "ask" compared to your proposal?
I think I could sum up the major reason in the phrase "Unintended downstream effects". At this point I don't think it's controversial to say that eliminating a species or a local population of a species can have drastic effects on the ecosystems it used to inhabit. The removal of sea otters from much of the West Coast devastated kelp forests in much of their former range by allowing a explosion in the populations of sea urchins. Similar stories for wolves and deer in many parts of the world. Also, bats serve has food sources for a number of other species. Removing them would cause a shift in trophic relations that is difficult to predict.
Now, I'm not a bat ecologist but a quick glance at the literature says that, amongst other things, bats are major predators of insects and likely do a lot to keep insect populations in check. Importantly, that appears to include mosquitoes in at least some populations, meaning that bats likely help reduce the spread of mosquito-borne diseases. So it's not even clear at first glance that eliminating bats would cause a reduction in the disease burden to human populations.
My first thought is not unintended downstream effects. It's that the bats are an intermediary phenomenon, and if you try to eliminate a problem by attacking one of those, what you tend to find is that another intermediary appears to do the same job.
Diseases want to infect people. If they can't do it via bats, they'll do it by other vectors.
Historically most attempts of forcefully exterminating a species have had negative second order effects, and have proven more difficult than they're worth haven't they? Off the top of my head, I can think of the extinction of wolves in the Midwest US leading to exploding deer populations and the erosion of rivers, the CCP declaring war on sparrows for eating seeds, and leading to an explosion in insect population, thus leading to much more difficult pest control during the cultural revolution, and the Australians comically chasing emus around with machine guns, wasting previous tax dollars (though I don't actually know if that was government funded, come to think of it). My understanding is that bats are one of the keystone species that eat mosquitos, so I wouldn't be surprised if declaring war on them wouldn't have similarly negative consequences. They're also kinda cute if kept at a distance, which probably shouldn't enter into the calculus here, but I do hesitate to remove the richness of the natural world for future generations.
I think other than for emotional reasons to eradication of wolves was mostly worth it from a human perspective, the populations haven’t barely bounced back and already there is a a lot of friction.
Consider the risk that some hippie will dedicate his life to saving the species and install himself in a nearby cave to protect the bats. There, he might have a chance encounter with a political prisoner/scientist, shortly before she establishes contact with an alien civilization and invites them to invade us. Inspired by her bold misanthropy, the hippie may then dedicate the next few decades to serving us up on a platter to our conquerors.
Then, too, while I know that we are never, ever, getting back together - I mean "running out of fossils fuels or running out of $$ to get the hardest-to-get of it" ever, ever - but still: is it super-rational that you'd want to pre-emptively eliminate a significant source of fertilizer just in case there's a tiny chance that fossil fuels won't always grow our crops?
Like, diminishing our options - is that a rationalist preference because it makes decisions simpler or something?
Wasn't the production of fertilizer from bat guano both mostly based on harvesting historic buildup rather than anything short-term renewable, and superseded by modern chemical methods of production anyway?
That might well be the case as to the long buildup, but I believe "modern chemical means" are entirely reliant on fossil fuels even when the the fertilizers themselves are not so derived.
Forest and brushland fires sometimes cause a lot of damage to homes. Maybe we should bomb the power lines that typically spark them, or bomb the people for moving deep into the forest, or bomb the roads which enable people to throw cigarettes out the window.
There's a lot to unpack here. Let's do it over a bottle of tequila, traditionally brought to you by bats.
Nature abhors an empty niche. Remove Chesterton's Fence, two years later there are thousands of little fences there. You could try to get some kind of invasive bat species in there instead, I'm sure the resulting viral evolution would be interesting.
The DEFUSE proposal was literally to vaccinate all the bats, as if that wouldn't create a bunch of new viruses.
Forewarning of conditions for TERRORIST VIOLENCE (actually just the wilful use of technology for anti human, anti essentialist and wireheading purposes (unless you subsequently get violent about this)))
https://open.substack.com/pub/alephwyr/p/explicit-redlines-for-conservatives
I’m loving the clueing on today’s XWord
Clue: Pictures where people are headscarfed?
Answer: ZOMBIEMOVIES
They are cracking me up this morning.
Rootclaim responds to Scott:
https://blog.rootclaim.com/covid-origins-debate-response-to-scott-alexander/
I don't find this particularly convincing compared to the arguments and data from the original debate. In particular I disagree that all of the other evidence supports lab leak. There were quite a few other points in the debate, many of which favored zoonosis. Rootclaims insistence to the contrary feels like bad faith lying
Before the debate, I was maybe 60% lab leak. After the debate, that went down to 30-40%. Their response made me discount lab leak a little more still.
It shouldn’t be so difficult to estimate the probability that a post like this damages your reputation and, by extension, the credibility of your platform and method altogether.
As long as they still pay the winner I don't mind too much, but for a group supposedly using math they like using words like "impossible" and "obviously" without backing them up..
Oh wow, now that was quite persuasive
OC ACXLW Sat April 6 Consciousness, Race, and Lived Experience
Hello Folks!
We are excited to announce the 60th Orange County ACX/LW meetup, happening this Saturday and most Saturdays after that.
Host: Michael Michalchik
Email: michaelmichalchik@gmail.com (For questions or requests)
Location: 1970 Port Laurent Place, 92660
(949) 375-2045
Date: Saturday, April 6 2024
Time 2 pm
Conversation Starters:
Your Book Review: Consciousness And The Brain: A review of Stanislas Dehaene's book "Consciousness and the Brain", which explores the cognitive neuroscience of consciousness. The book discusses the differences between conscious and unconscious processing, the neural signatures of consciousness, and theories of consciousness such as the Global Neuronal Workspace.
Text link: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-consciousness-and
Audio link: https://podcastaddict.com/astral-codex-ten-podcast/episode/139738702
Questions for discussion:
a) According to Dehaene, what are the key differences between conscious and unconscious processing? What can the brain do without consciousness, and what requires consciousness?
b) How does Dehaene's approach to studying consciousness, which relies on subjective reports, differ from traditional methods in cognitive psychology? What are the strengths and limitations of this approach?
c) The book discusses several theories of consciousness, including the Global Neuronal Workspace, Integrated Information Theory, and the Multiple Drafts Model. How do these theories differ in their explanations of consciousness, and what evidence supports or challenges each theory?
How Should We Think About Race And "Lived Experience"?: An article discussing the complex relationship between race, genetics, and lived experience, using the case of Elizabeth Hoover, a professor who identified as Native American but was later found to have no Native American ancestry.
Text link: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-should-we-think-about-race-and
Audio link: https://podcastaddict.com/astral-codex-ten-podcast/episode/172964727
Questions for discussion:
a) How does the case of Elizabeth Hoover challenge the idea that race is primarily a matter of "lived experience" rather than genetics? What are the implications of this case for how we define and think about racial identity?
b) The article discusses the potential problems with using genetics as the sole basis for determining racial identity, such as the risk of retroactively invalidating someone's life experiences and cultural contributions. What are the pros and cons of using genetics, lived experience, or a combination of factors to define race?
c) How might concerns about cultural appropriation, affirmative action, and the preservation of minority cultures influence how communities define and police racial boundaries? What are the potential unintended consequences of these practices, as illustrated by the Elizabeth Hoover case?
Walk & Talk: We usually have an hour-long walk and talk after the meeting starts. Two mini-malls with hot takeout food are readily accessible nearby. Search for Gelson's or Pavilions in the zip code 92660.
Share a Surprise: Tell the group about something unexpected that changed your perspective on the universe.
Future Direction Ideas: Contribute ideas for the group's future direction, including topics, meeting types, activities, etc.
Does anybody here have experience with Acton Academy? One just opened up in our town (they're enrolling for next year) and I'm interested, but also a little wary. My son is in second grade and is not getting challenged at all in his public school (there are no gifted and talented programs). This is the only private option in town and I really want to believe that it might work for him.
Some questions you can ask the school that might help your due diligence, though I guess most of these will have to be directed to some "reference" Acton Academy instead of the one in your town:
(1) What fraction of students return for the next year?
(2) For students who don't return, what are the reasons?
(3) What are examples of discipline issues/punishment at the school? Are there examples of
students expelled?
(4) What are examples of students who wouldn't be well served by AA?
(5) What is the average number of years a teacher stays at AA?
(6) What processes are there in place for teachers to work with each other (adult-adult interaction is shockingly rare at a lot of schools)?
(7) How are teachers given feedback? How do teachers improve over time?
I'm sorry that I can't help with direct experience of this school franchise, but would also be interested to hear from current students/parents.
No experience, just saying my impressions.
First, I looked at their website https://www.actonacademy.org/
> I am confident that any randomly-selected ten-year-old from Acton would have succeeded instantly where at least some MIT graduates failed.
...well, this really rubbed me the wrong way. I was like: these people seem to utterly lack any critical thinking, and seem to expect the same from their customers.
But then I watched the Peterson podcast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEUjcRWfu3c and the founder of the school seems quite smart and nice, and many of the things he said made sense to me, so I guess I am going to forgive them this.
I think the dark secret of many successful schools is that the success of the kids depends a lot on their character traits such as IQ, so the easiest way to have successful students is simply to only admit the successful kids as your students. Admit only the ones with high IQ (and if you can't measure their IQ directly, use some proxy, such as their existing academic success, or the success of their parents), and kick out the troublemakers, and maybe also the ones who are lazy or otherwise demotivating (the fact that Joe is lazy is not a big problem per se; the problem is rather that his classmates see him and it impacts their own expectations of "normal"). This alone will probably make you one of the best schools in the neighborhood.
But you shouldn't say this openly, because (1) it will invite the controversy you don't need, and (2) it will invite people who have high IQ but are otherwise problematic. Instead, you should probably behave as if IQ does not matter. That way, you can also attribute all their success to your unique teaching methods, even if you did literally nothing.
That doesn't mean that the school has no impact on students at all. The school can definitely encourage or discourage the smart kids. If you let the smart kids follow their interests, they will mostly turn out okay even in the classical subjects. (Sadly, this is probably not true for the average kids.) From the emotional perspective, the school environment can range from very friendly to deeply toxic. Friendly is better, because stress hurts kids, but mutual cooperation can help them a lot.
So, the vision of the school is nice, the question is whether the reality matches it. Could you perhaps find the parents of the students, and ask them about their experience? Maybe try contacting them via social networks, or ask whether your local friends know someone.
Their first class at this school won't be until the Fall, although I suppose I could find a way to talk to parents at other schools (maybe there are Facebook groups?). But yeah, my big unknown is whether the reality matches the vision.
My ideal situation would be one where my son is with other smart kids, but there are really no skill-based programs around here. It's hard to predict what the population of this school would be. The local founder is marketing it largely as a way for parents to exercise more choice in their schooling.
Sometimes a completely "normal" school happens to be surprisingly good, probably as a combination of "has sane administration" and "people in this neighborhood happen to be unusually smart".
People talk a lot about whether IQ is related to race or sex, but I think that much greater controversy would be if someone published a map comparing average IQ on various *streets*, or parts of town. In practice, it would be difficult to obtain the data, but I suspect the effect is real and strong. (Before anyone says "this would simply reflect the ethnic differences", my point is that it would actually be much *stronger*, because even people from nominally the same ethnic group sort themselves out geographically. Also because in smaller groups, the variation is statistically greater.)
I mention this because my daughter is currently in a "normal" school, and we are quite happy about it. But before we made this choice, we have asked many parents we met on playgrounds in our neighborhood, how happy are they about the schools their kids attend. Then we did some optimization to get our daughter sorted by the system to the right school. (We used some lucky coincidence, but a general solution would be to rent a place near the school, bring the paperwork saying that your child lives there, let the system assign to your child to that school, and then say "well, we moved somewhere else, but we are happy with keeping our child here". The feasibility and complexity of this plan would depend on your local laws.) I am mentioning this so that you can have a Plan B in case you would try the Acton school and something goes wrong.
> The local founder is marketing it largely as a way for parents to exercise more choice in their schooling.
This is mostly a good thing, because it will filter out the parents who don't care. It will select for opinionated people, so likely for intelligence (which is good), but also maybe for various forms of craziness (which is bad, but probably inevitable). Overall, seems like a good thing.
Don’t have personal experience, but the Jordan Peterson Podcast episode 336 was an interview with the founder and made me wish very badly that there was one in my area. I’d recommend checking that out if you haven’t already.
https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2024/04/keto-diet-mental-illness.html?fbclid=IwAR2tN6zHn66yO72Ad35jiggY_zfPoQlI6QMLUr5RSDsBHvrLp3LnDtQyRwo
What is the current state of research on risks and effectiveness of psylocibin for depression-therapy? Does anyone know of a good discussion of this?
I took a class in it a couple years ago taught by a very smart and honest researcher, psychologist Alan Davis, and was impressed by the results. Here are links to a few of the studies we read:
Psilocybin-assisted group therapy for demoralized older long-term AIDS survivor men: An open-label safety and feasibility pilot study
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(20)30282-0/fulltext
Long-term follow-up of psilocybin-facilitated smoking cessation
Matthew W. Johnson , PhD, Albert Garcia-Romeu , PhD & Roland R. Griffiths , PhD
Pages 55-60 | Received 21 Jan 2016, Accepted 21 Mar 2016, Published online: 21 Jul 2016
Cite this article https://doi.org/10.3109/00952990.2016.1170135 CrossMark Logo CrossMark
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3109/00952990.2016.1170135
JAMAPsychiatry | OriginalInvestigation
Effects of Psilocybin-Assisted Therapy on Major Depressive Disorder A Randomized Clinical Trial
Alan K. Davis, PhD; Frederick S. Barrett, PhD; Darrick G. May, MD; Mary P. Cosimano, MSW; Nathan D. Sepeda, BS; Matthew W. Johnson, PhD; Patrick H. Finan, PhD; Roland R. Griffiths, PhD
Safety and Efficacy of Lysergic Acid Diethylamide-Assisted Psychotherapy for Anxiety Associated With Life-threatening Diseases
Peter Gasser, MD,* Dominique Holstein, PhD,Þ Yvonne Michel, PhD,þ Rick Doblin, PhD,§ Berra Yazar-Klosinski, PhD,§ Torsten Passie, MD, MA,|| and Rudolf Brenneisen, PhD¶
Predicting Reactions to Psychedelic Drugs: A Systematic Review of States and Traits Related to Acute Drug Effects
Jacob S. Aday,* Alan K. Davis, Cayla M. Mitzkovitz, Emily K. Bloesch, and Christopher C. Davoli
This one is pretty interesting too.
Must Psilocybin Always “Assist Psychotherapy”?
Guy M. Goodwin, F.Med.Sci., Ekaterina Malievskaia, M.D., Gregory A. Fonzo, Ph.D., Charles B. Nemeroff, M.D., Ph.D.
https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp.20221043?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email.
Didn't have time to read it, just read abstract. But none of the studies I gave links to used psilocybin to assist a long-term, insight-oriented therapy. Most involved about 10 sessions of therapist contact, with 2 psychedelic sessions somewhere in the middle -- generally first was low-dose, then a session to process trip, the next one, which could be higher dose or, if subject preferred, a repeat of the original low dose. And the actual sessions were focused on the patient's problem. Prior to the first trip subjects and therapist discussed patient's problem, including things like what they had tried so far, aiming to develop some sort of formulation of what was wrong or what needed to change. For instance, in the study where a couple psilocybin trips were used to help people quit smoking, a subject might formulate the problem as "I've quit before, but I've come to associate smoking with feeling good -- it relaxes me when I need it, gives me energy when I need it. And the pack in my pocket is like my little friend. So even though I know smoking is bad for me, that just doesn't *feel* true, so I always go back to it." So this person might be told that psilocybin helps people see things from a different point of view, and that look for ways during the trip to try to see smoking -- or quitting smoking -- from a different point of view. And of course therapist tells the person some stuff about what to expect when the effects kick in, and answers any questions. After the trips therapist and subject talk about what it was like, and what if anything can be harvested from the to help with quitting smoking.
So I described the smoking cessation study in detail, but the other studies -- of anxiety, despair, depression, etc -- were all on the same model. Actually I think they would be better termed therapist -assisted trips, rather than trip-assisted therapy.
Also, there's something odd about the article's complaint that lots of therapist are doing psychedelic-assisted therapy. How can that be true? Unless a shrink is doing a research study that gets approved by all the various powers that be, there is no legal way to give patients psychedelics. The shit's illegal in almost all states, and in face is a Schedule 1 drug, along with heroin and meth.
What there is, though, is a lot of "ketamine-assisted" therapy. The great advantage of ketamine is that doctors can legally prescribe it. The great disadvantage is that it's not really a psychedelic -- at least IMO. I got a psychiatrist I know to let me try it, both a low doses and at high ones, and to me it seemed like the low doses were sort of like mild marijuana high. The high doses fucked me up so much that at their peak I could not even remember why I felt so weird. But they were not rich experiences, the way even marijuana can be -- more just a temporary scrambling of my mind.
I've been following this topic for a while now, there is a Meetup group that bills itself as the Minnesota Psychedelic Society and I ran into some interesting and serious people, not therapists, but what I would call goal driven users of psychedelics. There was a group of young fathers that were trying to become better at being dads that I liked to listen to. But COVID came, and George Floyd died a few miles from my house and a lot of things were knocked off track and haven't really gotten back into the same form as before.
There are a lot of ketamine therapy outfits in my area and I watched a Zoom presentation for one of them. The setup rang some 'grift' alarm bells though. I talked to one of the business owners on the phone and that impression was reenforced. For example they required a physical from their doctor and when I told them I just had a thorough physical they wouldn't use those results. I went to check on their office and there was only an empty office front so I shied away from that operation.
I did talk to another group and spoke to the medical doctor in charge and the operation seemed more on the up and up, but as you mentioned ketamine is not a psychedelic and efficacy for anxiety and OCD has not even been explored.
I thought the AJP article that I linked was interesting because it seems to suggest that the neuroplasticity effects by themselves are at the heart of therapeutic use. Obviously I'm not a professional but a curious amateur poking around in an interesting field.
The NYT article about the research at Johns Hopkins didn't surprise me a lot. We are in the honeymoon phase of this renewed research that was aborted with the 'War on Drugs' for a while now and while the research seems to have a lot of potential there are bound to be setbacks along the way.
I like the sound of that young father's group. If you do decide to try ketamine I can tell you about my experience with different ways of getting it into your system.
I agree that the neuroplasticity psilocybin makes possible is the crucial thing. And there are plenty of people who took solo trips and felt better forever after. (But also a few who felt haunted forever after.). I think a few meetings with a therapist can be helpful in sort of planting a flag in the area of the mind the. person hopes will change -- also in reinforcing the idea that change is possible. Most people who have suffered for a long time from a head disorder believe in their hearts that it is their fate and it is impossible to affect the problem.
It's a shame I lost track of the "let's get better at being dads" group during the COVID plus rioting plus 12 year old boys hijacking cars for kicks period.
Their sincerity was readily apparent. Two things stick with me from those guys, one of the more experienced guys said it comes down to "trying to lead with love", a newer guy said "I'm just trying to become less of an asshole." Even if I only achieve the lesser objective I think it would be time well spent. :)
Maps [dot] org has a bunch of stuff. It's from a true believer point of view though.
A couple weeks ago the NYT did a piece about research at Johns Hopkins maybe leaning into desired results with psychedelic therapy there, as in bad science, prompting responses from study participants.
This link is supposed to be unpaywalled:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/21/health/psychedelics-roland-griffiths-johns-hopkins.html?ugrp=u&unlocked_article_code=1.hk0.R3pL.B3hcahRG31Ou&smid=url-share
So today I learned that the Obamas have a film and TV production company, which surprised me. I don't know why, except that "film production" is not something I would have imagined as post- presidency careers for them.
Looking it up, they've had it since 2018 and it seems to be mostly producing stuff for Netflix, so a more successful version of what Harry and Meghan tried doing with their production company? Anyway, I learned about all this due to the fact that their company produced a series set in Ireland that will be screening on Netflix in May:
https://www.rte.ie/entertainment/2024/0402/1441266-netflix-unveils-trailer-for-ireland-set-series-bodkin/
It sounds a little bit like an Irish version of all those Scandinavian thrillers/police shows that were wildly popular in the UK a while back, and I suppose I'm fearful that it may indulge in Paddywhackery. Even the modern form of Paddywhackery, which is more "the dark dire drear doings of the bog dwellers, isn't it great that we're so modern and urban nowadays?" unless it's the "we're so modern and urban nowadays, we have gangs and crime and drugs and guns all that good stuff where people wallow in poverty and misery and can't get out" variant.
EDIT: Okay, going by the trailer, yep, Paddywhackery. And swiping the Scandinoir style with the Midsommar version of Hallowe'en (no, even in darkest West Cork they don't walk around with skinned rabbits in a procession, ask Scott if you don't believe me) and the de-saturated colours. I never thought I'd complain about asking them to turn up the brightness, because usually it's the *opposite* problem in movies/TV set in Ireland, but even while it can be grey and dreer here, it's a tiny bit brighter and greener than this shows. If it's Hallowe'en, that's the end of October, and in a West Cork coastal village you'll have the golden autumnal evening light and the long Atlantic dusk where the western sky is amethyst and sapphire.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoVnzw4nP10
EDIT EDIT: Although feck it, there's a scene at around 1:32 in the trailer where one of the intrepid podcasters breaks into what looks like an abandoned chapel full of beehives with a statue at the end surrounded by candles as in a shrine, and if the writers did *any* kind of homework, that *could* be Saint Gobnait because it's West Cork, she's a prominent local saint there, she's associated with bees and bee-keeping, and she's also the patron saint of a mountain parish in my own place, which is how I know about her.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gobnait
But it'll probably just be a statue of the Blessed Virgin, so a missed opportunity!
I saw one of the Obamas' movies, "Rustin" a few months ago. It was about a gay black civil rights organizer who helped with the March on Washington. It was OK. Interesting behind-the-scenes history, and a lot of good scenery-chewing by the actors, including some great Oscar-bait lines. But it wasn't terribly coherent - it gave the impression of a bunch of scenes stuck together in the pattern of a story, neither fully embracing the complexities of reality like a good documentary, or putting the chosen narrative above all else like a cheesy docudrama. Instead, it sort of muddled between the two, and IMO failed at both. But perhaps I've been spoiled by David Simon's work ("Generation Kill", "Show Me A Hero", and above all "We Own This City" come to mind).
Yeesh. American Factory was pretty good, but looking at this and the other stuff on their website, not much else in their portfolio looks to be to that standard.
Everything I know of Ireland I've learned from @Deiseach, and what I've learned is that it's wall-to-wall Fae incursions barely held in check by a combination of Catholic rites, good old-fashioned Celtic moxie, and political shenanigans. :-)
Like everywhere, there are charms and rituals to keep the Fairies out, but you can't do the same for politicians (drat).
I wonder if politicians count as snakes?
There is something deeply amusing to me of the idea of a successful politician retiring to make movies, and then filling their movies with the most racist stereotypes they can think of.
They're not exactly racist, just cliché. I think the Scandis are entitled to be miffed at swiping their trademark "There's something nasty in the woodshed, Olaf" mayhem-in-the-smiling-countryside productions and setting it in Ireland by an American outfit.
Is that what scandi-noir is about? I haven't read or seen any of it.
I'm used to that sort of thing being set in the American south. Like, either the deep south, or West Virginia. "Deliverance" would probably be the most (in)famous example. So on the one hand, maybe there's less ripping-off going on, but on the other hand, there might be even more looking-down. :-/
The Duelling Banjos scene is absolutely worth a listen:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlJ82Qlw4hw
This is what I've picked up over the years (and I don't have any links and I may be wrong about some of this) — but with the popularization of inexpensive paperbacks in the 1950s, Swedish publishers started translating British and American mysteries and crime fiction to meet the new readership demands of Sweden. Initially, the British tea cozy mysteries (a la Agatha Christie) were quite popular, and Swedish authors began to write their own versions of these in Swedish settings. My understanding is that they were all very tame and derivative, but I can't say if this is true, but this was the opinion of a Swedish-American friend. Then in the 1960s translations of American crime fiction (a la Raymond Chandler) hit the market. Something about that noir sensibility struck a chord with Swedes (with their long dark winter nights and their sleep-deprived summers) and they started writing their own noir fiction. They took the genre and ran with it! Wikipedia doesn't have an article on it, but search for Swedish Crime Fiction and you'll get dozens of authors (link below).
Jo Nesbø is probably the author you want to start with. Although it was Stieg Larsson's Girl with the Dragon Tattoo that introduced me to this genre. Icelandic crime fiction is pretty damn good, too. I don't know if the Danes and Norwegians have the same fascination with fictional criminal psychopaths, though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=Swedish+crime+fiction&title=Special%3ASearch&ns0=1
Thanks!
I think the European version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo would count. Did you see that?
Nope. I kind of fell out of pop culture around when that became popular. Was it any good? It seemed to fall into that broad genre where flaws in the rest of the work get covered up by slathering on sex appeal.
I enjoyed the novels more than the Swedish movie adaptations and the Swedish movie adaptations more than the American movie adaptations of the Swedish movies. It's important to note that Stieg Larsson dropped dead of a massive coronary after finishing the trilogy. My understanding is that his unmarried longtime partner didn't get any of his quite valuable literary estate, but his family did, and they hired some hacks to churn out more in the series.
The main character is quite Aspergery, and I thought Larsson did a great job portraying her. The writing seems a little uneven in places, but that may be because of a poor translation.
Yeah, not this one, but I'm imagining, like, Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton making a drama set in China, and then everyone spends the whole movie speaking Pidgin.
The closer their job was to international relations, the funnier.
Seems like paddywhackery is somewhere at the intersectionality of colonialism and oppression. Does being heavily freckled qualify one to be a person of color?
Did I really just say that?! <sound of me whacking my face>
I'm calling my race the Colorless People. I tried using Everybody But the White People instead of People of Color. It's much more direct. But all the racialists in the room either shouted Shush or ran for the door.
I don't classify race by color. I classify race by skin color but by tastebuds. And there are two races, those that like spicy food and those that don't. If you're not into spicy food, then we can have absolutely nothing in common and I don't want to associate with you. But if you're of the spicy race, let's party!
I'm lame as hell by your standards. I like tasty spices like cumin a lot, but you're talking about hot spices, right? I just cannot comprehend how people can like them. Pain is not a flavor! Why would anyone take pleasure in having their mouth hurt while they experience the actual flavor and texture of the dish? And for those who enjoy a burning sensation while chewing, couldn't we come at it using a different model, one that doesn't wreck most things on the menu for people like me? For instance the cooks can leave the capsaicin out of the food, and instead supply the table with some sandpaper and a lemon. Those who like a burning sensation can sandpaper their lips while ordering -- then, while eating, they can rub them with lemon juice before each bite.
See what I mean? Two different races. Melanin is just skin deep. Tastebuds are what separate humans into two very different races. ;-)
People of Colorlessness, please. Then acronymize it, and sit back to enjoy the ensuing brouhaha.
Maybe whites could call themselves Consolidated Spectrum People? (White light is made up of all colors). Integrated Spectrum People would be good except the first word demands a trigger warning. Um . . . Rainbows in Disguise Entities?
The Political Coalition of Many Colours?
I have been informed by previous discussions on social media that persons of colour can indeed be freckled, so you need not whack yourself in the face for that.
Deiseach, who is the saint people pray to when they can't find something? I once lost my car keys after stopping to clean up my car interior at a gas station that offered a big trash barrel and use of a vacuum cleaner. When I was ready to leave I just could not find my keys. After half an hour of crawling around the car floor, digging in my backpack, checking the ground etc. I was blinking back tears of frustration. A guy nearby helped me briefly but had no more luck than me, and returned to cleaning his own car. And about a minute after he left, I found them. They were in the trash barrel, right on top. I told him and he said matter-of-factly, "yeah, I said a little prayer to St. _______ for you."
Also, what did you think of Peaky Blinders?
I think the best evidence that we are living in a simulation is the consistency with which my mother can find a parking space using the St Anthony hack.
St Anthony of Padua, the go-to guy in my family for "Hey St Anthony I lost my keys/paperwork/sanity, go find it for me, please?" and he never lets us down.
Don't forget to at least light a candle if you don't put money in the donation box! 😁 Yeah, we're not above trying to bribe a saint: "Hey Anthony, find this for me and I'll put some money in the box, we gotta deal?"
It's even funnier in that he got his reputation as a theologian and preacher, but popular piety decided "yeah, we're gonna make this scholarly friar find our lost crap, that seems the best way to approach this".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_of_Padua
Haven't been watching Peaky Blinders, it's not really my thing. Seems very dramatic, and I've seen some discussion that later seasons are not as good. Cillian Murphy of course became a star out of it, so good luck to him.
I've been following Murphy since Breakfast on Pluto, 28 Days Later, Redeye and Sunshine. I always enjoy his acting. Everything he does or says, he puts a little bit of spin on, a little wobble, that gives a sense of interiority and of the character's areas of eccentricity. Also am fascinated by his profoundly androgynous good looks. And his blue eyes are sort of a superpower. Saw him in a movie where the director had him wear brown contact lenses and I did not realize it was Murphy til near the end, even though his appearance was not changed at all except for the eye color.
Back when I was a child in Poland, I often heard my grandma pray to St. Anthony of Padua to help her find her glasses/keys/other stuff. Thanks for the trip down memory lane 😊
Old news?
The psychological risks of meditation
https://harpers.org/archive/2021/04/lost-in-thought-psychological-risks-of-meditation/
The DSM-IV. had qi-gong Psychotic Reaction as a diagnosis.
Meditation induced psychosis seems to be a real thing (and not specific to qi gong)
Possibly, prior history of psychotic symptoms may be a risk factor.
There is a pretty well known 'Dark Night of the Soul' phenomenon.
https://meditatinginsafety.org.uk/dark-night-soul/
Assuming there's any credence to all of that, it still seems like St John had it completely backwards. It's faith that's the source of denial and attatchment to false idols. Actually abandoning attatchment would involve stripping away the lies that make up your view of the world, even down to your own identity... but then you would be left with nothing. And apparently the human mind can't handle that.
Anyways, I don't think anything in there is related to meditation-induced psychosis. The whole "dark night of the soul" just seems to be temporary disillusionment with their faith. Or it's just seasonal depression.
Alternately, it's stripping away the veil of illusion that prevents you from directly perceiving reality. You are not your identity. What was your true face before you were born?
Not that it's much easier for the human mind to handle that. And I suppose one could debate whether "reality" is different from "nothing", but well, I think that view generates enough despair under introspection, as is.
Depersonalization and derealization are hellish disorders. I've seen both in post-meditation syndromes. But they do seem to be a pretty rare consequence, even among people who do meditation marathons.
Culadasa - John Yates - touches on it in "The Mind Illuminated" in the section on insight meditation. I was looking into attending one of his ten day training sessions in Arizona just before he was caught up in some sort of scandal and was kicked out his practice.
A Google search on the phrase + meditation will turn up a lot of links to Reddit discussion, etc. So I suspect it's a thing that happens to some people with regular long sessions.
I've had a daily practice for several years and will often do one hour sessions but I haven't had it happen. No Jhanas for me either.
Personally, I've been lucky and never really experienced anything I would call depression. It was always just a lot of anxiety and some pretty bad OCD for me. I'm a good responder to SSRI's for the OCD so I've been lucky that way.
If something bad happens, like losing a friend or a relative or even a pet I'll go through a period of sadness but I think that happens to pretty much everyone and it would be cause for concern if I wasn't low for a while after that sort of loss.
One of my brothers does have issues with seasonal depression though. He relocated to Phoenix because Minnesota winters were just too dark and dreary for him.
This is interesting - I also have OCD that responds very well to SSRIs, but I won't try meditation because of my fears about the negative effects (particularly that some switch might flip in my brain that would send me into psychological hell). I love that you are getting a lot out of it!
If you haven't had jhanas, and find SSRIs good enough to deal with anxiety and OCD, how do you get the motivation to do daily practice for years, even to the point of planning a ten day training session?
For me personally, I seem to lose meditational steam outside my extreme lows where I come close to thinking of taking my life. Even then, Michael Sealey's youtube videos seem to give me more immediate response to stress/sleeplessness, though for longer term transformation possibly (I don't know) a TMI-style framework might suit better.
The daily motivation comes from the self exploration of insight meditation. I’ve worked some important things out regarding my own motivations for my own actions and I have developed a good degree self understanding and non reactivity to events outside my control.
It made working with engineering teams with big egos much more harmonious. I’ve retired in the last couple years and the patience I’ve learned with myself and others makes life for me and the people around me more open and loving. I’ve been married for a long time - 41 years and counting - and my relationship with my wife has never been so conflict free.
This is a pretty brief summary of how meditation has helped. It probably has the ring of too good to be true. The process involved a lot of self work and wasn’t always easy and I’m glossing over many details here but I’ve been up since 5:00 this morning and I’m a bit tired right now. If you like I can go into more detail tomorrow.
This is already great -- thank you very much -- but more details will of course be even better.
My impression was, for instance, that "open and loving", "calm" etc. were more in the shamata (especially metta) territory, and that people embrace insight-driven-misery once they graduate from shamata only for progress towards supposedly more serious goals like stream entry. Here you seem to suggest that at least some could understand their own motivations better from insight meditation rather than shamata + targeted contemplation on one's own motivations?
I know ppl who go to the 10 day Vipassana camp annually. It did seem pretty extreme to me, based on their description..
I remember having read this a while ago (I think Gwern Branwen had linked to it somewhere).
That said (epistemic status: not an expert) I think these issues tend to kick in with a rather large dose of meditation? (If I understand the article correctly, Megan Vogt, the main focus of the article, had to meditate for *sixty hours* before she finally went insane.) Usually normies who are into meditation tend to meditate for maybe like an hour a week(?), which should be below the threshold of craziness.
A few years ago, I used to practice meditation very casually for maybe 15-20 minutes daily. I believe (but have no way to prove) that this meditation regimen led to the onset of a weird bodily sensory issue which I still struggle with to some extent. The sensation itself and the discomfort that it causes are difficult to describe in words. Essentially, my attention will occasionally gravitate, spontaneously and uncontrollably, toward my heartbeat (which is a sensation that I became consciously aware of for the first time during these meditation sessions). This causes me significant discomfort, due to my squeamishness regarding internal bodily sensations.
Is it possible that you might have some condition like a heart arrhythmia which by a coincidence developed at the time you were meditating? Perhaps you should check with a doctor.
It's definitely possible. I got an ECG a few weeks after these episodes started, which came in normal. But I also have relatives on both sides of my family with various heart conditions. If it is a physical arrhythmia, then I sort of suspect that vagus nerve stimulation could be what triggers it.
In the article it mentions a threshold of thirty minutes per day, beyond which meditation stops being a benefit and has the potential to be harmful. They didn't follow that up, so I'm not sure if they've done any more research into that threshold. It does match with my experiences though - I've done meditation for about 15 minutes a day for a long time and never had any bad experiences, but at one point I went up to two hours per day. The experience was very different, I had some profound realisations, but I also saw frightening things. After a few weeks I realised my mood was getting lower and lower, and I backed off from the long meditation then. The realisations I had were not negative, but I could imagine some people do experience very negative and frightening realisations like the ones described in the article.
Do we know which percentage of subscribers are paying subscribers here on ACX and in general on substack.
For ACX it's about 5.5% (source: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/subscrive-drive-2024-free-unlocked)
Pretty close to the claimed overall Substack percentage of 5.71% in April 2023 (source: https://backlinko.com/substack-users)
The rationalist tradition in Hinduism that began in ancient India. (Btw, This is a great channel of you're interested in Indian history. Came recommended by an expert I know.)
https://youtu.be/2VlaDOqgeog?si=-WvVUudh1vcCBc8o
There are a lot of Indian philosophical traditions. I never had the time to learn about them--I don't know Western philosophy that well so I wouldn't know what to compare it to. Just a reminder there are thousands of things you will never know.
But a school with a focus on this world seems credible--this is the home of the Kama Sutra after all. ;)
Ancient Indians were into theorizing everything. Panini created (2000 years ago) a set of 4000 algorithms to define what a well formed sentence was in Sanskrit. Basically, he codified a language. This is widely seen as one of the greatest intellectual achievements of humanity. There was an intellectual environment for at least a 1000 years before that, that led to that.
Some of the other subjects theorized, such as the Kamasutra, were pretty wacky. Ultimate nerdiness.
I mean, only in a society where smart theoretical people are unattractive and therefore theorizing about sex is creepy.
I read through it ages ago as a kid, and it seemed eminently practical to me, though at the time I was too young to do anything with it, and thought, "Hm, guess some cultures are less puritanical about sex. I guess this might be useful for an adult." The thing I remember was the three categories of genital sizes with animal names.
True, that they were not puritanical about sex. However, 1000 years of colonization by Islamic and then Victorian Christian cultures affected that though.
I don’t usually watch videos. Much prefer reading text but thanks for this.
I feel exactly the same. Drives me crazy when I'm looking up how to do something tricky in Photoshop. I'm willing to scroll and scroll through google hits looking for the information in prose. But usually it does not exist, and I end up with a 20 min video with somebody perky, one unskippable and one skippable ad at the beginning and 2 or 3 unskippables in the middle. And the first long part of the video is stuff I already know, and the last part is stuff I don't need to know, and I have to hunt for the middle part that tells me how the hell to do X, and when I find it the instructions involve panels and options I'm not familiar with, so I have to go look up how to get Photoshop to extrude them into view, then go back and find again the part about X, and the crucial part has an unskippable ad in the middle. Fuck that.
Do you have a few minutes to talk about our lord and savior, YouTube Premium?
While I agree with @Anonymous that ad-blocking browser plug-ins are terrific, YouTube frequently finds ways to thwart them, and of course thwarting ads in YouTube phone and TV apps is no longer trivially easy (or maybe no longer even possible).
But $25 a month gets you no ad interruptions, ever, plus YouTube Music (I have no idea how it compares to paid Spotify but it seems good enough to me) and other crap I don't use like downloading videos to watch offline, and that's for up to **FIVE** YouTube accounts.
I signed up for Premium and my four family members pay me $60 a year for their accounts, so I'm only actually paying $5 a month for ad-free YouTube. There are no requirements that everyone be in the same household and your Premium account follows you everywhere you are logged in. You can be logged in in more than one place (like your phone and a Roku, or whatever).
This is heaven.
Seriously.
Heaven.
I went to a friend's house and tried to share a funny 2 hour video essay on a Marvel movie with them on their TV and the ad interruptions were *torture.* It was so bad that I persuaded them to log out and let me log in, and our collective blood pressure immediately dropped.
They signed up for YouTube Premium at the end of the night.
It's a bargain for one person at $25; it's a steal for five people at $5 each. Just do it.
I just downloaded the subtitles of the video shared above (as .txt) using some google-thrown-up subtitle download website, which I don't recommend or link because that site is full of ads with gifs. I hope there is a better site that can do the same.
If you can install on your computer, try https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp
Thanks. I did download it and invoke the command wrongly, but then now I am starting to get paranoid if the developers could have slipped in something nasty in the code. Let me be stupid and ask: how do I know that wouldn't be the case, when I download software by a bunch of private individuals I don't know at all?
Sorry, no idea. My heuristic is something like "if too many people use it, I would probably have heard if it did something fishy".
I wish there was a better (and sufficiently simple) way to use untrusted programs. Something like when you install an app on smartphone, and it keeps asking for permissions, maybe something like that could also exist in Windows, like you would run the program in a paranoid mode and keep getting notifications like "now it tries to download from this URL", "now it tries to write into this file on disk" and could agree or disagree on any action (and remember your previous decisions, or create rules for the future). But I do not know anything like this.
Do you have a few minutes to talk about our lord and savior, Ublock Origin?
I haven't seen a Youtube ad for *years*, besides those sponsorship spots recorded by the video maker and which are easy to manually skip.
Yeah, I'm lazy and sloppy when I'm in the throes of a photoshop project. It's hard to break out of that state and proactively do the sensible thing. Does Ublock work on Mac?
Yes; it's not based on operating system but on browser. It will not work in Safari, due to Apple once again ruining its bundled apps for no good reason, but it will work in Firefox as well as in Chrome-based browsers.
Apologies for the slow answer, by the way.
See, this is part of why I avoid taking some of these proactive steps. They sound easy -- 20 mins getting and installing it, and the rest of your life will be bliss. But I have been using Safari for years, and whatever is wrong with it I am so used to dealing with that it doesn't bother me. It's like being married! I'm sure there are ways to port your bookmarks and history and passwords over to another browser, but doing all that will take me. a long time, I will probably get stuck on something and need help, etc. And then once it's done I'll have to get fluent with the new browser. I think I'm stuck with the YouTube ads, unless there's an equivalent ad blocker for Mac.
But thanks for trying.
Maybe you can read the wiki on "Charvaka".
Reading it right now. Thanks again.
What do wombles do with the litter they collect?
From the Wombles song:
"We're so incredibly utterly devious
Making the most of everything
Even bottles and tins
Pick up the pieces and make them into something new
Is what we do"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWQMMPFtoG4
An episode of the series:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSb6qfYcgJo&list=PL93iTaOoznoR9Il0cAIaBJdAEsCUyPl08&index=2
Ah. Upcycling. Should have guessed. For some reason I was imagining the little fuzzy bastards eating my KitKat wrapper.
Um -- my guess is that they give it to the Alphas in the group, and the Alphas impale it on their great big peckers and feed it to women who have developed crow's feet and are now willing to do anything at all to get an Alpha or even a bit of food.
Hey no sexualising the wombles. They are but humble creatures performing a vital service. Plus modern London wombles aren't afraid to stab a bitch.
lol
Yes, once you get the first wrinkle, it's all over. You are reduced to fighting the rats in the alley ways for scraps.
Yeah, that first wrinkle is each woman's Crack of Doom. You fall into it screaming AAAAIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEE! and that's it for you. Though if you're lucky you might find a lonesome, though somewhat crispy, Gollum at the bottom. And the worst of it is, Gollum was no Alpha even prior to crisping.
**blinks**
So Frodo stuck his finger into Sauron's Crack of Doom, huh? After putting a ring on it.
Just for context for y'all, here's a definition of The Wall from a page of definition of Redpill acronyms: "The Wall- The point in a woman's life where her ego and self-assessed view of her sexual market value exceed her actual sexual market value; the beginning of the decline. Usually occurs as a wake-up shock to women when they realize that their power over men was temporary and that their looks are fading. This usually results with first denial and then a sudden change in priority towards looking for a husband. Even after hitting the wall, many women will squander a few more precious years testing her SMV with alphas to double-check, hoping her perceived decline was a fluke, this will make her even more bitter when she finally has to settle for a worse-beta than she could've gotten before because of squandering her youth."
And, um, crass as I am, my Gollum comment had nothing to do with sex -- well, except for good times women who've hit the wall might have with Crispy Gollum down in the Crack of Doom. The Crack of Doom is the canyon in or near Mt. Doom with a river of molten metal flowing through it, right?
You know, when I first encountered the redpill stuff it really seemed to me like the sort of things feminists used to say about men, except of course with the places reversed. They had some good points but exaggerated everything--SMV does exist but varies depending on the beholder, and yes it does decline with age but a lot of women are aware of this, get married successfully and exit the market. Or else decide they don't want to and manage their money accordingly. You also have to see the irony in wanting 'traditional values' and then screwing around--sure the consequences were worse for women pre-1960s but 'good time Charlies' weren't respected either.
Still, after hearing endlessly a bunch of second-wave stuff growing up about how awful I was for even looking at a woman the wrong way and how terrible my natural inclinations were and if I screwed up I'd be unhireable and starve to death on the street...well, it starts to look refreshing. There are these people I've been terrified of my whole life and nobody ever criticizes them and we had to pretend we loved them--AND SOMEONE IS FIGHTING BACK!
Then they turned into Nazis. Oh well. Nothing good ever lasts.
The one thing I got out of reading both Dworkin and Mackinnon (or more accurately their epigones in the popular press) *and* Roissy and Roosh over the years is that the sexes are basically enemies--while there *are* indeed negative-sum outcomes like nuclear war or climate change that hurt everyone, in general what benefits women hurts men because they don't need men anymore, and vice versa. Fundamentally, male and female interests are in conflict, because (a) unlike say LGBT where straights don't lose anything by allowing gay marriage, men and women are both half of humanity and resources are limited, and (b) at least for the heterosexual majority, both sexes are engaged in trying to get the 'best possible' partner of the opposite sex, which usually means limiting the agency of that sex (either by taking away money from women or creating consequences for approach by unattractive men) so they have to settle for you.
Forget any dream of romance and companionship, for in the grim darkness of the near future there is only war, and the laughter of thirsting lawyers.
I'm gonna guess that "good times with crispy Gollum, yes?" would not be a good pickup line. :-/
Curses, that our power over men is merely temporary!
I do have to laugh at some of the discourse, as they say.
The gay interpretations of Frodo and Sam are pretty common now I think.
But this is a gay interpretation of **Sauron**... ;-)
I'm deciding between upcoming travel opportunities in Hong Kong and Taiwan - any recommendations for either (or both)?
I visited Taiwan many times, most recently 4 years ago. Even though a white guy with minimal Mandarin, I was always treated well. I was often disoriented, since I was unable to read, speak, or understand. Someone always helped. Also, IMHO, best food in the world
like collapse, like AGI, time will most certainly tell
Is this meant to be a reply to something?
Yes sry, my mistake
I feel like this might be getting tedious now, but something has gone wrong with the scores. The highest blind score on the spreadsheet is 0.275 (as stated in the post) and the highest full score is 0.34. But the winning score was 0.38.
Those are the corrected scores. Corrected scores were lower average absolute value.
https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1435696884513861632
"Google has launched an "antiracism" initiative claiming that America is a "system of white supremacy" and that all Americans are "raised to be racist"—including Ben Shapiro, who is depicted as a layer of the "white supremacy pyramid," culminating in "genocide.""
Something to keep in mind next time somebody talks about 'wokeness is in decline' or something
This is a three year old tweet.
But I'm angry NOW!
If you are Jewish, Black or an immigrant to the US you should be seething with anger at yourself because you are destroying White America with your vile genes, character and habits. If you are Asian or something else I'm not clear whether and how much you should hate yourself -- but I'm sure Hammond will be happy to provide guidelines.
LoL. Don't forget all the Shröndinger Immigrants who steal our jobs but laze around all day collecting welfare bennies while eating bonbons!
Only if they're knife-ears, though, as the Rings of Power reminded us:
"Elf ships on our shore; Elf workers taking your trades. Workers who don't sleep, don't tire, don't age. I say, the Queen's either blind or an Elf lover, just like her father."
I hear there's this guy named Sauron who has a plan to protect pure-blooded Numorians. Check out his Truth Social page!
Google pulled out of a conference in Europe because the organiser criticised Israel. As did Intel and Siemens. American capital is pretty much pro Israel.
I don't know the specifics (since there's not enough data to identify the conference and the organizer) but from my experience, I strongly suspect "criticised Israel" means something like "denied the right of Israel to exist as a state, propagandized boycotting and ultimately destroying Israel and unquestionably supported genocidal organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah in their quest for massacring Jews and ethnically cleaning the territory of Israel". That's how it usually turns out - it's one thing saying "Israel did this and that wrong" - and I don't believe thoroughly woke and leftist Google would pull out of anything because of that - and quite the other thing saying "make Palestine Judenfrei!" especially right after over a thousand Israelis had been brutally murdered by an organization with an official goal of making Palestine Judenfrei. *That* could make even the very woke and leftist Google to stop and think maybe they don't want a part in this particular thing.
You might want to update your priors, because you're wrong on just about all counts. Also, it took me a grand total of two minutes of googling the first sentence there before I had the tweet from the organizer in question.
"I’m shocked at the rhetoric and actions of so many Western leaders & governments, with the exception in particular of Ireland’s government, who for once are doing the right thing. War crimes are war crimes even when committed by allies, and should be called out for what they are."
https://twitter.com/paddycosgrave/status/1712790539844612553
Followed immediate by an apology, which starts, "First, what Hamas did is outrageous and disgusting. It is by every measure an act of monstrous evil. Israel has a right to defend itself, but it does not, as I have already stated, have a right to break international law." and advocates for peace using Ireland as the metaphor.
Also, Google is a highly profit-driven TRILLION dollar corporation. They are not remotely leftist lol.
They are very, very leftist lol. Example: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/02/most-liberal-tech-companies-ranked-by-employee-donations.html If you go to the top, it'd be likely 100% to the left, the 12% likely are low level techs that decide nothing.
And if you think leftists are some kind of pennyless hippies that despise money you need to really update your world model. It's a fallacy beyond a mere lol, it's double-facepalm-worthy misconception. There are a lot of leftists billionaires, and it's probably pointless to count the millionaires, there are so many of them. Bernie Sanders is a millionaire, for Marx's sake. Trillion dollar corps do not contradict leftist principles in any way - in fact, for a trillion dollar corp it makes sense to ally with the left, since they can easily overcome or capture the economic control mechanisms, and they would be delighted by both the capacities of control that such alliance promises (who wouldn't like to be able to decide what people can and can't speak about?) and all the negatives would be much heavier on their smaller and less established competitors than on them.
As for Cosgrave, I can see that he, a week after Hamas murdered over a thousand Israelis and and kidnapped several hundreds, before all the victims were even identified and buried, while giving lip service to Israel's "right to defend", accused Israel of "war crimes" (note he had never said Hamas committed any). This was way before operation in Gaza started, that was on Oct 27. And he endorsed the call of Irish government for "cessation of all hostilities" - effectively denying Israel's right to defend itself right after giving it lip service (because there's no way Israel can actually defend itself it it ceases hostile actions toward Hamas). I think the position here is clear - Israel is the criminal here, and while Hamas is "disgusting", Israel should just shut up and take it, and not respond in any way or form. This is a little step better than outright denying the right of Israel to exist, but only barely.
I grant you that some Google *employees* identify as leftists, and maybe even are. I'm well aware you don't need to be penniless for that, I'm a software engineer. That said, I'm not talking about the employees, nor was it the topic of discussion you replied to. We're talking about the *company as a political entity* - e.g., the part making decisions about pulling out of conferences, the actual management of the company (the employees are not making these decisions). They are categorically not leftists, nor are they pro-Palestine (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/08/business/israel-palestine-google-employees.html)
If the word "leftist" has any meaning other than "to the left of me, the person talking", there are no leftist billionaires. Millionaires maybe, but I don't think you really conceptualize the difference between "owning 2-3 houses" wealthy and "financially able to purchase thousands of houses and let them sit vacant" wealthy.
As far as the rest of your post, it's clear you're not actually open to new information here, using some truly motivated reasoning to avoid updating, so I'm not interested in further discussion. If you're complaining that "what Hamas did is outrageous and disgusting. by every measure an act of monstrous evil." is insufficient because it didn't literally use the words "war crime", it's clear you're not engaging in good faith here.
I remember back in the day when a lot of employees were upset to discover that Google was giving donations to Republicans.
> We're talking about the *company as a political entity*
Oh, then it is definitely very very leftist. I mean the whole company was in mourning after Trump has been elected in 2016, held special meetings to help the employees cope with that, and several top officials promised to work extra hard to never let it happen again. As a company, Google is probably even more leftist than a random worker. At least on worker level people like Damore exist(ed). On company level, they obviously can not be tolerated.
It is true that as a company Google is not pro-Palestine (or pro-Hamas) - a lot of American Left are not very sympathetic to Hamas (though a lot also are). That doesn't prevent them from being very leftist in all other political questions.
> If the word "leftist" has any meaning other than "to the left of me, the person talking", there are no leftist billionaires
George Soros, Jeff Bezos, Mark Cuban, Tom Steyer, Mark Zuckerberg, Steven Spielberg, Eli Broad, Michael Bloomberg, Pierre Omidyar, Marc Benioff. These only ones I could quickly recall, there are probably many more.
These are people who are on record endorsing leftist policies, organizing PACs to elect Democratic candidates and promote Democratic policies, giving money to leftist causes and NGOs. Any sensible definition of "leftist" would include them.
> so I'm not interested in further discussion.
Of course, after proclaiming some easily disprovable falsities, you are "no longer interested". No surprise here.
> is insufficient because it didn't literally use the words "war crime"
No, not because he didn't use the particular words (though it certainly wouldn't hurt) but because the practical conclusion he makes is that Hamas, while he calls them "evil" and "disgusting", should keep the hostages and go unpunished, while Israel is being called "criminal" right after it has been brutally attacked. Practically, the real crimes of Hamas are ignored in anything but rhetoric, while actions of Israel are called "crimes" by default. It is a grotesquely distorted view - yet very common, especially among western woke leftist. Their formulaic "condemnation" of Hamas atrocities is nothing but a smokescreen permitting them to move on to the real goal - bashing Israel. If they really thought Hamas is evil - they would endorse practical steps of fighting evil (which the Left is very active at when they really, and not just formally, think something is evil), but when it comes to the evil of Hamas, they somehow never do. I guess it may have something to do with "engaging in good faith"?
There is no source in the twitter message (from 2021). Where can I read more about this campaign? To be frank, I very much doubt this is accurate.
There's a source and it's kinda accurate in the sense that there has been a slide deck with that pyramid and it drew a progression from IIRC "white supremacy" to "genocide" and had some prominent right-wing names on it, but that was in 2021 when I saw it and I don't remember the exact thing and it's not different enough from a thousand of similar woke duckspeak pieces enough to bother digging it up. On my recollection, it wasn't even made by Google per se but one of those woke consultancies that profiteer on the whole DIE fashion but it probably was spotted somewhere at Google sponsored event. Again, not something unique or special - since 2021 there has been dozens of such instances spotted.
I wonder if this isn't a hoax. If this were an officially sponsored Google slide deck...
1. All the slides should say "Google Confidential" if they were really Google confidential. instead only one slide has "Google Confidential" pasted on it in the upper left hand corner.
2. Likewise, where's the Google watermark? That doesn't mean this isn't the Ladipo Group's slideware, but if this were a course sponsored by Google HR, they would have insisted on a more official form (confidential statement on every slide, and Google watermarks indicating sponsorship).
3. What's with that "Join the watch party" slide? If this course was sponsored by Google HR, they'd make sure that all their employees were taking it, rather than encouraging them to join watch parties after hours. Also, for the past decade just about all HR training is delivered through online modules that force the user to click through the content and then take a quiz. Watch parties are not a commonly used courseware delivery method.
4. Google employees have their own groups that are allowed to meet on site. Maybe this is some sort of wokeness study group?
Bottom line this whole thing doesn't look corporately official. And, BTW, did you know the word gullible isn't in the OED?
I had thought that "Oppression Olympics" was a term used to criticise wokeness by opponents of wokeness (back when it was called "social justice", but whatever). I suppose it's possible that it might have been in the slide-deck as an example of an anti-woke argument which should be countered, but if so then I'd expect it to have some context around it? It's strange to see it there as a slide by itself.
Theoretically, it could be a hoax. But I've seen the same ideas expressed so many times since 2021 in so many venues that creating a hoax that would look exactly like dozens of other DEI courses and decks sounds kinda pointless. Why bother? Judging by the style, those graphics likely weren't created by Google people but were copy-pasted from some other sources - probably some kind of DIE consultant content decks, or maybe activist sites/forums. And Rufo mentions several documents and videos in the thread, so the genocide pyramid is probably from another document than the confidential slides. Could be that this document is from some kind of wokeness promotion group, yes. Could be private initiative of the DIE person Rufo mentioned that created it as a guide. "Official" is kinda vague here - on one hand, you probably don't l;iterally have to read and follow literally everything DIE Lead sends out. On the other hand, it's kinda clear what the company endorses here, isn't it? I mean, if a senior officer would be sending coworkers links to the stormfront site, would we say "meh, it's not officially endorsed and mandatory" or would we be a bit more worried?
We had DEI training modules every year at my former company (15K employees worldwide), and they looked nothing like those slides. Basically, they were all about not saying things that racially or sexually insulted our coworkers. You'd get conversational scripts (which you could read or listen to the audio) and then you had to identify when someone was being a jerk (comments on par with "You mean you didn't grow up in a ghetto?" or asking "Is it your time of the month?"). It was pretty easy to score a 100 on these tests — even if you were a clueless jerk. There was nothing about identifying our privileged identities. And the Wheel of Power wasn't part of the training. BTW, that slide is credited to ccrweb.ca. I checked out the website and CCR is the Canadian Council of Refugees, an immigrant rights organization. Their mission statement: "The Canadian Council for Refugees is a leading voice for the rights, protection, sponsorship, settlement, and well-being of refugees and migrants, in Canada and globally. CCR is driven by member organizations working with and for these communities from coast to coast to coast." After the opening statement, there's some boilerplate about the intersectionality of colonialism and oppression. But it doesn't sound like they're trying to wokify Canadians.
You have linked to a tweet dated 8 September 2021. Setting aside any possible concerns with accuracy, this clearly does not falsify the hypothesis that wokeness has declined since that date.
This...
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/22/google-meta-other-tech-giants-cut-dei-programs-in-2023.html
key points from the article
<quote>The cuts come as the tech industry doubles down on artificial intelligence. With fewer diverse voices represented in AI development, the resulting products could be less accurate or more harmful to users.</quote>
I assume they mean 'exclusive or'.
Whenever someone uses the term "diverse voices" I automatically think of choirs singing off-key. But I'm thoroughly enjoying the shitshow as AI companies try to placate the competing racialist obsessions of the Right and Left.
I'm not, it doesn't amuse me to think that a decade of hundreds of AI researchers (roughly millennia of human thought) working together and centuries of computing time by GPUs result in a model that we then proceed to shackle and shittify because its users are not responsible adults and can't conceive of it as a neutral search engine whose answers are not opinions.
Please, Brer Fox, don't shackle and shittify what the best minds of my generation are erecting to replace Advertising.
When o when will you people figure out that you're not supposed to click the link? You're just supposed to get mad! It's the rationalist way.
LoL! And as proper rationalists we should treat any factoid, meme, or hearsay as Bayesian priors for our pre-conceived conclusions.
Oh dear. Apparently now saying "I'm not racist" means that you are racist, according to Ibram X Kendi. I have decided, therefore, that I am racist, but only against Ibram X Kendi. I trust the woke mob will find my position acceptable.
A lot has happened to Ibram X Kendi since September 8, 2021 (the date of that tweet).
What do you all think of Orchid genetics? Has anyone used them yet?
Have not used them, and am generally supportive of the concept, but have two concerns.
I suspect that with some conditions, the predictive power is limited. As I've seen it, predictive power is often quantified as the difference in the odds of having a disease when comparing the highest to lowest risk decile of poly-genic risk scores. I've seen recently with Schizophenia a ~3X greater risk (maybe Orchid has a better algorithm). But most parents won't be selecting between the highest and lowest risk deciles, since they are giving limited genetic material, I imagine they'll be selecting between 4th and 6th decile or 1st and 3rd (but these are intuitive calculations, I don't know how much variance exists in risk-genes in a typical couples embryos). That being said, if there is a sharp increase in risk between any deciles, and you have reason to believe that your embryos may straddle those deciles, the prediction could be useful.
Another concern I've heard is whether the predictions will remain true when the child grows up. Maybe Schizophrenia or Alzheimer's or whatever-disease emerges as an interaction between genes and culture, such that today's risk genes are not tomorrow's risk genes. I wonder if there is any way to evaluate this possibility.
All that being said, granted the limited risks of in-vitro fertilization, and knowing nothing else, if it wasn't for the $ & inconvenience I'd do it for some conditions at least.
Are there any risks to using them? Such as privacy concerns involving genetic information?
They have a calculator here expressing it as relative and absolute risk: https://portal.orchidhealth.com/risk-calculator#scz. You can see the expected benefit based on family history.
Really interesting, thanks for the link.
Are there any risks to using them? Such as privacy concerns involving genetic information?
Or consult the movie GATTACA. It's theoretically possible (albeit I'm pretty sure illegal) that health insurance companies could decline to cover you if you're susceptible to some of these diseases, or an employer could screen you based on mental health risks. This seems speculative, it would involve espionage or collusion with Orchid, and a very compotent (and... bad-acting) CEO who is capable of understanding and acting on this information without too many people finding out.
If you're already undergoing IVF, then there is no additional risk from using IVF. However, if you were not planning on any sort of aneuploidy screening, then there is the risk of some type of harm from trophectoderm biopsy. However, it appears this isn't really an issue: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajog.2023.08.010. So, if you find it worth the cost, then I believe it is "riskier" to not use their PGT-WGS, as in P(disease|no PGT-WGS) > P(disease|PGT-WGS).
As for privacy concerns, that is probably a better question for them -- I don't know
More and more evidence that the purported financial benefits of a firm's "diversity" are based on bad/misleading science that doesn't replicate: https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1774891359268147684
I stumbled into a (relatively) old interview [1] with Yehuda Shaul, a Co-founder of Breaking the Silence [2], an Israeli organization that specializes in debunking the myth of the "Most Moral Army" by soliciting personal accounts from some of the people who fought for said army about what they did during their service. For example, the current top link on Breaking the Silence's website is a post-October-7th NYT op-ed [3] from an IDF soldier who fought in the 2014 war, where he recounts how - based on false briefing from his superiors - he accidentally killed an elderly woman with a grenade.
Breaking the Silence, along with B'Tselem, are the main 2 characters in a change of heart I had recently (mostly after October 7th, but in some sense it started before, not by too long), where I transitioned from an older model of Israel, the mainstream default in most Arab circles, of Israel and Israelis having no intention to ever see the word "Peace" except as a cynical delay tactic and as a tool for aborting actual peace initiatives and negotiations, to an updated model where **most** (by number) of Israel and Israelis are like this, but where a significant and influential minority of as-yet undetermined size truly wanting peace and bearing massive social and personal costs as it swims against the immense currents of cynicism and warmongering in a desperate Hail Mary for peace. I'm highlighting this org because - in some sense - this change of heart it induced in me is the 3rd most massive POV switch in my belief network, right after Atheism and Vegetarianism. And just like for those 2, I have a certain fondness and feeling of gratefulness for the people who pointed me to (what I now see as) the right direction and away from the unexamined inertial one.
The highlight of the interview for me:
-- Yehuda recounts how his former unit in the West Bank city of Hebron was tasked with what he described as "making our presence felt". Meaning: Breaking into a Palestinian home, waking up the resident family in terror and inspecting the whole house, going to the roof, jumping into the neighboring house's roof, and coming out the other house's gate. 8 hours a day per individual patrol, each day a year, every year from 2000 till now. For what reason? What military objective? What galaxy-brained endgame that defenders of the IDF's behavior always seem to hallucinate in their ever-more-futile quest to justify the unjustifiable? Yehuda, former IDF personnel, says "literally nothing". Nay, that's actually not what he said, he said something far worse: the objective is to create the "Feeling of being Persecuted" in the occupied Palestinians, translating from a slang Hebrew term widespread in the army. That is, the whole reason is for Palestinians to know that "Big Brother is Watching", the entirety of the IDF mission in occupied Palestine being essentially little more than a gesture of "That's a Nice Family you have over there, would be a shame if... you know".
I recommend watching the full interview and checking out the Breaking the Silence website to see the thinking and handiwork of a man that I'm sure changed the mind of many Israelis and (more importantly, and so I hope) many Palestinians and those who root for them. The interview was posted nearly an exact 10 years before October 7th, on October 10th 2013. Itself a statement about the sheer uniformity of oppression and dispossession meted out by the Israeli war machine, an anti-dote to the artificial short Context Window that many on the Pro-Israel side loves to impose on the debate, where you're supposed to tunnel-vision on the exact 100 hours stretch between the night of October 6th and the night of October 10th of 2023 and not a single sensory input else.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXiMyQkCPfI
[2] https://www.breakingthesilence.org.il/
[3] https://archive.ph/z63RM, paywalled original: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/28/opinion/international-world/gaza-idf-israel-veterans.html?unlocked_article_code=1.6Ew.X_0W.8hhb88AHkBKB&smid=url-share
I don’t really want to get involved in discussion on this topic, but anyone who is interested in how these things are “seen” in different countries might like to have a look at the headlines of British newspapers on Wednesday 3rd April, after the lawyers and factcheckers felt they had confirmed what happened to a group of charity workers. https://www.tomorrowspapers.co.uk
Yes, over the 75 years of continuous warfare, I am sure you can find examples of IDF soldiers - and regiments, and commanders - behaving all sort of ways, including committing some quite heinous acts. It's an army at war, and it is not composed of angels - it will have the same percentage of assholes, jerks and even violent psychos sometimes as any other large group of people. So yeah, there's a difference between the ideal mythologized image and the grim reality on the ground. If you are beyond your teen-age years, you should already know that. If you are not, hold in there, there's a lot of surprises on the way.
IDF and the political establishment governing it pay a lot of attention to not harm civilian population unnecessarily and to make the army behave in a way that doesn't harm Israel's image unnecessarily. It is based on both moral and practical considerations. Israel's political goals - beyond the initial decades of it's existence, where it has been much more complicated - are purely defensive. Israel does not want to conquer any of their Arab neighbors, does not want to "genocide" or destroy or harm in any way at all any of these countries. Israel mostly wants to be left alone. However, that is not going to happen, at least for now. The war has been waged, in various forms, for about a century now, and it's not going to stop anytime soon, as it looks. And yes, when you have an army composed of real people waging a real war, there would be all kinds of stories, including stories not looking very good. If you make your life's purpose to cherry-pick and collect those stories, you will always succeed. Some would probably be much, much worse than accidentally killing a civilian based on a bad intel.
With all that being said, anybody who uses these examples as a basis to claim that Israel's army and Israel's political government's goal is something other than being left alone and ultimately achieve peace are just wrong - at best, mistaken, usually - cynically lying. Moreover, those organizations that are using this to give boost to movements like BDS and give passive - and sometimes active - support to movements like Hamas and hamstring the ability of IDF to fight Hamas - are actively harming the cause they nominally support, i.e. achieving peace, and actively contribute to the harm done to civilians at both sides. These people may be subjectively idealist and strive for peace, as they understand it, but objectively they are the ones that ensure movements like Hamas see that their cause is alive, their victory - which, have no doubts, they see as destruction of Israel and murdering or expelling most of Jewish and other non-Muslim population of Israel - be possible and within reach. Until it becomes clear to these movements that this dream is not going to happen, there could be no hope for peaceful co-existance. And the position like "we support the right of Israel to defense in theory, but we will scream like hell and demand boycotts and sanctions each time Israel tries to do something to defend itself in practice, because they are not inhumanly perfect while doing it" is just a moral coward's way of saying "to hell with Israel". Obviously, Israel would never accept that, and no "peace effort" based on that would never achieve anything.
> Israel does not want to conquer any of their Arab neighbors
For the purposes of this comment, are Palestinians considered "neighbors"?
Any comment on e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deir_Yassin_massacre ?
Israel wanted to give Gaza back to Egypt but Egypt wouldn't take it. I can say with some confidence that, for Gaza specifically, they have no interest in "conquering" it.
EDIT: After a half hours Googling I haven't been able to find a source for the idea that Israel offered Egypt control of Gaza back during peace negotiations. Until I do, I can no longer stand behind this statement as being true.
My first reaction was "why Egypt? why not simply have Palestine governed by the people who live there?", but that of course opens another large debate and I do not want to spend the time necessary to study all the relevant history and whatever.
Just wanted to say that I find "Israel offered Gaza to Egypt, and Egypt refused" plausible but irrelevant.
(As an analogy -- and a bad one, because of course the situations are different in many aspects -- it sounds to me like Putin proposing a peace deal where he keeps the eastern part of Ukraine, and Hungary gets the western part. Hungary refuses, and Putin says "well, I tried; everyone can clearly see that conquering territory was never my priority, but what other options do I have?")
Funny how Israel supporters keep saying this and never post a single credible reference.
A perpetual game of telephone.
That's a pretty good example of what's a hopelessly demagogic/brainwashed Pro-Israel supporter would say: zero self-reflection, 100% catechisms and parroting propaganda verbatim. Zero engagement with the actual post you're replying to, 100% whiny fretting about Anti-Semitism while in complete denial about the dehumanization and war crimes that the war machine you're cheerleading for is engaging in.
That's a pretty good example of what I consider to be not worth the keyboard wear-and-tear on my laptop to even attempt to respond to. Thanks for setting it and have a good day.
"100% catechisms and parroting propaganda verbatim. Zero engagement with the actual post you're replying to, 100% whiny fretting about Anti-Semitism while in complete denial about the dehumanization and war crimes that the war machine you're cheerleading for is engaging in."
Couldn't have put it better myself. Utterly disgraceful behavior on their part.
Yeah, that's how the dialogue with "proponents of peace" usually looks like. "We are all for peace, but you don't want peace!" - "Let's look at these facts and arguments?" - "You are a brainwashed zombie not worth discussing with!". Yeah, that's a great way to achieve peace, keep going. Don the keffiyeh and go scream "free Palestine! from the river to the sea!" at a random Jewish-looking person in the street, that will help a lot, I am sure.
> 100% whiny fretting about Anti-Semitism
There was literally 0% fretting about Anti-Semitism in my response.
> while in complete denial about the dehumanization and war crimes
I literally spent most of the response talking about how the things that the orgs you mentioned talk about happened, and probably worse things too, and why, which is the literal opposite of denying it. You didn't even bother reading it, did you? Not that I hoped for much better. If you, in the future, will be interested in the question why there's no peace, the mirror would provide a good answer.
If it makes you feel any better, I did read your entire response. It's not very long, I was just impressed with how formulaic and devoid of any originality it was.
Perhaps if you behave, I can even point you to the exact parts in your first and your second reply where you quite obviously appear as whiny and how you might do better in the future. As of now, I don't think you deserve it enough.
If that's true, that makes it even worse. You read it, and then you claimed I wrote the exact opposite of what I did. Right there, in plain sight of everybody. Now you resorted to personal insults and trolling, so I guess we reached the natural conclusion of it. Keep the "struggle for peace" or whatever the voices in your head tell you to do.
> an older model of Israel, the mainstream default in most Arab circles, of Israel and Israelis having no intention to ever see the word "Peace" except as a cynical delay tactic and as a tool for aborting actual peace initiatives and negotiations
Funny, because most Israelis and Israel supporters believe that Israel wants peace but the Palestinians don't want peace and will only use peace negotiations as a tactic to extract concessions, without any intention of maintaining peace. This belief makes them discouraged about the peace process, because there's no point in negotiating if you believe the Palestinians will never accept peace anyway.
I didn't know until now that the opposite view was common in Arab circles. I assumed it was something more like, "we can't accept peace without Jerusalem and the right of return".
Which is not very surprising, of course when one side perceives the other side to use peace as a cynical tool, it will (consciously or unconsciously) converge to using peace as a cynical tool.
The only question is who started it, there is a very good argument to be made that it's Israel. Beginning with starting the war in 1967 then using its conquests to strong-arm the Arab neighbors into having a favorable peace settlement. But since I'm firmly on the "Pro-Palestinian" side of the issue, I will understand that people farther away don't necessarily see it the way I do.
Not sure what the other viewpoint is, but Israelis and certainly a lot of historians would say that Egypt and its allies caused the 1967 war.
I'm aware of the Israeli narrative, I'm also aware that the case it makes is unconvincing, and that all sources say the war started with Israel's air force attacking Egypt without Egypt doing a comparable escalation.
Just to show that this is a widely (though not universally) held view and it's not just Israelis, here's a quote from the Wikipedia page on preemptive war (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preemptive_war):
> Israel incorporates preemptive war in its strategic doctrine to maintain a credible deterrent posture, based on its lack of strategic depth. [26][27][28] The Six-Day War, which began when Israel launched a successful attack on Egypt on June 5, 1967, has been widely described as a preemptive war[29][30][31][32] and is, according to the United States State Department, "perhaps the most cited example [of preemption]."[33] Others have alternatively referred to it as a preventive war.[34]
I suppose we will never know, would we? You can always shoot first and justify later, and in a Prisoner's Dilemma type of situation you will always find enough wrinkles in the data to fit however many epicycles in your narrative.
What I mean to say is that the cold hard truth is that Israel attacked first in 1967, and attacked first in Lebanon the 1980s, and attacked first in Lebanon 2006, and attacked first in Gaza 2008/2009. All else is commentary.
Or, in other words. "we will never accept peace that doesn't include your destruction". Which, of course, is a kind of peace - just not a kind that you can expect other side to voluntarily agree to.
Hello,
I’m not going to beat around the bush, I’m an Israeli myself and I strongly disagree with some of your assessments. However, it is a rare opportunity to talk with someone from the “Arab side”, with the exception of Arab Israelis, which are a different situation, I believe.
I am not going to try and change your mind, both because I don’t think I will be successful, and to avoid this discussion turning ugly. Instead, I’m only going to ask you some questions, and I will be very grateful if you’ll answer them. In turn, I will be happy to answer any questions you might have. These questions might seem “leading”, but this is not my intention. They simply reflect my own opinion on the conflict and army, which is naturally different from yours.
I may not agree with you, but my genuine intention is to understand your way of thought. I promise you that any rudeness is unintentional.
How do you assess your own general knowledge about the technique and morality of war? Other than the Israeli-palestinian conflict, do you read or take an interest in other wars/conflicts? If so, I’ll be happy to know which ones.
Regarding the morality of the IDF: if you discovered that other countries' armies behave worse/better in a similar situation, meaning coming in contact with foreign civilians and combatants, would it change your mind? In what way? What do you think would be a good way to measure the morality or conduct of an army? As much as you can, separate the way the army behaves from its political goal. I do not believe those things are separate, but that separating them for a moment in our thought will lead to a better understanding. For example, you can criticize the American war in Afghanistan, and its political goal and reasoning, and have a different criticism for the way the army behaves day to day.
You say that you believe that only a minority in Israel is interested in peace, what is the source of that assessment? Do you believe the “peace seeking” rate has changed with time? To what direction, and what do you think caused it?
What types of actions will demonstrate to you that a large part of Israeli citizens are interested in peace? That the government is interested in peace? Should “peace seeking” actions be taken by the Israeli government, what do you think will be the Palestinian response? If the response turns out to be negative to Israel, especially if it puts its citizens in danger, what do you think will be the morally appropriate response?
What do you think about the evacuations of settlements from Gaza? Do you think it was right/wrong? Strategically, morally? What do you think was the Israeli government's aim when it did it?
What do you think is the most moral solution to the conflict? What does peace look like for you?
Do you think peace is possible with the current Palestinas governments, meaning the PA and Hamas? If not, what do you believe will practically cause a change in leadership? What do you think Israel is morally permitted to do about it?
I’m assuming you don’t think peace is possible with the current Israeli government. What do you think about other Israeli parties/leaders? Beni Gantz, Yair Lapid, Yair Golan? Mansor Abbas?
Let's imagine that “the other side” proposed a two state solution, based on 67 lines, some kind of joint control of jerusalem, no/limited right of return for palestinians to Israel, but some kind of financial compensation for those who lost property in the 48 war - What do you think will be the response from the Israeli side? The Palestinian side?
Taking into account both moral and practicality, what do you think each side should do to promote peace? Hamas? PA? Israeli government? What happens, to each side, if everything goes wrong? What happens if it goes right? How likely do you think each outcome is?
Those are my questions for now. I will be very grateful if you'll answer them, and of course I will be happy to answer any questions you might have. I hope we can have a useful discussion, and understand each other better.
> I’m an Israeli myself and I strongly disagree with some of your assessments.
Hello, I welcome talking and having conversations with (and - hopefully in the not too far future - peace/friendships/hospitality) with Israelis too as long as it's in good faith with a bilateral recognition of each other's (Jews/Arabs/Israelis/Palestinians/...) humanity. Disagreement is okay, it doesn't automatically mean you're right and it doesn't automatically mean I'm right either.
> to avoid this discussion turning ugly.
Discussions generally don't turn ugly with me until I detect my interlocuter is careless/flippant about the civilians dying and starving in Gaza, and even then, there are instances where I apologized after I had gone too far with someone like that.
> How do you assess your own general knowledge about the technique and morality of war?
I hate self-assessment, especially numerical ones, so I will interpret this question to mean that the answer is a verbal judgement, and the judgement is "Not much, but enough". I have never joined an army or fought a war, which presumably means I know less than you as being an Israeli Jew means you have necessarily joined an army with overwhelming probability. But I know enough about the technique and morality of war to recognize that posting TikToks in a warzone making fun of the displaced populations and their destroyed houses, or dedicating the destruction of civilian infrastructure to the soldeir's daughter on her birthday, is not normal or professional conduct.
> other than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, do you read or take an interest in other wars/conflicts?
Yes. In rough reverse chronological order: the many Iraq wars, the Vietnam war, the Korean war, WW2 and WW1. Those are the major ones that I read and watched multiple things about, there are many minor ones. Here's a recent selection of what I have watched a couple of days ago: The Iraq War Explained (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWICnxeVLp4), What the Red Sea ship attacks are really about (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPhTwmylZi8), which might look like it's about October 7th and Gaza but it's actually a crash course on Yemen's recent history up to this point.
> if you discovered that other countries' armies behave worse/better in a similar situation, meaning coming in contact with foreign civilians and combatants, would it change your mind? In what way?
It depends on what exactly is the part of my mind that you're talking about. My mind is *already* changed to a certain extent, after all the default Arab narrative which I now reject and try to push back against assumes implicitly that Israeli evil is beyond any evil and that it's motivated by exceptional ethno-religious hatred. Part of my change of heart was to recognize that this is the remnants of Arab propaganda from the 1940s-1960s, and that Israeli evil is not exceptionally different than any state evil, it might be motivated by some ethnic hatred but not abnormal levels of it all things considered.
However, very few armies are defended as the "Most Moral in the World". Very few armies (exactly 1) are the self-appointed guardian angels of a "Jewish State" where criticizing them or saying they're acting immorally will make people think you're antisemitic. Very few armies have the kind of incestuous relationship with the USA that this one have. And of course, very few armies are defended as fiercely as this one in the pockets of the internet where I hang out in (like this one). For those reasons, other armies behaving worse or better isn't too relevant to what I'm trying to do.
> What do you think would be a good way to measure the morality or conduct of an army?
That's a huge question. As low-hanging fruits, the army can start by recognizing its power over helpless civilians. It can instruct its soldier to not publish TikToks where they're gloating about the death of civilians and the destruction of their cities, and not film themselves destroying toy shops or playing with women's underwear belonging to the civilian population, it can assign protection to aid convoys, or at least not actively shoot them (and I'm not talking about the incident at an aid distribution line from about 2 or 3 weeks ago where the IDF investigators admitted shooting at civilians, there is a recent incident where 5 World Kitchen personnel were killed in an airstrike), not target the UN forces (recent incident in Lebanon), and not gratuitously destroy a city (this report https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-calculated-bombing-gaza/, where anonymous sources in the IDF say that every single bomb that fell on Gaza there were exact estimation of how many civilians vs. how many terrorists would be killed, and most of the time those estimates were "a single terrorist in one floor of a building and all the civilians living in the building").
> You say that you believe that only a minority in Israel is interested in peace, what is the source of that assessment?
No single source, an overall Gestalt as I perceive it. The components of this Gestalt are how many members of Breaking the Silence and B'Tselem there are relative to the total population, how are those groups treated (like traitors), the general number of polls that ask questions about a Palestinian state or the legitimacy of the current war in Gaza. The sum total of all those pieces of info leads me to conclude that, even from way before October 7th, Israel and the majority of Israelis are not interested in peace with Palestinians. They're very interested in peace with the Middle East west and south of the Levant, as a tactic to neutralize the Palestinian problem and obtain legitimacy to delay the resolution indefinitely.
(Of course, "Interested in Peace" is implicitly being defined operatively here as "Ready to make concessions for Peace". Because obviously, everyone is "interested in Peace" with no concessions, Putin is interested in Peace, Hamas is very interested in peace, and so is Netanyahu. That's why I measure "Interested in Peace" by how many Israelis are supporters of a Palestinian state, or how many are not supporters of the current war in Gaza.)
> Do you believe the “peace seeking” rate has changed with time? To what direction, and what do you think caused it?
Who knows. The traditional wisdom is that there was Oslo in the 1990s and with it a real hope for lasting peace, but then came the second Intifada and destroyed it. Many people challenge this narrative, many for example point to the Yitzhak Rabin speech where he says Palestinians will only be allowed "less than a state" entity as evidence that even the much glorified Oslo was not in fact a good peace process. I was an unborn/a baby at the time so I couldn't follow it firsthand.
What I think is the real reason that Israelis are not interested in peace is the fact that no real consequences are imposed for warmongering on part of Israel. Why would anyone do anything if they're not pressured? At the end of the day Israelis have a state and Palestinians do not, they're in a position to indefinitely keep attacking Palestinians and prolonging the conflict till the Palestinian population is fatigued and accept whatever scraps they're willing to give, if any. This is why I support BDS as a concept and think it's a key piece of puzzle in a peace process. (while not necessarily agreeing with all actions and rhetoric that BDS as a concrete movement is actually engaging in)
> What types of actions will demonstrate to you that a large part of Israeli citizens are interested in peace? That the government is interested in peace?
Government: Expulsion of all settlers outside of Israel's internationally recognized borders, which technically aren't even the Green Line (this is just the 1949 armistice), but let's say it's for the sake of this conversation. No settlers outside the Green Line means no West Bank settlement, and no Golan Heights settlement either, and none in Jerusalem.
If we're talking only citizens with no military power, then actions that demand such an expulsion. Political parties centered around it as a platform. Demonstration in support of it. Polls showing the majority (> 60%) are in support of it. And so on.
> Should “peace seeking” actions be taken by the Israeli government, what do you think will be the Palestinian response?
Who are the exact Palestinians responding? Hamas? PA? ordinary citizens of Gaza and the West Bank? It will depend. I don't think I'm confident enough in any of the models I have of them to predict a response.
> If the response turns out to be negative to Israel, especially if it puts its citizens in danger, what do you think will be the morally appropriate response?
You will notice that I carefully choose the word "Settlers" and not "Israelis", so I believe that a Palestinian response which puts Israeli civilians in Israel in danger is unrealistic while the IDF is still there.
If you mean after the eventual withdrawal of the IDF and the establishment of a full Palestinian state (or 2) which then proceeded to attack Israel despite whatever treaties and assurances that the peace process that established it have given Israel, the morally appropriate response would be to respond to aggression with exactly enough aggression to ward it off and not a single bit more.
> What do you think about the evacuations of settlements from Gaza? Do you think it was right/wrong? Strategically, morally?
Good decision executed terribly. Morally it was good, although not the only good decision (another one would have been annexing Gaza and making all Gazans full citizens, which of course most Israelis do not want for reasons that they insist are not racist but suspiciously looks like very racist). Strategically it was disastrous because it was executed unilaterally, not even waiting for a government of Gaza to be up-and-running before withdrawal.
>If you mean after the eventual withdrawal of the IDF and the establishment of a full Palestinian state (or 2) which then proceeded to attack Israel despite whatever treaties and assurances that the peace process that established it have given Israel, the morally appropriate response would be to respond to aggression with exactly enough aggression to ward it off and not a single bit more.
Do you believe the US declaring war on Japan after Pearl Harbor and fighting them to the point where they unconditionally surrendered was immoral?
I don't think the comparison is apt. Israel is more akin to Japan in this case and has been starting the aggression since it's founding which was based on pretty racist expulsion of natives, to free up land for jews.
The point of the comparison is the similarity of October 7th and Pearl Harbor, in terms of both being a surprise attack with significant casualties made by an inferior military power towards a superior one. In this case I was curious whether HatesIP's theory of wartime morality would imply that the US was immoral in conquering Japan as a result of the Pearl Harbor attacks. It seems that he does believe that said conquest was immoral. I disagree, and I imagine many others would disagree with him as well, but it is a consistent view.
I think they aren't analogous because Israel is ultimately the aggressor and Palestinians are ultimately fighting for their rights. the latter has just cause and the former does not.
Comparison is dishonest and misleading, too much baggage from Imperial Japan to be useful.
For what it's worth, I believe that firebombing Japanese cities in particular, and the 2 nuclear bombings, to be obviously immoral and unerasable mark of shame on the USA and its political leadership.
>Comparison is dishonest and misleading, too much baggage from Imperial Japan to be useful.
Is your position then that the moral thing to do in a war is to fight the enemy only with enough force as is necessary to prevent them from harming you: unless they have baggage?
No, it's not, my position on war is to know the enemy well and not to fall for obvious propagandistic invocations of Godwin's law. Having known the enemy well, proceed to use exactly enough force as is necessary to protect yourself, which you can't know unless you know the enemy well.
[[CONTINUED]]
> What do you think was the Israeli government's aim when it did it?
Warding off human rights violations accusations in the West Bank, and delaying and distracting the peace process that will start its withdrawal from the West Bank. Here's the English Wikipedia page about the disengagement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_disengagement_from_Gaza where senior members of Sharon's government basically lay out all their thinking about the matter. A relevant quote:
>> the parameters of a unilateral solution are: To maximize the number of Jews; to minimize the number of Palestinians; not to withdraw to the 1967 border and not to divide Jerusalem... Twenty-three years ago, Moshe Dayan proposed unilateral autonomy. On the same wavelength, we may have to espouse unilateral separation... [it] would inevitably preclude a dialogue with the Palestinians for at least 25 years.
Not exactly a peace-seeking mindset.
> What do you think is the most moral solution to the conflict? What does peace look like for you?
Single state between Gaza and Galilee, secular with special recognition for Jewish holidays and other customs (e.g. Kosher). The issue of the Golan and Shebaa farms solved separately in later negotiations with future saner governments of Lebanon and Syria. Preferably Right of Return for whomever can prove descendance from Nakba survivors, but appropriate financial compensation will serve equally well. Right of Return and/or financial compensation to Jews who can prove they fled the Middle East due to persecution.
> Do you think peace is possible with the current Palestinas governments, meaning the PA and Hamas?
No.
> If not, what do you believe will practically cause a change in leadership?
A change of leadership in Israel that reverses the decade-long sling towards Right Wing ultranationalism and religious Zionism. This new government will then hopefully advance peace plans that the current governments of Palestinians will reject or drag their feet in negotiating, which will trigger a mini-Arab-Spring against them from Palestinians. Each step in this scenario is unrealistic on its own, but it's one possible path towards peace.
> What do you think Israel is morally permitted to do about it?
Expel settlers, change the government, advance peace plans, keep defensive IDF presence in the territories, and defend itself only and precisely when attacked.
> I’m assuming you don’t think peace is possible with the current Israeli government. What do you think about other Israeli parties/leaders? Beni Gantz, Yair Lapid, Yair Golan? Mansor Abbas?
I don't know enough about any of them nor the machinery of Israeli elections or government to have an intelligent opinion. Ehud Olmert looks moderate *enough* from what I read in Haaretz, anyone like him can serve as the first step in deradicalization and de-ultra-nationalization of Israel, not the final step - far from it - just the first one.
> Let's imagine that “the other side” proposed a two-state solution, based on 67 lines, some kind of joint control of Jerusalem, no/limited right of return for Palestinians to Israel, but some kind of financial compensation for those who lost property in the 48 war - What do you think will be the response from the Israeli side? The Palestinian side?
Who is the "Other side"? A 3rd party? Arab or not Arab?
The proposal itself looks fine. I can't predict how any future Israelis or Palestinians will react, but current Israelis will almost certainly reject even admitting the Nakba, and current Palestinians will probably reject it too because decades of hardliners trained them to accept nothing less than full return to Israel.
> Taking into account both moral and practicality, what do you think each side should do to promote peace? Hamas? PA? Israeli government?
Hamas: Return Hostages and declare minimal/nominal trials and investigation for October 7th war crimes. Only target the Israeli military in future attacks, if possible by restricting operations to the West Bank. Pay compensation for all families of the non-military dead and captured. Gradually de-radicalize away from Islamic Jihadism to a more moderate doctrine of armed resistance that takes geopolitical realities into account.
PA: Collapse and be replaced by a new government.
Israeli government: Expel all settlers outside of the Green Line, keeping the infrastructure they built and handing it over to a PA successor (in the case of Golan Heights, Assad's successor) as a kind of reparations. In case no successor to the PA (and Assad) is ready and willing, keep the settler cities and infrastructure under IDF control till a successor is ready and willing. Reward each episode of Hamas' de-radicalization with a de-escalation of the siege of Gaza. Begin a process of reconciliation and compensation to civilians whose homes were destroyed in Gaza.
Those actions can be done partially as experiments. For example Hamas can return half the hostages and investigate fighters who appeared on video doing war crimes, PA is already partially collapsing and being reformed into a new government so all what remains is Abbas abdicating, Israel can start by expelling settlers who came to Israel less than a decade ago. (In actual reality, Haaretz reported a couple of weeks ago that Israel is approving more settlement construction and granting legitimacy to more previously illegal settlements).
> What happens, to each side, if everything goes wrong? What happens if it goes right? How likely do you think each outcome is?
If everything goes wrong, each action by each side goes unrewarded and destroys it eventually. Hamas return of hostages only invites further death and destruction in Gaza, PA is replaced by an even more corrupt and collaborating government that further accelerates settlement and oppresses/neglects Palestinians, and Israeli concessions result in a Third Intifada more violent than the second.
If everything goes right, each action by each side accelerates the de-escalation by the other sides, essentially running the history of the conflict since 1948 in reverse.
Most outcomes are unlikely. Israel won't deradicalize without sanctions and the rest of BDS. Hamas is an Islamist organization, it rewards more extremism and one-up-Manship, its incentive structure is designed for such. The PA is a typical Arab government and those are extremely hard to change from the roots even if you happened to change the individual faces in front of the Camera and the individual butts sitting on the seats of power.
> I will be very grateful if you'll answer them
I answered all of them as much as the depth of my consideration and thinking about them allows, some questions I haven't considered before, notably many about Israeli concessions because those are historically rare and unlikely, but I have tried to consider it as carefully as possible while I'm answering them, but many of my answers are provisional.
I can't think of well-phrased questions of my own as of now. But I might think of them later when you reply.
Many Thanks for your answer! You wrote an interesting and detailed proposal.
( edit: never mind the nit, it was incorrect )
Thank you for answering! I am finding it hard to put what I’m thinking into words, but anyway I am not sure how much value writing everything down has right now, and it is past midnight. You are right that I served in the IDF, but not in a combat position by any way. I think that I’ll start reading more about modern warfare and aid, outside of just the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and perhaps that will be the missing piece to make sense.
Of course feel free to ask any questions that may pop up later!
Here are a few things that might interest you or others:
- Some Israeli Knesset parties stated that their direct aim is a two state solution in the last election. You have Yesh Atid led by Yair Lapid, the second biggest party in Israel with 24 seats, The Avoda led by Merav Michaeli with 4 seats, and also Raam and Hadash-Taal, two Arab Israeli parties, with 5 seats each. You also had Meretz led by Yair Golan, which didn’t get enough votes to get a seat at the Knesset. So out of 120 Knesset seats, 38 were held by parties that openly supported the two state solution, most of them “jewish” parties.
(And just as a little tidbit, Raam is led by Mansor Abbas and was the first Arab Israeli party to join the coalition, in the previous government.)
- Another thing that you might find interesting is the volatility in the Israeli government. A full term of the Knesset is supposed to be four years, but it is rarely achieved. Another thing is that Israel has no term limit, so the present prime minister acted as one for 16 years! I don’t know how much of what I wrote is already known by you, but if you’re interested I’ll be happy to write more about internal Israeli politics.
- There is an Israeli group called “Commanders for Israel’s Security”. They’re a bunch of ex military guys advocating for “seperating” from the Palastinans. To quote their website:
“Members of the movement are united around a common vision: Israel as a secure, democratic state with a solid Jewish majority for generations, conducting itself in accordance with the spirit and values of Israel’s Declaration of Independence.
To realize this vision, Israel must advance a security-based separation from the Palestinians and pursue peaceful relations with pragmatic countries of the region, all with a view of resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and contributing to regional stability.
The eventual agreement with the Palestinians should be based on the principle of two states for two peoples and account for Israel’s security needs.”
Here’s their website in english: https://en.cis.org.il/
No problem. Feel free to respond later either in this thread or a new top-level thread in another Open Thread.
> So out of 120 Knesset seats, 38 were held by parties that openly supported the two state solution, most of them “Jewish” parties.
Interesting, about 1/3 of the people's representation then? What does it mean to put Jewish between quotes? Are they Jewish or not? Are all parties open to Arabs or not? Do parties having Arabs receive less votes than parties with comparable policies and position with no Arabs amidst their ranks?
>I don’t know how much of what I wrote is already known by you, but if you’re interested I’ll be happy to write more about internal Israeli politics.
Yes, do write more about Israeli politics. The information is all there on Wikipedia, I'm sure, but in a confusing and dry format that doesn't make it very easy to connect facts and incidents. If you're like me, you would agree that writing and opinions based on facts is - vast majority of the time - better than writing and opinions not based on facts. Facts naturally moderate and counterweight extremism, as in actual practice nobody is the devil, and nobody is the angel.
I knew about Israel having no term limits, I never thought about it explicitly, but I knew that Netanyahu was elected sometimes after Ehud Olmert in the late 2000s and kept being Prime Minister with only a brief months-long hiatus in 2021/2022. So I knew the fact one way or another.
> They’re a bunch of ex-military guys advocating for “separating” from the Palestinians.
I will have to read more about them, the only thing mentioned in their Wikipedia page is how they disagreed with Netanyahu once and he called them leftists. One thing I don't like is how they keep using the word "Security", and I have learned that this word in the Israeli parlance is euphemism for "Subjugate the Palestinians and humiliate them and dispossess them to no end and call anybody who notices an antisemite". But there is not much in the writing on their websites that suggest this till now.
What I would like to see is precise census data that shows at least 30% of Israelis are - in aggregate - enrolled or supportive of organizations like B'Tselem, Standing Together, Breaking the Silence, Land for All, Commanders for Israeli Security, etc.... I have no trouble that I can find a similar percentage enrolled or supportive of Pro-Colonization movements that (among other things) are calling for resettling Gaza right now, so to change my mind that the Pro-Peace or at least thinking-about-peace faction of Israel is not a minority I will need to see data that suggests a significant percentage like 30% or 40% of Israelis do actually support a full and non-demilitarized Palestinian state or a single state or binational confederation or whatever.
But if Polls are anything to go by, most Polls don't show Israelis are interested in Peace in the same number they're interested in settling and resettling lands not theirs.
I think you are a smart and reasonable dude. I dearly hope Netanyahu is crushed at the next election (and Biden too for enabling him); I hope Israelis can see that his strategy of “security” and “managing the conflict” has led to more conflict, not less.
I am Israeli in the sense that I hold an israeli passport and have an aunt and cousin who live in Israel. None of us support Netanyahu or Likud. I hope you can speak to many such people and we can build bonds of understanding and recognise mutual humanity. May peace prevail
Israelis are an invasive force, they don't intend to benefit Palestinians but ideally make life so ruthless for them they are forced to leave and free up more land for Jews.
Israel can't really benefit the Palestinians who elected genocidal terrorist organization Hamas to be their representative (and they still have very high level of support for Hamas, if you believe the polls made in Gaza). Those who chose different path - like Arab citizens of Israel, over 2 million of them - yes, Israel benefits them a lot.
I do not think that Palestinian people benefited from Israel's existence, but it wasn’t really my point either. It is a point that you heard the pro Israeli side make? I’m surprised by that because the arguments I hear tend to do more with Israel’s historic claim to the land/right to defend itself/the Palestinians don’t want peace anyway. Do you remember when you heard/read about that argument? I’d love to know more because it honestly took me by surprise.
Regarding Abu Gharib and sadism: if possible, can you specify which social media posts/incidents are you referring to, and what do you think would be an appropriate response? I don’t know if you are referring to incidents of the like, but I remember a few months back a soldier sang a jewish prayer in a mosque. A lot of people in Israel wrote about it and condemned it, and the soldier was removed from active duty.
Anyway, if you think that the IDF is in the ballpark of the american army actions, that is good enough for me for the rest of the discussion. Unfortunately, I don’t think this will be the last war. What I am interested in understanding is “the other side” standards and aspirations. What do you think Israel should do, both morally and practically? If Israel took a positive action yet it backfired, what do you think Israel should be permitted to do? Please be as detailed as you can bear, thank you.
Not to barge into a conversation not mine, but since AY98 probably doesn't intend to reply, I will reply to your questions myself.
> is it a point that you heard the pro Israeli side make?
Yes, they do. Very frequently. Starting from the repeated assertions that most/all Palestinians are actually economic immigrants from Egypt and the Levant who came to Palestine in the 1920s and the 1930s to work on the Jews' farms and Kibbutzim, and ending with similar assertions about how modern-day West Bank Palestinians are actually better off with the occupation of their lands by Israel because then Israeli companies and businesses can employ them and give them higher salaries than their counterparts who aren't employed in Israeli companies and businesses or other Arabs outside of Palestine. Implicit in most of those assertions are racist worldviews and racist insinuations that Jewish minds are the true money-making component of businesses and all Arabs are merely mindless "hands" to execute Jewish visions.
> can you specify which social media posts/incidents are you referring to
I can't possibly know what the original poster was referring to when they wrote this, but - in particular - here are several instances where the IDF plausibly engaged in torture and/or mistreatment of captives:
(1) Haaretz: France to Take Legal Action Against French-Israeli Soldiers Involved in War Crimes in Gaza, https://archive.ph/nbhqI, (paywalled original: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-03-28/ty-article/.premium/france-to-take-legal-action-against-french-israeli-soldiers-involved-in-war-crimes-in-gaza/0000018e-8530-d0d3-a98e-d7ff169e0000)
French-Israeli soldier allegedly shared himself while boasting in French about torturing suspects captured in Gaza, video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTOrvhRs4l8. French lawmakers then declared that all French nationals engaged in the war will be investigated and those found to have committed war crimes will be prosecuted.
(2) Amnesty International: Horrifying cases of torture and degrading treatment of Palestinian detainees amid spike in arbitrary arrests, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/11/israel-opt-horrifying-cases-of-torture-and-degrading-treatment-of-palestinian-detainees-amid-spike-in-arbitrary-arrests/
(3) Haaretz: Physicians for Human Rights called the conditions at the military medical compound in Israel – where patients are kept shackled and blindfolded the entire time – 'torture', https://archive.ph/As7fU, (paywalled original: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-03-12/ty-article/.premium/nameless-shackled-blindfolded-medical-treatment-of-detainees-from-gaza-examined/0000018e-327a-d5ad-addf-7e7bca660000)
(4) Haaretz editorial: Israel Must Stop Abusing and Humiliating Palestinian Prisoners, https://archive.ph/0weER, (paywalled original: https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/editorial/2024-01-03/ty-article-opinion/israel-must-stop-the-beating-and-humiliation-of-palestinian-prisoners/0000018c-cbf7-dc35-adee-cbf7961c0000)
> I remember a few months back a soldier sang a Jewish prayer in a mosque
That wasn't the worst thing posted by IDF personnel on TikTok.
(1) IDF soldiers destroys toy shop while laughing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuCGikC7YNM
(2) IDF soldiers posing and playing with women underwear found in abandoned Gazan homes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yq5N4s1DxnE
(3) IDF soldier destroys a Gazan house while filming himself dedicating it to his daughter's birthday: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/IZ7NpSCpzSA
(4) CNN reports about many instances of IDF soldiers filming themselves destroying universities and mosques while laughing and making fun of Palestinians: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1D3uQbiE8No
I can go on and on, keep in mind that I don't have a TikTok, that's just what filters down to YouTube and not just any YouTube, but official news channels on YouTube (CNN, Reuters). If I had a full day and a TikTok account, I can probably fill an Open Thread worth of links of IDF soldiers documenting and posting themselves violating the so called IDF "purity of arms" code of conduct guide, internationally agreed upon rules of warfare, and just plain humanity and decentness.
> A lot of people in Israel wrote about it and condemned it, and the soldier was removed from active duty
If someone were to do something similar to a Jewish Synagogue, would this reprimand be enough?
> What do you think Israel should do, both morally and practically?
I have answered this question in general in my other 2 comments to you, but in the particular case of the IDF behavior in Gaza, what Israel should do to punish the self-described "Most Moral Army" is real punishment, real monetary fines (> $10K) and real jail time, all aired in public. Naming and shaming soldiers who engage in this behavior. Compensation to civilians in Gaza too, as a bonus.
Iowa women playing LSU in a minute. According to Michael Che there are bars that only show women’s sports. They’re called ‘the empty ones.’
Ah cmon Michael,this is some good basketball and the are called sports bras.
Oh, man and Caitlin drains her first three pointer.
It's always struck me as odd that women's college basketball, at least in my experience, is WAY more widely viewed and followed than women's professional basketball. I guess it's probably at least in part because people have inbuilt loyalties to the schools, but other women's college sports don't get nearly the same attention.
I would imagine it is linked to *participation* in women's sports. Families with girls playing basketball or vollyball will be interested in and follow women's sports in general, because it's part of their shared social mileiu. Since there is almost zero expectation that they (female student-athletes) will become pro athletes, their attention horizon stops at college.
The WNBA has a very different vibe. Subjectively it feels like a bunch of fifth-year seniors who should have moved on. Also: women's basketball is very boring because it can never have the pace and power of the exact same game played by men.
They're cuter?
Not PC but it might be true (I don't watch either, or any sports really).
School loyalty is definitely the biggest thing; but, I think some of it is also that the WNBA season is during the summer so people aren't really in a "basketball mood". People are also less likely to be inside at 7pm watching TV in the summer.
If I lived on the west coast I don’t think I’d ever get used to a Celtics home game starting at 5:00 locally.
University of Minnesota Gophers women’s hockey is pretty popular locally at least. Not as big as NCAA basketball though. There is the whole ‘dynasty’ thing with teams like UCONN.
For how entertaining they are, they sure do seem to need a lot of supporters reminding people how entertaining they are.
And here I thought I was the first.
I am looking for as detailed as possible a data source on human height: average, median & variance, segregated by sex, nationality & decade; the more, the better. Does anyone have recommendations where to look for that?
Maybe https://ncdrisc.org/data-downloads-height.html?
How long until H5N1 makes Covid look silly? https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2024/p0401-avian-flu.html#:~:text=April%201%2C%202024—A%20person,HPAI%20A(H5N1)%20viruses.
Looks like it's becoming less of a threat over time. I posted this graph of H5N1 deaths by year on TwiXter. The worst year of H5N1 deaths was 2006 (~75), and they've been mostly decreasing since then except for an upward blip in 2015. Since this chart was created there were a total of two H5N1 death in 2023. Flutrackers hasn't announced any H5N1 deaths so far this year — and since H5N1 follows a seasonal pattern like other influenzas, unless this person in Colorado dies we probably won't see any more (at least in the northern hemisphere) until Autumn.
https://x.com/beowulf888/status/1629671390080282625?s=20
the crazy amount of birds and other mammals dying in the (not so) wild and also being killed by humans because of H5N1 continues to grow since 1997 and evolve including in cows to humans now in the US so it's 10,000 years past time to end animal slavery and fishing. agree? lol the ideology of speciesism and superiority complex of humans should end. today. all of us should WANT to be vegan and the animal abuse f*ckery should end forever. zoonosis will still exist but come on, we humans are flesh eating blood thirsty zombies.
Lol you sound mentally ill. Who hurt you?
Every time I run across a vegan extremist like you I always make it a point to buy an extra pack of hot dogs. Congratulations, your insane rhetoric just caused some marginal animal death. Do everyone a favor and keep your nonsense to yourself.
How are those of us who choose to reject animal abuse the extremists and insane? You must not know the extreme harm animal agriculture and fishing causes. Or maybe you just don’t care. No empathy? If it is unnecessary to consume them why would you choose to?
Comments like this are what solidify my desire to eat meat.
So bird flu means we should abandon animal husbandry. But that won't stop bird flu because it will still exist in the wild amongst non-domesticated animals. But that's not the point, anyway, because this is just an excuse for evangelical veganism to maunder on about "abuse".
Also I *wish* I was as hardcore as a flesh-eating blood-thirsty zombie.
Reasonable comment: Transmission of pathogens to humans from intensive rearing of food animals is a reason to consider moving the modern diet to vegetarianism/veganism
Unreasonable comment: Slavery, abuse, LOL, zombies
The systemic violence of speciesism speaks from the perch of patriarchy confusing fantasy stories of gods with non-bias actions towards all sentient beings. How low can you go in your control of all others? You are here to proudly justifying humans being animals' husbands! 🎤
(1) Setting aside "fantasy stories of gods", humans are animals like other animals, therefore it is no more wrong for a human to eat meat than it is for a lion to eat meat
(2) Animal husbands? Careful there Vicki, you don't want to be using hate speech about zoophiles, furries, and people who talk about being cat and dog moms and dads!
Do lions forcibly impregnate other species? Your tired justification of bias and cruelty is so predictable.
Correction: according to Flutrackers, a college student in Vietnam died from H5Nx a few weeks ago.
https://flutrackers.com/forum/forum/internet-communication/avian-flu-diary/987503-vietnamese-media-reports-a-h5-case-reported-in-university-student-in-kh%C3%A1nh-h%C3%B2a%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8B-media-reports-patient-s-death
And you can find the Avian Flu data here for the US wild bird populations below. There's a .csv file you can download from 2022-the most recent month of 2024. I'd be curious what it would show if you graphed the rate of incidents over time. But in the last 30 days there've only been 23 incidents.
https://www.aphis.usda.gov/livestock-poultry-disease/avian/avian-influenza/hpai-detections/wild-birds
There seems to have been one case in Colorado in 2022 and one case this year in Texas. Not quite at pandemic levels yet.
https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2024/p0401-avian-flu.html
It's interesting that it is now in cattle, but given that they are mammals too, not unusual. Similar to transmission of TB from badgers to cattle.
High Pathogenicity Avian Influenza (H5N1 and its variants) has been circulating in avian and mammal populations at least since 1996 (when it was first identified). But what's the trend? The WOAH (World Organization for Animal Health) puts out regular reports on Avian Influenza. Using poultry outbreaks as a measure (because wildlife is harder to survey), they've been tracking it year over year. The graph (page 2 of the report in the link below) shows H5N1 is like other influenzas and follows a seasonal cycle peaking in February. But year over year it doesn't seem to be trending upward or downward.
https://www.woah.org/app/uploads/2024/02/hpai-situation-report-20240220.pdf
They are concerned because this is the first year it's been seen in mammal and bird populations in the Antarctic. A special southern hemisphere edition of their situation report here...
https://www.woah.org/app/uploads/2024/03/hpai-situation-report-20240319.pdf
If you're interested in pathogens (and I am), it's worth checking these out. Unfortunately, our news media swings from ignoring the problem to hysteria.
I just read through your link and much of what it linked to. Have you? Having read it my conclusion is that the situation reported in the media release you posted does not warrant much worry.
Yes I have read it. My conclusion is the evolution of viruses have proven to be lethal.
Do you mean the evolution of viruses in general, or the evolution of this variety of H1N1?
This is not about risk to health from viruses, it's about another excuse to bang the drum for veganism.
One guy in the US got a sore eye 2 years after another guy got a flu symptoms in Colorado. That guy felt fatigued. Hard to be alarmed.
What effect will the new weight loss drugs like ozempic have on lifespan?
They have just been approved by the FDA as a treatment for people with heart disease. I believe you don't have to have a severe, symptomatic heart condition to qualify, just something like high blood pressure or high cholesterol, not controlled by the usual drugs. I suppose the people who qualify must also have to be overweight, but maybe they don't need to be as much overweight as is required for those without evidence of heart disease ? I'm reporting on a remembered brief blurb I saw in my Medscape news bulletin a coupla weeks ago, and may have some details wrong. But based on what I read it seems the FDA believes the drugs will prevent or delay some heart disease drugs.
Oh, this is 100% my area. It is my strong assumption that weight loss medications increase lifespan, if started early enough in life. We have pretty good data that weight from diet loss prior to 65 years of age increases lifespan, after that it is a bit mixed.
I would note however that, as trite as it sounds, it will have a greater effect on "healthspan" meaning years of life spent free of disability. Orthopedic concerns and frailty are a big deal in older age, and I suspect that weight loss can help offset the age at which those things become debilitating.
What's your read on the likelihood of long-term side effects like type 2 diabetes? This is such a systemically powerful drug it seems to me like weird side effects could start popping up once millions of people are on it for several years.
Very unlikely, not impossible. There is a general principal in medicine of tachyphylaxis (tolerance) that builds up to repeated exposure to the same stimuli. Theoretically, I could imagine GLP1 agonists causing GLP1 down-regulation leading to issues. We don't see that, and I'm not entirely sure why, I have some guesses, but they're probably not right. In terms of some other, non-gastrointestinal/endocrine side effect (like causing cancer, or problems with vision or something) we probably should have seen at least some signal by now in the animal models.
At this point I'm not worried about side effects that aren't known issues.
Interesting, thanks. GLP1 receptor down-regulation and insulin resistance were exactly the things I was thinking about. Good to know that doesn't happen.
Are there any data about weight loss due to diet/lifestyle change vs. weight loss due to medicine? I.e. is it just "less kilos is less kilos, no matter how achieved" or there's a difference between if it's done by better lifestyle or by ozempic?
I'm pretty sure liposuction doesn't improve lifespan.
I disagree with the framing of your question. The loss of weight is caused by the diet change in both cases, specifically by eating less. (You may also choose to exercise more, etc., but the same is true whether you take the medicine or not.) There is no difference in that part.
The difference is that if you do it the natural way, eating less is accompanied by *hunger*, but when you do it the medical way, the feeling of hunger is reduced by the semaglutide. So the semaglutide helps you do the thing that you could in theory also do without it. It is not "better lifestyle or ozempic", it is "better lifestyle achieved by suffering a lot, or better lifestyle made possible without suffering by ozempic".
I am not an expert, but my understanding is that there is an ideal amount and composition of food that you should eat in order to achieve the ideal weight, but the mechanism for feeling hungry/sated is unbalanced for many people. If your hunger mechanism is well balanced, you can eat exactly as much as you want, and your body looks great. You can thank the gods for their blessings, or you can pretend that you have a superior willpower and everyone else is a pathetic sinner. If your hunger mechanism is misbalanced, eating the right amount of food will leave you hungry; and eating the amount of food that feels right will make you fat. And there are also people whose hunger mechanism is misbalanced in the opposite direction, so despite eating as much as they can, they can't e.g. grow muscles, because their "as much as they can" is barely enough for them to survive.
A few months ago I have volunteered for a medical experiment for the new generation of semaglutide-based medicine (basically, like ozempic, but in a pill), so I can describe the effects first-hand. I have lost 10 kg in five months, mostly by eating less. Both before and after, I was eating only when I was hungry; the difference is that with the pills, I am simply hungry less. Before the pills, the only way to lose weight was to constantly feel half-starved... which wasn't good either for my mood or my ability to concentrate on work. Before the pills, when I tried to lose weight, it felt like my entire life became *about* losing weight. Now, I just swallow one pill a day, and then I do whatever I want, which includes eating when I want, as much as I want. I don't even eat super healthy now; I just eat less of everything, including the unhealthy stuff. Or rather, after eating some healthy meal now I feel full, so I am not tempted to eat so much unhealthy food afterwards. Eating the right amount of food became *easy*. I can do some exercise on top of that, when I feel like it, but I am losing weight even when I don't exercise.
(Generally, I think that exercise is a red herring in debates about weight loss. Yes, you should exercise, because it gives you various health benefits. But losing weight is *not* one of them, because when you look at the actual numbers, your entire hour spent in the gym is equal to the number of calories contained in one apple, or something like that. You can't outrun the food! The sad truth is that the only way to lose weight it to eat less, full stop; unless you are training for the Olympic games, your exercise is a rounding error compared to that. Also, exercising more means you get more hungry. Problem is, how to eat less without constantly feeling hungry. Winning the genetic lottery is one answer, semaglutide is another.)
"Before the pills, the only way to lose weight was to constantly feel half-starved... which wasn't good either for my mood or my ability to concentrate on work"
Now don't you know that's just the price of health? Why, there are people who are able to fast on nothing but water for two to three days at a stretch! This means that the only thing wrong with you fat, lazy, greedy lump is that you're a fat, lazy, greedy lump with no willpower.
This comment brought to you courtesy of the many interactions I've had with "the reason I over-eat is that I'm constantly hungry" "Well just go hungry long enough and you'll stop feeling hungry eventually, it's a simple matter of getting off your fat ass and exercising some willpower"
EDIT: If you say that you *constantly* felt half-starved, well that just proves you were Doing It Wrong. *I* have no problems giving up eating and quelling the hunger pangs, so you're just lying or not doing it at all!
I think it's really hard for people who have never been fat, or only somewhat overweight, to understand really fat people. A lot of it from our side *does* sound like excuses, but it really is that the metabolism doesn't work the same way for some reason.
This never-been-overweight reader expresses sincere sympathy. I get really frustrated with “just eat less and exercise more” nonsense directed at the overweight. Because if I exist - “eat whatever in any quantity and never gain weight” - then the opposite clearly has to exist.
I believe the intersection between exercise and weight loss is more interesting than people think.
The first thing is that initial weight loss itself is pretty easy relative to keeping the weight off, and a slight marginal reduction in net calories could help more than it seems.
The second thing is that exercise is important for mental health, which (anecdotally) is itself important for weight loss.
The third is that lifestyle choices like hiking or choosing a physically active job burn a huge number of calories. Hiking in particular can more than double your daily caloric needs, and it's genuinely hard to eat enough food unless you bring chocolate, nuts, dried fruit, fatty preserved meat, and so on. Again anecdotally, it feels like there's some amount of compensatory reduction in caloric needs, but walking 20km a day can overwhelm this.
I think it takes 5 or 6 hours walking for an adult male to double the daily calories burned. Possible on weekends, but if you have a full-time job, that would reduce your entire workday to sleep + work + hiking. Heck, I might do it anyway, and my wife would be happy to join me... but we also have kids, and they require some care, so we cannot spend the entire afternoons hiking.
I was already walking every workday 40 minutes to my job and 40 minutes back (7 km total), which is about as much walking as I can put into an average workday sustainably.
Depends on the kind of walking, but plausible. But if you're eating twice as many calories as you would normally burn, you've got *huge* problems. As in, you're gaining about three pounds a week, 150 lbs in a year.
Realistic weight gain or weight loss, aside from unsustainable crash diets, I think typically involves a calorie surplus or deficit of 10-20% normal demand. At that level, modest exercise can make a substantial difference.
I don't have info from weight loss due to medicine vs weight loss due to diet and exercise. There is some data like that for bariatric surgery, which finds it is as-good/better. Keep in mind, semaglutide was approved in 2017 in the US, so we're still waiting to see how that shakes out. It is my assumption that since we are ultimately reducing calories that are being eaten rather than doing anything different with storage or metabolism (weight loss medications, especially GLP1s work by curbing appetite) I suspect their health outcomes will be the same as diet changes alone (modulo how it may be easier to stick to a medication assisted diet than a willpower based one).
Genuinely, I think "Wow I don't feel hungry all the time" is the game-changer here and one I don't think the non-fat understand. I wasn't able to be on Ozempic long enough to get to the "I don't feel as hungry" stage due to shortages, but even the low initial dose was beginning to have some "Huh, I don't want to go eat right now" effects.
I mean, yeah, it's simple as "calories in = calories out for weight loss" and "stop eating so much crap", but the 'simple' part is not *easy* when it comes to "I have the constant nagging sensation that I need to eat". Not that "I want to eat" or "I want to eat junk food", but "I need to eat even though I only ate two hours ago".
I was lucky to be born with a set point that kept me on the slim side. For most of my life I've just eaten what I felt like eating and weighed myself only occasionally, and when I did it was always in the same 5-10 pound range. But there have been 2 times when I have taken drugs with a known side effect of weight gain, and both times I have gained 25+ pounds. And I was no more able to lose the weight than people are who have been overweight all their lives. And I tried quite hard to lose it -- I was horrified to suddenly be chubby. Nope, could not do it. If I got through the day with zero cheating, I'd wake up ravenous in the middle of the night and eat a couple bowls of cereal or a sandwich. Those experiences completely cured me of the idea that being slim was an achievement of mine, due to my eating sensibly and being reasonably active.
Drug-induced weight gain is definitely a thing (my father, who was not overweight, had to go on steroids for a while and ended up with the typical 'moon face' and weight gain even though he was not eating excessively). I just wish the diehard "calories in, calories out, metabolism is not immune to the laws of thermodynamics, if you say you're not eating bad junk but still gain weight you're lying" set would acknowledge even that much - that it's not as simple as "if you get fat, it's because you eat too much and exercise too little, no other reason at all".
I mean, yeah. I eat too much and exercise too little. But *why* do I eat too much? That's not ever been addressed (apart from "junk is hyperprocessed to be delicious and you're some poor sap with no willpower and too greedy"). Up to my mid-twenties, I had little to no access to junk food, and still was overweight.
"If I got through the day with zero cheating, I'd wake up ravenous in the middle of the night and eat a couple bowls of cereal or a sandwich."
My mother used to refer to that with the old-fashioned term "night starvation". It seems to have originated in a 1930s ad campaign:
https://angalmond.blogspot.com/2017/04/guard-against-night-starvation.html
Yeah its one of those things where even if it does have some gnarly long term side effects they would have to be *really* gnarly to outweight the catastrophic effect morbid obesity has on your health in all factors. I could still see there being hefty backlash from the statistically illiterate though.
It does look like there are some genuine gastro-intestinal side-effects, due to the mechanism of action being slowing down emptying of the digestive system so you feel full for longer and therefore don't feel hungry. So that's the usual "we only find this out when we do it at scale in humans for long enough" findings, and I wouldn't say that having some concern around this is being statistically illiterate. If the side-effects are bad enough that you can't continue on the drug, that's not alarmism, that's something you are having a genuine problem with that is affecting your health.
So I think newer generations and refinements of this class of drugs to get around that (maybe finally the holy grail of shutting off hunger) will work better, but that will take time.
Kind of early to speculate. I am already getting spam emails from Ambulance Chasers Are Us outfits looking to sue for Ozempic harmful side effects though.
Statistics sanity check:
This report claims that cybercrime costs the world $8 trillion annually:
https://cybersecurityventures.com/cybercrime-to-cost-the-world-8-trillion-annually-in-2023/
All experts are at risk of inflating the importance of their area of expertise, so there could be bias here. And $8 trillion is a huge number (roughly equal to the combined GDPs of Germany and the UK). World GDP is ~$100 trillion.
Is this claim plausible? If yes, chances of making this a new EA cause area? Even marginal progress on reducing cyber crime might save a trillion dollars!
It's also important to keep in mind that "cost" is a very ambivalent term in economics. As others have pointed out, it's not revenue or profit of fraudsters. It's what companies invest in cyber security. As all economic costs, these are part of the GDP and also have economic benefits, like giving jobs. So it's tricky to count it purely negative.
I still do agree that it's a part of the economy which doesn't generate welfare for society: if cyber crime didn't need prevention, and thus no one would need to protect against them, then the money and labor would be spend for better purposes. But there are surprisingly many parts of the economy like this, where all sides would be better off if this part of the economy didn't exist. Many parts of the economy are zero-sum games. Just to give a concrete example, take lawyers. There is no advantage if both sides in a big trial spending millions on lawyers. It's just that if party A spends them and party B doesn't, then party A wins. So both are forced into an equilibrium where they spend lots of money. But if there were regulations saying that both parties may spend at most 10,000$ on lawyers, all sides would benefit, and the money could be spent in a more productive way. (Ok, perhaps the millions help to get marginally better decisions in the end. But let's be honest, this effect is not large.)
So if you want to establish a good EA cause area, then I doubt that fighting cyber crime sticks out. You may be better of reducing zero-sum games. You could also fight for reducing the cost of lawsuits, or the cost of marketing (which is also mostly a zero-sum game), or the cost of fundraising for that matter. In economy, if you count generously you are quickly at some very high numbers.
For example. in the UK all of our ATM cards have a microchip in them.
The cost of fraud under the old mag stripe system was just too high, so the banks had to roll out better security
I have a suspicion the government also leanedon the banks/ If you have a choice between loosing X in fraud vs spending X on coutermeasures, economically its the same but the government would much prefer you do the latter/
Well, smart cards have been a thing since the 1990s. They likely don't cost trillions a year. I would recommend them over mag stripes on general principles even in the absence of any fraud.
> If you have a choice between loosing X in fraud vs spending X on coutermeasures, economically its the same
Well, it's the same if the countermeasures drop the level of fraud to zero. For most scenarios that would be an implausible level of effectiveness.
Agreed for the total amounts going to both. In a perfectly efficient market (admittedly fictitious), one would expect business to operate at the point where the marginal delta-X lost to fraud would match the marginal delta-X spent on incremental countermeasures to prevent it.
The government has one other incentive: delta-X spent on cybersecurity experts' salaries probably gets taxed at the usual rates, delta-X acquired by fraudsters probably not so much.
The link doesn't go to a report, only to site claiming to summarise the report, and asking for me to provide my contact information in order to download it. I say, if the report was good, they would publish it directly, and this is just a marketing exercise.
Also, I don't believe this cause area can be neglected.
Clearly we should take the $8 trillion saved by tackling cybercrime and give $7 trillion of it to Sam Altman.
Likely a lot of double-counting here. If somebody steals a credit-card number, buys $1k of some shitcoins, then shitcoin project rugpulls, then somebody hacks them and takes all their money, then they fall for a romance scam and lose it to the next conman, etc. etc. - that's a lot of "loss" with the same $1k of money.
Also, of course, "we have to hire somebody to maintain and update our systems and can't just install 10-year old free distro of linux and forget about it" is also counted as "costs". And if, say, a bank is hacked and the clients sue, lawyers' fees on both sides will be "costs of cybercrime". Etc. etc.
> Likely a lot of double-counting here. If somebody steals a credit-card number, buys $1k of some shitcoins, then shitcoin project rugpulls, then somebody hacks them and takes all their money, then they fall for a romance scam and lose it to the next conman, etc. etc. - that's a lot of "loss" with the same $1k of money.
This doesn't seem like a valid point; the total is being compared to GDP, which is calculated the same way. There's a whole concept, the velocity of money, relating the total amount of money to the total amount of spending.
I mean its the old joke with the economists and the cow pat. Economic measures have always double counted because its very hard to calculate what portion of money changing hands actually generated new value. Not to say this report is credible.
You say those dismissively, but protection costs are indeed a real cost produced by cybercrime. Businesses could invest a lot more in actually building and selling better products if they didn't have to worry about data security. It's like a mini version of the broken windows fallacy.
I don't say it's dismissively per se, I just say it needs wider context. E.g. if you say "we have a billion dollars lost to crime in this city" then it's one thing if thieves steal a billion dollar worth of cars and wallets, and another thing if 99% of it is the local police department's pension fund. I mean, I have nothing against the police and their pension, but that's just different picture. I am not pushing any conclusion here, just noting that the picture includes things that are very commonly overlooked when talking about such things.
This is utter hogwash; it implies there are 80 million people earning $100,000 every year from cybercrime. A few scrotes earning pennies on the pound from street deals got us the war on drugs––and we're supposed to believe that 8% of the world economy vanishes into a black hole? Shit, if was that easy I'd have chucked the day job two decades ago.
I can light your home on fire, making you lose however much it cost you without necessarily winning anything myself.
Destruction is negative sum. The only one winning is the Goddess of Entropy.
>A few scrotes earning pennies on the pound from street deals got us the war on drugs
1/ I'm really not sure "penny on the pound" is a good description of the profit margins of the drug trade.
2/ Even if they did make pennies on the pound, the damage dealt by drug addiction is pounds on the pennies. How much does it take to ruin one's life through drug? A few months of dealer income, I'd wager? On the other hand, Cybercrime seems to have a tendency of causing little second-order damage (except cost of protection, per "40 Degree Days" comments. When a ransom is paid, the damage dealt is (roughly) equal to the income of the pirate.
The cost of cybercrime is not necessarily equal to the profit from cybercrime. If I'm a local government official, and I have to pay $500,000 to upgrade our digital systems to protect against advances in cybercrime, criminals haven't gotten any money but I'm still down $500,000.
I think that’s the kicker, this number almost has to assume that every dollar spent on cybersecurity is a “cost” of cybercrime.
... Obviously you wouldn't have to waste resources on security if there was no crime.
A good deal of infosec is necessary to prevent accidents due to non-malicious human error, or bugs in collaborating applications.
Also privacy is justified as a goal on its own. You cannot claim that without "crime" there is zero need for authentication or firewalls or whatnot.
So I disagree that you can lump everything as the cost of crime in this case.
(Unless you are being sarcastic)
Good point! Even with no malice anywhere, write protection is needed, or the first buggy cat command could wipe out a data center.
Does that mean the price of every doorknob, Ring camera, and locksmith salary should be counted as “the cost of burglary”?
Yes, obviously. Resources that are being spent on security could be used on other things if burglary was made physically impossible. Though, as completely preventing crime is impossible without some extreme measures, this whole discussion isn't particularly meaningful.
Ring cameras can be useful for things other than preventing burglary, like seeing if you're friend is at the door when you're away. But yes, costs paid to prevent crime are indeed a cost of crime, including cameras, lighting, police, etc.
The USA spends a little short of 1 trillion a year in defence––doesn't mean we say that war costs the USA $1tn a year. It means we say the USA spends $1tn a year on defence.
People very commonly say things like "The Iraq War cost the US $X billion dollars." That doesn't mean the Iraqis received those dollars.
Here's a simpler example: someone breaks into your car and damages a vital part, in order to get scrap copper to sell. The repairs cost you $1000, but the thief has only made $50.
Or if you don't want to count that example since a vendor/employees are getting the $500,000, if cyber criminals attack a stock exchange in the hopes of getting a ransom payment but are ultimately defeated by law enforcement, there could still be lots of lost GDP from the time the stock exchange is offline/damage to the systems even if no money is ever successfully stolen.
I asked this in the announcement thread but was late and got no reply so trying here: Would it be acceptable to enter the book review contest by writing a review of a fictional blog? The blog in question has not "concluded" and is not structured as a book, but it is fictional and I think could benefit from a "book review"-style analysis, but if that's not what the contest is looking for I'll write up something more standard.
I say go for it. From what I've seen it's hard as hell to rise above the median review (there's a coterie of excellent analysts and writers who follow this blog, shocking I know), so if this is the hook that gets you in that upper echelon, more power to yah
I'd say site review is a genre different from book review. Has been very popular at the early years of the internet, but then almost completely disappeared. Maybe worth trying to bring back, but it's not the same as book review.
Isn't a review of a blog that doesn't exist itself fiction? Admittedly the book review contest encourages creative writing and some entries from past years have been... strange with respect to their topic material, but what you suggest seems to go beyond that.
Maybe you can just write your fictitious blog review and then get somebody else to review that for the contest, or vice versa.
Just to mention, Scott already said it was fine to enter imaginary books. The drawback being you have to make the audience care about a review of an imaginary book.
To be more clear, the blog is real but the posts on it are fictional; it's a fake news website.
Oh, a *fiction blog*, not a fictitious blog. I get it now.
Again inviting people to read and hopefully subscribe and even more hopefully then comment on what they read at "Radical Centrist" https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/
Recent topics are
COVID policy errors
Climate Change
Monetary policy
Macroeconomic Indicators
I was disappointed with your COVID policy errors essay. Maybe if you could have provided some data to support your opinions?
There was an article I read a while back about a US intelligence officer who lived in Damascus before the civil war broke out. He talks about sitting in cafes and coffee shops eavesdropping on the conversations people around him were having, and realizing based on this that shit was really about to hit the fan. Not only was a war going to break, but based on what he was hearing on the ground he thought there was a chance that radical Islamic groups were going to end up controlling large swaths of territory in the midst of the chaos. Apparently he brought these insights to his superiors in the Obama administration and they laughed him off. Of course that’s exactly what happened.
Point is that sometimes what you’re hearing on the streets is a useful barometer for a monumental shift that’s about to happen.
I bring this up to say that I think there is a decent chance Trump wins in a landslide. I was at a Lil Wayne concert recently, with a crowd that was roughly 75% black and Hispanic, and for whatever reason there were a ton of people voicing their enthusiasm for Trump in the Men’s room and elsewhere. All races cracking jokes about how terrible Biden is and how insane democrats are. It was pretty surprising. If Biden can’t win the Lil Wayne fan demographic, which based on what I hear on the ground it doesn’t sound like he is, he loses the election in a landslide. Obviously it’s not a perfect heuristic, but it seems like everywhere I go there’s more enthusiasm for Trump than there’s ever been.
What I've noticed (at least online) is not so much that Trump support has become cooler, but that actively opposing him has become dated and cringe. Posting anti-Trump sentiment feels like Tiger King or Harambe posting.
It's not clear that actual voter preferences would be counting for much.
Don't underestimate the number of ballots that will be produced and counted despite not having been cast by a legitimate voter. Among other numbers, consider the at least 7 million migrants newly let into the country - if ballots will be somehow obtained for, say, 1/3 of that number, imagine how that would affect the outcome.
I think we're once again going to see ballot dumps of questionable origin counted sometime after the election day flipping a bunch of states that now look certain to go to Trump.
What if I imagine that ballots will somehow be obtained for, say, 1/3000th of the number of illegal immigrants? How would that affect the outcome?
I can see ways that an illegal immigrant could secure a ballot for themselves, so by the law of large numbers applied to human populations, it's almost certainly a thing that happens. But how *much* it happens is critical, and that is something that requires *data*. Not imagination.
And if 1/3rd of America's illegal immigrants were voting illegally, it should be easy to find hard data. Where is it?
Do you have any evidence for this is actually happening at sufficient volume to affect elections? It's quite a thing to have posted this without offering any.
The last time I saw actual evidence proffered in one of these "the left is winning with illegal immigrant voters" debates was years ago, and it was frankly laughable. Took some digging, but I found it - I apologize because it's on scribd (https://www.scribd.com/document/326149037/Report-Alien-Invasion-in-Virginia), which makes it a pain in the ass to deal with and I'm going off of my memory rather than scroll through dozens of ads to try to find the exact specific pages where it gave its numbers.
As I recall, they found thousands of illegally registered voters and votes over a 10 year period, which sounds scary until you realize that (a) by “thousands” they meant less than 10,000 registered voters and even fewer votes, and (b) that was in all elections over a 10 year period, including 2 presidential years and 3 mid-terms. If you ran the numbers, a highly-motivated conservative organization had, at best, proven that “illegal voting” was changing vote totals by .002% or some similar paltry amount that never came anywhere close to impacting the election results.
Sure, it proved that this kind of voting occurs slightly-more-often-than-*never*, but "error rate near-zero but not quite true zero" isn't typically a cause for panic, and it didn’t come anywhere close to raising concerns that what they found was impacting elections, or showing how anyone with a fiscally conservative bone in their body would think it a problem worth the cost of solving.
Purely anecdotal of course, but over the last few months I've seen four people wearing those red MAGA hats in public. None have been white. And I live in a disproportionately white area, too.
Yeah I should add I’ve been seeing this everywhere. The Overton window has shifted and people are much more comfortable supporting trump publicly, and I think he’s simply gotten more popular.
Metaculus still has them neck-and-neck, 51/49 Biden/Trump
> I was at a Lil Wayne concert recently, with a crowd that was roughly 75% black and Hispanic,
Where was the concert?
That's probably very relevant to what you were hearing!
Reading, Pennsylvania. 100k city and hour from Philly.
Clearly a US intelligence officer living in Damascus has a self-interest in saying that that happened. I would want to at least see his contemporaneous predictions before saying that he gained any special insight from his experience.
What do you mean by a landslide? Trump won the electoral vote by quite a big margin in 2016, despite losing the popular vote. Today, virtually every poll has Trump ahead in the popular vote. If you mean that Trump could win the electoral college by a 20% margin, that's been evident from th polls for some time now. If you mean that Trump can win in the same way that Reagan won--by winning all but one state--you'll need more than a Lil Wayne concert to demonstrate that.
He will win the popular vote comfortably, imo.
1: The Syrian Civil War started a few months into the Arab spring. People were talking revolution all across the region. It would have been hard to know in advance that the Syrian case would turn into the worst shitshow.
2: The rise of Al-Nusra/ISIL/etc. Was heavily contingent on actions from the Syrian regime, the US and its allies, as well as the "moderate" rebel groups. Basically, Assads regime put all of their effort into eliminating moderate groups to make sure that outside powers would not have any attractive alternatives to his regime, while infighting between "moderate" rebel groups and indecision on the part of the US in providing weapons and other assistance weakened the opposition enough to make this strategy successful. This left strong extremist islamist groups, which were eventually defeated by an outside coalition when the pathetic remains of the Syrian government were not able to do so.
The Lebanese civil war was from 1975-1990. Barak Obama would've been around fourteen when it started. It's shameful that he didn't take the intelligence seriously from our agents in the field.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebanese_Civil_War
I don’t know enough about the dynamics of the Middle East to know how relevant this information would be to the situation in Syria in the late 2000s. If I remember the article correctly (it’s been years and I’d love to find it but can only remember the main gist), there were a lot of people in the intelligence community who didn’t take his concerns seriously as well. So it’s not just Obama.
Not completely irrelevant, as Lebanon and Syria are fundamentally connected in many ways. Indeed, a large part of the "Lebanese Civil War" was basically Syria and Israel duking it out through proxies.
Bit before the "formal" civil war broke out, I was in a meeting that had a Lebanese communist involved, and she said that the Syrian protests seemed to be directed from abroad and would tip towards the Islamists. I didn't pay that much attention since she was a bit oblique about the topic, but later on reflected that the Gulf support to various Islamist opposition groups was probably already evident.
Gulf and US support. That the west supported Syrian rebels has been disappeared from history.
My understanding is that at the very earliest phase it was primarily Gulf support.
...Damascus is in Syria.
D'oh. Sorry. I still think it's perverse Bayesian thinking to claim what you hear in the lavatory or a cafe can predict the course of the future.
It’s not that I think it can predict the future but I think you can pick up on trends that polls or more sophisticated methods will miss. 3 years ago no one would publicly admit they supported Trump in such an environment, where as now there’s a lot more open enthusiasm about Trump even in apolitical spaces. I’ve seen this same phenomenon in a variety of settings. Easy example is to look at him walking into UFC events now compared to a few years ago, the crowd goes insane. The UFC has a broad, mainstream audience these days. Something has definitely shifted in my view, and the most likely is that Trump has gained popularity. I could be completely wrong though, tbf.
I think the place this could make sense is this: Suppose you live in a dictatorship. You and everyone you personally know well enough to trust talking about it thinks the dictator is an idiot who is wrecking the country. But for all you know, and from everything visible around you, everyone else thinks the dictator is a genius who is wisely guiding the country into a glorious future. If suddenly the noose seems to loosen a bit, and everyone is expressing their contempt and hatred for the dictator, then everyone's knowledge about what everyone else thinks can change very rapidly.
If you were present at the time when the whole society transitioned from "nobody ever speaks ill of the Glorious Leader" to "everyone is kinda joking about how the Glorious Leader is a jackass," you could detect this transition and infer that everyone now knew that everyone else wanted Assad gone, and thus that an uprising like happened in the rest of the Arab Spring was possible.
I’m going to be charitable and assume he knew this and is making another point about the dynamics of the Middle East.
No. I f**ked up. But an apocryphal story about somebody hearing somebody else talk shit in a cafe — and who Obama didn't take seriously — is not a historically useful analysis. What we hear on the streets depends on which streets you're on. Just sayin...
I think it has value and you shouldn't dismiss it. In 2017 you could hear people talk about crypto in public transit. Same in 2021. And now again I hear people talk about it that are probably just "common people"
Well crypto is different as it’s a general topic of conversation. To be honest with you I don’t believe any of this. Political debate at the interval of a concert to imaginary conversations in Damascus - still largely pro Assad - to Obama not knowing or understanding rebel groups that the US helped fund.
Every measurement about the world needs error bars in order to be correct.
This is true the same way that every energy measurement needs a relativity term in order to be correct: In the vast majority of cases, this extra term can be safely ignored.
In some cases it cannot, and this is the common problem between non-frequentist probabilities and the “Rootclaim’s $100,000 Lab Leak Debate” probabilities. To be clear, I fully believe that someone smarter and more eloquent than me has written about this. However, since I haven’t seen said writing, I’m going to give it a go myself.
In the case of non-frequentist probabilities, this is a little bit pedantic, but I think it gets to the root of why (some) people object to them. It plays out as follows:
If I see 400 white balls and 600 black balls in an urn, then I can say “There is a 40% probability of a randomly pulled ball being white”. However, this is incorrect. What is actually true is “There is a 40% probability of a randomly pulled ball being white, given that I counted the original number of balls correctly, plus N% that I was off by net-1, plus an M% chance that I was off by net-2, etc…”. In other words, my 40% number has error bars – It’s really 40.0000% += “probability I counted wrong”. In this case, however, we can assume that “probability I counted wrong” is very small relative to the information being conveyed by the 40% number. Maybe it’s actually 40.00 +/- 0.1%. Thus, in common parlance, I can elide the uncertainty altogether, and just say 40%, and very little information is lost.
In the case of the question “will it rain tomorrow”, the model is much more complicated, but the basic idea remains the same. If the weather forecast says “There is a 20% chance of rain”, what they actually mean is “there is a 20% +/- all-the-error-in-our-model-compounded”. And (I assume) meteorologists actually know what these numbers are, at least to some extent – there’s a reason that weather forecasts don’t go more than 10 days out: meteorologists understand that, past a certain point, their error bars are large enough that they simply can’t say anything helpful. They don’t include their error bars in their forecasts because we don’t live in a statistically literate society, but it’s generally understood that a.) the weather forecast has bigger error bars than the 400/600 balls case and b.) the weather forecast’s error bars increase with temporal-distance-from-the-present
Hell, I assume Samotsvety has detailed confidence calculations on all of their predictions. I would hope. If they don’t, I would love to know how their results end up being as good as they are.
The problem with putting probabilities on AI doom (or any other thing that we don’t have well-tested models for) is that the error bars are large enough that 0-100% are all included in them. Saying “AI has a 20% chance of destroying the world” is technically wrong in the same way saying “I have a 40% chance of pulling a white ball is wrong”. Both of them are eliding the “+/- chance-my-calculations-model-etc-are-wrong”. But with the balls case, that probability ends up being very small – saying “40%” when the reality is “40% +/- 0.1%” is mostly correct. But in the AI case, the chance the model is just wrong is really high. So saying “20%”, when the reality is “20% +/- 50%” is mostly incorrect. Given “20% +/- 50%” as a probability, the ‘correct’ shorthand is “I don’t know”, and not “20%”.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with probabilities for future events, but stating numbers for things with large error bars gives a misleading
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This has gotten long, so I’ll keep this short. This is the same problem that Baysean reasoning has, particularly with many terms, and particularly with small terms.
If you’re multiplying probabilities, you have to multiply their errors as well. Probabilities aren't numbers -- they're distributions. And if you do so, you very quickly get error bars which encompass, say 20+ orders of magnitude. Thus, unless you are supremely confident on all your components, any Baysean process that doesn’t ignore uncertainty will very quickly find itself giving a useless answer, and any Baysean process that does quickly becomes wrong.
If you're dealing with a singular event, a single point probability estimate is fine. If I flip a coin *once*, it's 50% probability of coming up heads even if there's a significant probability that the coin is unfair because there's no reason to prefer biased-heads to biased-tails. Though if I estimate that e.g. 1% of coins are either double-headed or double-tailed because of tricksy cheating gamblers and that tricksy cheating gamblers prefer double-headed coins to double-tailed by a 60/40 ratio, then I'd give my single-point probability estimate at 50.1%. The error bars can be folded into that estimate, and as 4Denthusiast points out you don't need to put error bars on the error bars.
If you're dealing with many repetitions of the same event, e.g. if you are going to flip the coin ten times in a row to settle bets, then you need the error bars to account for the correlation between repeated samples. "5% of bolts are from bad lots and bolts from bad lots will fail 20% of the time", correctly gives you a 1% probability that the next bolt you use will fail - but it also gives you a 5% probability that a bridge will fail if it's designed to stand the loss of 10% of its bolts and you bought them all from a single lot.
In this case, we're asking what is the probability that the 2019 pandemic was due to a lab leak, not the fraction of future pandemics that will come from lab leaks, so the single point estimate is fine.
But Scott's general point that the math involved in doing this right for complex problems is really hard, is valid. And the need to account for potential sources of error, even if you are going to fold them into a point estimate of probability for a single event, is a big part of that.
There is a difference between the case where you know you have a fair coin and 50% probability and the case where the coin might be double headed/tailed. The difference is that in the last case you may need to make assumtions about the probability of having double head/tail. Depending on your level of information this may be very uncertain, and your final probability could change drastically depending on the assumtion - so two probability estimates from different people could be very different - like the case with covid lab leak. In the case where you have a fair coin, two independent probability estimates would presumably be equal. I think this is important information to convey, even if the estimate is for a single toss.
So I will give that, in theory, one could incorporate their uncertainty into a single point prediction for the lab leak hypothesis (and for each component of their Baysean reasoning). But it is clear that the debaters either didn't do that or were *wildly, grossly, irresponsibly* overconfident.
I think it is uncontroversial to say that there is a >1% chance that both/either sides in this debate are wrong. This is *clearly* not a cut-and-dry issue. If it were, the debate wouldn't be happening. Scott saying "I think 80% lab leak" is perfectly reasonable. The actual debaters, saying "there is a 532:1 likelyhood of a lab leak" is clearly ludicrous. That level of confidence should be a huge red flag not to trust them, not evidence that they're right!
I think the real problem with this kind of Baysean analysis on hard issues like this is that, yeah, the math is really hard. To the point where no one ever gets it right. To the point where the whole thing is a useless exercise. But it is a shiny, intimidating-looking useless exercise, so all it end up with (in practice) is making extremely uncertain numbers look more certain.
> I think the real problem with this kind of Baysean analysis on hard issues like this is that, yeah, the math is really hard. To the point where no one ever gets it right.
No, the math isn't what's hard. The math is straightforward.
The problem is that doing the math calls for you to supply values that you don't actually know. This can't be done.
uuuuh yeah that's fair.
The math is not hard. The math is useless since it's impossible (under most circumstances we actually care about) to supply it with useful inputs
Yeah I'm mostly clueless about Bayesian probability propagation, but the last lab leak post I felt like give me some error bars and all these guesses are about the same... except for the winner who's numbers I find disingenuous... not sincere.
Should the sizes of error bars themselves come with error bars? Of course not, you just include that in the original error bars if there's such an issue. Probabilities work the same way. In the urn case, say there's a 99% chance that there are 400 white balls, and 0.5% each you miscounted by 1 and it's 399 or 401 (the chances of greater errors being negligibly small in this hypothetical), and similarly for about 600 black balls, then we can just add up the conditional probability of drawing a white ball given each of the nine possible true values of the contents of the urn, weighted by their probabilities, for a total 39.982% chance of drawing a white ball. The same applies to the real-world probability estimates of things like chance of AI doom. If the model is uncertain, you can just take that uncertainty into account in the probability estimate. Depending on what sort of error you envision, this will generally move the probability towards 50% (relative to the raw probability produced by the model).
If you want to incorporate your uncertainty that your model is even correct into explicit Bayesian reasoning, I don't think error bars on the likelihoods are the right way to go about it, because probabilities are not distributions, they're numbers. In the specific case where there are several observations of the same kind being used, where you're not sure how to interpret the observation such that you may be making a consistent error for multiple of them, this manifests as a correlation that needs to be taken into account in the Bayesian calculation.
So the problem is that no probability exists in a vacuum. In both of these cases, the actual question being asked is "Should I believe that AI will kill us all/covid was a lab leak". And to answer that question, an answer of "I calculate the probability to be 20% (or 50% or whatever)" is entirely useless unless you can communicate how sure you are about it.
"50% chance because I have flipped this coin 10,000 times" is not the same thing as "50% because I have no idea" when trying to answer the question that people actually care about.
It's true that you can use a probability as a single number, but if you do so, you can't use it as impetus to do or change anything. If you want to actually be able to *use* the probability for anything, you need to either specify or assume a certainty.
And since people usually assume highish certainty when looking at percents, leaving out a certainty on a low-certaintly percent reads as lying by omission.
If you want to use a probability to take action (placing bets or the equivalent), a single number suffices. If you want to update your personal probability estimate of some event based on someone else's knowledge, then you do need more information than just their probability, you also need to know what information their probability is based on. Even for that though, I think error bars on the probability are not that great a way of summarising the information, because it depends specifically on not just how much information they have, but how that compares to how much information you have, and how much that overlaps.
Say that we are to flip a coin one time to get heads or tails. The coin can be fair or double sided. Say person A has no information about this and therefore estimates p(h) = 0.5. Person B on the other hand knows that ther coin is double sided with tails on both sides. Now person B offers a bet to person A with 10/1 odds that the coin will land tails. It seems like if the singular estimate is sufficient to take action that person A should take the bet, as he had caculated p(heads) = 0.5 and the expected value is positive? In this case it seems to me that the correct conclusion for person A is that I have no information, and that p=0.5 without error bars is not sufficient to take action even for the single event?
Ah, yeah, this is a more straightforward example than I had. 100% this.
I mean the problem is that the vast majority of the time when probabilities are communicated, they are intended to make someone update their personal probabilities on something. In which case a raw number is unhelpful-to-actively-malicious.
Certainly I agree that information-provenance-tracking is better than error bars (or some more general error measure), but that's a looot harder to do/takes what would be a sentence and blows it up into an entire essay. But yeah, when possible, full informational provenance is obviously preferable.
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Re: placing bets, even a low-certainty probability isn't necessarily very helpful. Assume I am quite naive. If I end up playing a 'fair' game of dice 'for fun' (but with real money) against someone who's using loaded dice, my default (low-certainty) probability for victory would be 50%. I would be much better served waiting and gathering more information rather than just working with the default 50% probability and losing my money.
A probability is only useful if it's correct, and low-certainty probabilities are more likely to just be flat-out wrong.
I haven't actually worked out a detailed objection, but I still vaguely feel like error bars are the wrong way to represent the uncertainty in this case, because they'd specifically be representing the difference in information between you and the one offering the bet, which is different from the usual case where there is no specific adversary or point of comparison other than the truth.
The relevant probability distribution on probabilities of an event X is given by P[X given Z], where Z is some information you don't currently know, treated as a random variable. If you want, you can turn this distribution into error bars by taking quantiles, but the distribution itself is more fundamental so I will be discussing it rather than the error bars. If you're telling someone about X for them to update, Z is what they know. If you're betting against someone about X, Z is what your opponent knows. If you're analyzing some repeatable process, Z is all the details of the process that remain consistent from run to run. For a one-off event, the closest to an objective Z you can get is probably something like "What are all the relevant facts that could plausibly be known about X at this time?". In other cases it's "What might I find out if I put a certain amount more effort into investigating?". The point I'm getting at is that the size of the error bars in this case would depend on more context than just how much you know about the thing. Also, conceptually, describing this as the error bars on your probability of X just feels weird to me because it's not really the same question. It's not "Is X the case?", but "What would my probability for X be if I knew Z?". I think this is my main objection, although it is admittedly pretty subjective.
Betting is not a great example because in that case you have an adversary who may know more than you, but for generally taking actions under uncertainty where there is no adversary, the point about using the single number as the probability stands. This applies to several of your original examples (the weather forecast, Samotsvety, and to some extent AI doom). There's already an expert who is assumed to have taken into account all of the relevant information that's available, so there is no clear other person to refer to who might know more, and the error bars wouldn't really be adding anything.
Actually, I think I got a bit distracted by other stuff. My main point is the last one in the comment above: error bars on probabilities make some amount of sense in contexts where there is some state of greater knowledge to compare to, but this does not actually apply to several of the examples in your original comment (most clearly, the weather forecast).
> Should the sizes of error bars themselves come with error bars?
https://xkcd.com/2110/
Technically what you're saying makes sense. Psychologically I think it might help people accept subjective probabilities if you explicitly say something like "x has a 40% chance of happening because we have a very convincing argument that the chance is right about 40%" vs "x has a 40% chance of happening because we have a fairly dubious argument that it's 10% to happen, which we correct back up towards 50% based on how likely we think the argument is to be valid."
Actually, is this correct? I get that for a single draw, if you assign 40% probability to the next ball being white, it doesn't matter how you got there. But it *does* matter for how much you should update based on the next draw being white. If you know the box has 400/1000 white balls, a run of picking white is just a weird coincidence that sometimes happens. If instead, say, someone who's not entirely reliable claimed that there were 200/1000 and you said 40% because you thought they might be wrong, then a run of white balls might have you updating much more quickly.
> Depending on what sort of error you envision, this will generally move the probability towards 50% (relative to the raw probability produced by the model).
According to your math above, that isn't what happens in this case, interestingly.
Yes, your prior on how likely each possible number of balls is does affect how you should update on new observations, and in this sense having a probability distribution on probabilities does make sense, but only because it's repeated draws from the same distribution, where there are two separate sources of uncertainty: what the process generating the distribution is, and how it turns out in each case. For unique events like the origin of covid, you can't split it up like that and only a single probability applies. (You can still get probability distributions on probabilities for related but somewhat different questions in such cases though, as I described in my comments on the non-frequentist probabilities post.)
Ravi Agarwal appears to be a real professor, possibly emeritus, at Texas A&M University - Kingsville. https://www.tamuk.edu/artsci/departments/math/about/agarwal.html
I became aware of him because this showed up in my search results as I was looking for something else: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/mathematics/irrational-number
> 5.2 Irrational number without zeros among its digits is inconceivable
> An irrational number (nonrecurring, i.e., no pattern in its decimal form; in other words, when the decimal form has no pattern whatsoever, it is irrational. If there is a pattern, then it is a good indication for rational) without zeros among its digits is inconceivable. An irrational number (a number that cannot be expressed as the ratio of two integers) will always have zeros in its decimal (or any other radix) representation. It is a conjecture to us now, but the proof should not possibly be difficult.
This is apparently an excerpt from a book that is available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Zero-Landmark-Discovery-Dreadful-Ultimate-ebook/dp/B017UAMW7Q/
(Obviously, you should not buy the book. It is gibberish.)
Hell, it's also available from Elsevier, implying that the trade dress in the Amazon image is not fraudulent: https://shop.elsevier.com/books/zero/sen/978-0-08-100774-7
It is of course very easy to prove that irrational numbers exist which have no zeroes in their decimal expansion. You can do it by constructing an example! (A really easy example would be the number whose decimal expansion is the concatenation of the strings '2', '12', '112', '1112', '11112', etc.)
So my question is:
(1) what exactly is going on with this book? Anyone who accidentally read it would have to notice that it is, at best, just a bunch of words someone made up, which, to the extent they're supposed to have a meaning at all, are wrong.
(2) Why is Ravi Agarwal's name on it? Is that fraud or did he do it? His faculty page says that he is or was a research mathematician with a Ph.D. from IIT. It isn't possible for such a person to believe that it might be possible to prove that all irrational numbers have a zero in their decimal expansion. What happened?
An easier proof (as far as I can tell):
Take any irrational number (pi will do, if you like)
Delete all the zeroes (you can describe this slightly more mathematically if you like)
Congratulations, you now have an irrational number with no zeroes in its decimal expansion.
First, that isn't a proof at all.
Second, what was the difficult part of my proof? The number has a 2 at the 𝘯th place of its decimal expansion if 𝘯 is a triangular number, and a 1 otherwise. This is so simple that I can give you the explicit formula for the number:
\frac{1}{9} + \sum_{n=1}^\infty 10^{-\frac{n^2 + n}{2}}
(If you can't read LaTeX, or don't want to, you can paste that into https://katex.org/ and see it rendered normally.)
If you want a proof based on manipulating an existing irrational number, you can do this:
1. Express any irrational number in base 5.
2. Reinterpret that string as a number in base 10.
3. Add 1/3.
4. This is an irrational number in base 10 with no zeroes in the expansion. (It also has no ones, twos, eights, or nines.)
Or, even simpler:
1. Express any irrational number in base 2.
2. Replace each 0 in the expansion with any digit that isn't 1. Could be 3, 8, F, whatever.
3. This is an irrational number in any base that uses the digit you chose in step 2.
That often works, but here's a counterexample:
0.101001000100001000001.... is an irrational number but if all the zeroes are deleted you have the rational number 1/9.
Well, it often works as far as intuition goes. It should work for most normal numbers.
But you'll have a terrible time trying to prove that the number you've generated is irrational 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘯 𝘪𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵'𝘴 𝘵𝘳𝘶𝘦, and as you've already observed, in the general case, it isn't true.
It would be an incredible result if you could show that "pi with the zeroes deleted" was a rational number, but the fact that that would be really surprising is not actually a proof that it's false.
This.
The only way the original claim would be true was if we talked about binary (in which case it would be true but boring).
As an applied mathematician he may have some preexisting odd but defensible ideas about non-computable numbers and nonconstructive proofs.
The book shows some signs of being written by someone in an unusual mental state, and is very concerned with mysticism (seeing mystical insight as more important than formal proof), so perhaps this leads to those ideas being expanded to the point that they are definitely wrong.
I think this is the explanation of how such a thing gets written.
As for how it gets published, it's just not that hard to get Elsevier to publish something. They put in almost no editorial effort and don't necessarily have to pay the authors anything, and clearly don't care about a reputation for quality.
> As for how it gets published, it's just not that hard to get Elsevier to publish something.
My point in observing that it was available directly from Elsevier was mostly to disprove the idea that someone obtained a bunch of nonsense and then supplied cover art including the names of some unrelated professors. (There's a second listed author!)
Elsevier may not care whether the book has any contents, but I suspect they do care that the attributed authors are actually responsible for the book in some legal sense.
If you're saying the reason this book got written was that both authors were high as a kite for the entire process... really? It must have taken _some_ time to produce the book, and to arrange a contract with Academic Press. Did neither of them ever review the text while they weren't high? Did colleagues, administrators, students, or publishing flunkies never notice anything amiss?
While the first proof that comes to mind that such numbers exist is non-constructive, Michael Watts's counterexample is explicit and computable. Also, it sounds like Ravi is confusing the fact that a number is rational iff its decimal expansion is eventually periodic with the false idea that if there's any pattern at all in the digits it's rational (which clearly would imply his conjecture), rather than having some obscure philosophical objection.
As I wrote above, I think the ideas stated in the book are definitely wrong and incoherent.
But they feel like they might come about from the starting point of someone who worries about constructive mathematics, and then lets mystical or unusual mental experiences take them too far.
Or it's a AI-generated e-book that someone posted up on the Big River to scam people out of money. This is happening frequently nowadays.
book comes from 2016 so too early for that.
I just published an article on COVID-19 denialism and how COVID-19 impacts the brain:
https://moreisdifferent.blog/p/all-of-these-things-about-covid-19?triedRedirect=true
Hey Dan, I hope you will respond to the points beowulf and I have raised. I am all for facing grim realities, but I think some of your alarming points are inaccurate. Coincidentally there is someone on this thread posting a link to a CDC report about a dairy worker who contracted avian flu from cows, and following up the link asking something like "how long til avian flu makes covid look like nothing?" But if you read what she links, and the links on her links, the picture is not very alarming at all. The worst part of covid for me wasn't the fucking virus or the precautions I had to take, it was seeing anxiety and rage get set off by inaccurate information. On twitter and elsewhere I watched split after split happen within and between groups of people over whether some reported "information" was case for alarm or cause for alarm or cause for screaming "bullshit" and hating those who were alarmed. Or of course the reverse -- hating those who aren't alarmed. So I am now worried and annoyed about these posts, and having to work fairly hard to hang on to my empathy and fair-mindedness.
I was on "Medical Twitter" all through the pandemic, following a bunch of scientists and epidemiologists. When I started seeing articles about brain damage and IQ decrease from Covid, I asked many of them via comments on their tweets or by Twitter PM whether there were similar findings regarding other viral infections -- flu, pneumonia, hepatitis, measles, etc. -- and none responded. (Most did not often respond to many questions from followers on Twitter, but the unanimous silence about this topic was striking.). My guess is that they did not respond because there isn't a lot of data about that. I searched around a bit on Google Scholar and it seemed like there had not been a lot of research on IQ change, brain changes, etc. caused by other viruses.
I had an experience once that nudges me in the direction of thinking that flu affects the brain. A couple decades ago I had when I'm pretty sure was the flu -- had all the classic symptoms, and it was during flu season. For about a week after flu had run its course I felt sort of low-energy but otherwise normal. I did not feel mentally foggy, just tired & blah. So I was driving on the turnpike, and approaching the toll booth I saw from several hundred feet away that the lane I was in was going to take me to a toll booth that had a long line. Still going 50 mph or so I changed lanes -- then realized I had changed lanes *without checking either my rear view or my side mirrors.* I had never done that before, and have never done that since. I have always had an irrational uneasiness about lane changing. I keep feeling like there's a car behind or beside me that neither mirror is catching. I check and double-check my mirrors, but before actually changing lanes I still crave to look over my shoulder to be sure. Sometimes I do look over my shoulder, even though that also feels unsafe, and probably really is.
I think of that incident as being due to some sort of post-flu brain impairment. Of course I understand it's just one incident in one life and it's not reasonable to base an opinion on it. But it does make it more plausible to me that flu, or maybe something like fever that's common to many illnesses, affects the brain.
Have you found data comparing covid brain and IQ changes to those from other viruses?
One other question, about Covid's damage to the immune system. I mostly quit Twitter about a year ago, but I do remember seeing a couple pieces around that time about the effect of Covid on the immune system, and whether it was true that Covid did lasting damage. One came from a physician who was not an active researcher, but did follow and summarize new research findings. She posted links to a couple articles she thought gave solid evidence that the immune system recovered completely after a lag of -- I forget how long, but it was months, not years. The other finding about this issue was from someplace else, not sure where but it was respectable: People who'd had both Covid and vaxes were actually a bit better protected from future severe cases of covid than were people who'd had vaxes only. Are you aware of these findings? Have there been later ones that you think negate them?
I dug into this question, too. Unfotunately I don't think I ever posted it on my biweekly COVID Twitter update. Yes, influenza infections have been found to affect brain function. And before the Measles vaccine, there were numerous studies that Measles in kids can delay cognitive development by an approx a year-and-a-half. Most of the Measles research was done pre-vaccine (pre-1968), so it's hard to find online.
https://www.termedia.pl/Review-article-The-influenza-infection-and-cognitive-functions,46,16251,0,1.html
Oh, and Measles really messes with the immune system. Post measles infection it takes 2-3 years for immune memory to be restored. This study compared pre-MV to post-MV mortality rates, about ½ of all childhood deaths from other diseases could be attributed to this effect. I haven't seen any meta studies that show the same effect for COVID. The fact that overall excess childhood deaths haven't increased from pre-COVID levels suggests that it hasn't.
https://t.co/qSYpyR9DP0
Damn, I'll take you over Monica Gandhi any day! And do you know whether I'm right that current thinking is that actual Covid + vaccination gives if anything slighter better protection against future severe covid illness than vaxes alone? According to OP, "A March 2023 paper in Immunity found “a major reduction in both the magnitude and functionality of peak CD8+ T cell responses in previously infected individuals after vaccination. The authors note that this is similar to what is seen in diseases like HIV. What they found is that people who have had COVID-19 are less able to mount a proper response to vaccination compared to COVID-19 naive controls. ”
Also, I'm pretty sure that research has found that for people who have covid several times later cases are on average milder -- that also doesn't square with the idea that immune system ceases to function well for a long time or even forever after a case of covid
Edit: OK, googled the question and here's the first answer I got: "Compared with SARS-CoV-2 primary infection cases, reinfection cases were more likely to present with mild illness (OR = 7.01, 95%CI, 5.83–8.44), and the risk of severe illness was reduced by 86% (OR = 0.14, 95%CI, 0.11–0.16). " From Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2023 Feb; 20(4): 3335.
Published online 2023 Feb 14. doi: 10.3390/ijerph20043335. Severity and Outcomes of SARS-Covid Reinfection Compared with Primary Infection: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
There have been a bunch of meta-studies of the severity of primary infections vs subsequent COVID infections. Most seem to show the subsequent infections are milder. I've only seen one meta that showed subsequent infections are equally severe as prior infections, and none that I know of indicate that subsequent infections are worse. I admit I haven't bothered to dig into the priors for these metas—so I couldn't swear in a court of law that meta authors aren't selectively skewing their priors. But despite the hysteria being spread by AJ, we'd expect hospitalizations to increase with each wave if our immune systems were being permanently harmed — and we're not seeing that.
The thing is a lot of experts who make these claims are extrapolating from small-scale studies. Yes, some peeps seemed to have suffered a T cell collapse or long-term T cell dysregulation — and the latter is currently the favored hypothesis for PASC (aka Long COVID). But so far we haven't seen the mass disabling event that was predicted by the Long COVIDians in the macro data (yet). For instance, you'd expect excess deaths to be steadily rising. They're not. Too bad Suckstack doesn't allow us to post graphs, but I posted the (almost) latest ED trend here...
https://x.com/beowulf888/status/1771984097658933281?s=20
No mass disabling event is showing up yet in SSA disability claims, either.
https://x.com/beowulf888/status/1693839037721948493?s=20
Likewise the BLS stats don't show an upward inflection of the permanently disabled (they've been growing at an overall steady state since 2009 — and they dropped during the initial phase of the pandemic but then bounced back to normal).
https://x.com/beowulf888/status/1693842873912033465?s=20
Thank you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JheGL6uSF-4&ab_channel=adumb
Graphing the connections between wikipedia articles and looking for patterns.
Interesting! But I want to know why Norwegian Politicians is the 19th largest community on the English-language Wikipedia? Seems like English-speaking Swedes need to step and do their part!
When I hear Americans talk about socialism and communism, they seem to talk about them as though they are the same thing — especially when libertarians or conservatives speak — and that both are necessarily totalitarian.
Here's Bryan Caplan (nothing special about him, it's just the latest example of many):
> Or to take one last example, when I debate socialists, most of them never even mention the old Soviet bloc. They give the impression that their ideas have never been tried. Which makes me wonder: Are they unaware of the history of actually-existing socialism?
I'm neither a communist or a socialist but I am interested and I have always understood them as distinct ideas.
Perhaps socialism is a stepping stone on the way to communism for some but my understanding is that socialism is compatible with democracy — as demonstrated by the many socialist parties in Europe — whereas communism is necessarily totalitarian.
I asked on Substack Notes and a few people replied that I am mistaken: the socialist parties in Europe are not socialist and the core of socialism is totalitarianism. The British Labour Party, for example, was not socialist according to this understanding.
Can anyone help me out? Am I mistaken? Does everyone in America have this same interpretation? What about other countries?
Eastern Bloc countries defined themselves as socialist countries (for example the Soviet Union was officially named the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) who are advancing towards communism under the leadership of communist vanguard parties.
No socialist country was ever a democracy. Introduction of democracy led to rapid abandonment of socialism.
The definitional mess is not some American idiosyncrasy - American socialists will use the same terminology as everyone else - it's just pure intellectual dishonesty by their ideological opponents. However, Caplan is in fact using the terminology correctly here.
First things first - communism has a perfectly precise, established definition, and the definition includes absence of state. As such, it's entirely incompatible with totalitarianism on a very fundamental level.
Whatever different use of the term is predicated on equivocating communism with [whatever self-described communist parties did]. (An aside - self-appointed names need not correspond with reality, Second World states also self-described as republics, and this is neither an argument for them not being totalitarian or, conversely, that democracy is totalitarian actually. But even granting them the right to self-description, it's a weirdly selective way to do it, because:) Those parties never claimed to practice communism. Communism was a distant goal, to be achieved only after worldwide revolution, in the meantime they had to be ruthlessly effective not to lose to the forces of reaction, which necessitated economic efficiency and war-like top-down command of society. They called the resulting system names like "socialism" and "state capitalism" - in time, the first became an official self-description, and the latter was adopted by their detractors.
Now, the definition of "socialism" is much looser. It's a generic term for socially directed economic egalitarianism, as opposed to liberal market-directed individualism, and conservative hierarchical rule, defined somewhere on the intersection of "worker ownership of the means of production" and "subordination of productive forces to the good of all society". This includes communism and all strains of anarchism, but also allows settings such as [centralized state controls the means of production and manages them in the workers' name], and the claim that Second World states could be called socialist is not contested. (Whether they actually were, different story, but largely meaningless to this discussion, since at least everyone can agree they were, in economic terms, more socialist than a generic liberal replacement.)
(Also, more successful than a generic liberal replacement, and we know this because a bit over 30 years ago we had a natural experiment in which some of them turned capitalist and the result was an unmitigated disaster, in macroeconomic ways and otherwise. As in, literally not yet mitigated - Russia, Ukraine and the Caucasus are currently still living through the fallout. This is hardly an obscure argument, which makes me wonder: Is Caplan unaware of recent history? Now, I'd assume they don't come up in discussions often because approximately nobody will use those states as examples of how they want a future socialist society to function {of course Leninists will contest that they had to function this way, and will point out Leninist-model revolutionaries were the only socialists able to hold on to power}, and their undemocratic political system is the main reason why - among others, it facilitated creation of alienated bureaucratic ruling class that eventually liberalized it, i.e. dismantled it for the purpose of appropriating its wealth. But their existence is hardly a gotcha.)
As an American, I'd tend to use "socialist" to describe mechanisms designed to smooth out the inequality curves, taking from the rich to give to the poor, establishing safety nets (of course at a cost to others). This can be applied to many styles of economy. Possibly it could even be a political term, to describe factions strongly concerned with establishing a minimum standard of welfare.
I'd reserve "communism" for systems that, nominally or otherwise, involve collective ownership of capital. This is technically about the internal ownership structure, rather than the goal of the systems erected on top. It's hard to imagine a non-socialist communist society, but if I squint just hard enough I think I can come up with some that I wouldn't reject as laughable settings for a fantasy novel. But it's certainly possible to have socialist non-communist societies.
All these societies have to deal with the question of "who decides", and can further be classified as to how they handle (or fail to handle) ambitious and power-hungry people. I don't think there's any inherent reason why communist societies have to be totalitarian, but I do think that societies that require ideological conformity are necessarily totalitarian.
You might try looking at Israeli kibbutzim for a perspective on non-state-based communism?
I think there's lot of ignorance out there, willful or otherwise. I recently ran across a forum where someone expressed the opinion that "black markets" were an exclusively "capitalist" phenomenon. I refrained from joining just to post "oh you sweet summer child".
But black markets _are_ an exclusively capitalist phenomenon. They are trade in what is not supposed to be traded, as capitalist as it's possible to be.
That they exist in places that frown on capitalism doesn't indicate that they aren't capitalist. It indicates that those places cannot do without capitalism.
This is an extremely slovenly use of the term capitalism. How does a black market in, for example, communist Russia involve a ruling class exploiting the worker through the use of economic force in the form of capital?
Tibetan peasants bartering chickens and yak wool isn't capitalism. Medieval guild economics isn't capitalism. Early-modern mercantilism isn't capitalism, although it's getting there. Black markets are *a form of market economics* and arguably *a manifestation of free-trade ideals*, but not capitalist. It's not the case that there are only two options, full-blown communism where all production is expropriated by the state and "capitalism" which is whenever anyone makes a voluntary trade in any way, shape, or form. Even the ridiculous impossible ideal of stateless communism would involve barter trade on the individual level.
Thanks for say that, so I didn't have to. :-)
> This is an extremely slovenly use of the term capitalism. How does a black market in, for example, communist Russia involve a ruling class exploiting the worker through the use of economic force in the form of capital?
I think you'll find that your definition of "capitalism" is not widely held. But I appreciate that you provided a definition. It's interesting that, to you, "capitalism" is defined by being inherently evil.
> Even the ridiculous impossible ideal of stateless communism would involve barter trade on the individual level.
The classic statement is "to each according to his needs". Under ideal communism, you would barter for nothing; if you wanted something, it would be given to you.
Legal Systems Very Different From Ours has a chapter on the Plains Indians, describing their internal economics as working much like this.
It's Marx's definition of capitalism, mein dicky old chum. If it sounds evil that's because that's how he formulated it. A more neutral version would be "economic activity is structured at its highest level through the investment by capital holders of their capital in productive enterprises in the hopes of profit". If there's no capital fulfilling a critical economic role, there's no capitalism. For example, in feudalism there are only lands and estates, on the economically meaningful level. Granted that in capitalism land *forms a type of capital*, that nevertheless is not how land operates under feudalism, which is what makes it a distinct economic system. Guilds likewise do not involve investments and are not capitalist.
In either case, in a conversation that's all about how people are sloppy and maybe evil for misapplying the term communism it would be a good idea to set a good example and not just call everything you dislike or every instance of a market economy capitalism, which is a gross misapplication. Particularly ironic since "capitalism" is a commie term.
> I think you'll find that your definition of "capitalism" is not widely held.
FWIW, I was making a similar distinction, similar enough that I don't need to respond to your comment because Anonymous basically said everything I would.
> It's interesting that, to you, "capitalism" is defined by being inherently evil.
I think that has more to do with Marx, and how he defined his terms. I think in practice I tend to use "capitalism" to refer to private ownership of the means of production, which isn't something I view as inherently bad. But without some counterbalancing force, it does seem to lead to concentrations of power, which in turn seem to cause problems. Which is where socialism comes in. (Using this definition, and my previous ones, capitalism is entirely compatible with socialism.)
I take the central example of socialism as being the Scandinavian nations (yes Hammond, I know you consider them mixed-market social democracies, I think the definitions are at least fuzzy, and there are a lot of government components in that mix), while I take communism as having as central examples the USSR, PRC, North Korea, and Vietnam.
That's just applying the term socialism incorrectly though. It means, quite specifically, state ownership of the means of production. Yes there is drift, but there's no reason to give into it. Just call the Scandinavian model market welfare states or whatever you want.
The examples you give of public services are services that most people would agree should be publicly owned.
Would it make a difference if the producers of electricity, coal, gas, oil, steel, ships, planes and nuclear power and the providers of mail, phones, hospitals, cars, water, trains, buses and television were owned and run by the government?
Would that be socialist? What should the crossover point be?
I think the boundaries of the term are fuzzy. Yes, the Scandinavian model has a large market segments, but it also has a very large portion of the economy (health care, education, public pension plans,...) going through the government, effectively state ownership of _those_ means of production. If you want to restrict "socialism" to mean nations where, say, >90% of the means of production are state owned, ok, but I think that that is too restrictive.
The appropriate distinction is public goods (which have or are large externalities - national security, law and order, arguably primary education) which have always been agreed on as state functions, and private goods (TVs, video games, tertiary healthcare) which are, or should be, privately owned and operated. In this latter category, the Scandinavian countries do not own or operate the means of production! At most they provide relatively generous funding support to private individuals to access some of those services (Sweden for instance has vouchers for education).
Many Thanks!
>In this latter category, the Scandinavian countries do not own or operate the means of production! At most they provide relatively generous funding support to private individuals to access some of those services (Sweden for instance has vouchers for education).
Ok, that certainly is less direct control than direct ownership would imply. I would expect that there at least needs to be something like accreditation, which carries some indirect control.
Hmm... Your point about public goods suggests that there are at least two axes to be considered - whether a good is publicly or privately funded, and whether the provider of the good is government operated or private. I think there are examples of all four combinations.
>Perhaps socialism is a stepping stone on the way to communism for some but my understanding is that socialism is compatible with democracy — as demonstrated by the many socialist parties in Europe
None of those countries are 'socialist' though. They're mixed-market social democracies.
"Actual" socialism involves mass/worker ownership of the means of production. And you don't get there with elections and parliaments. Communism is basically socialism that has fully "abolished" classes and the state - everyone living in one big 'commune'. This is obviously made confusing by "communist" governments that rule countries that don't have anything close to "communism" but ostensibly their end goal is a communist society.
And I say this as a strong anti-marxist who hates all of this stuff.
The phrase "actually-existing socialism" specifically comes from inter-left debates during and preceeding the Cold War, where various non-Communist leftist groups (social democrats, anarchists etc.) would talk about what their visions for socialism were and how Soviet Union was failing to produce those visions, the Communists countered that while they were faffing around, Soviet Union and other such countries were creating actually existing socialism, warts and all (with those warts being a natural product of what happens when you do things in the real world). Sort of amusing to see this argument being then utilized (and turned on its head) by Caplan et al.
An awful lot of people use labels they don’t understand, and those who do understand disagree about their meanings. This is especially true for many -isms. If someone from a different country or different generation than me, uses either of the words socialism, capitalism, nazism, racism, or (neo-)Marxism, to mention a few examples, I usually have to find out what they mean from context, or just ask.
Ryan Chapman makes good videos on terms like that: https://youtu.be/lrBRV3WK2x4?si=UnruI_3wAWIwWdkK
I’m not a socialist, but socialism is a really large umbrella term that encompasses communism and Stalinism, anarcho-syndicalism and democratic socialism. At least if you ask many people who identify with those labels. But no, not necessarily totalitarian. Popular conceptions of horseshoe theory says that you tend toward authoritarianism if you go far enough in either direction. But there’s a faintly mirrored horseshoe, that tends toward anarchy on the left and social Darwinism on the right.
To me, it’s helpful to view socialism and its variants (and certain other -isms) as ingredients, not menu items. None of these pots (ideologies or political systems) ever stop boiling long enough to nail down what the real thing even means, anyway, so why commit to any as an endpoint? (You could that no one has ever tried “real capitalism” or “real democracy” or real anything, but that misses the point that in society, the journey is the destination. The things we have tried are a stew of ingredients, and some stews are obviously tastier than others. Socialism, IMO, is like chili and cilantro – use in small doses, with the utmost care.)
Thank you. This seems like a sensible approach. I was curious because Americans seem to make no distinction between the two whereas I had never accounted that approach outside of the USA. I wondered if that was a general understanding over there or just one used by folks on the right. It helps to clarify meanings!
I've just spent the last few hours reading up on the history of socialism and, certainly, the Labour Party along with several other parties in Europe thought of themselves as socialist until recently. The Labour Party specifically was committed to the nationalisation of all industry in Britain until the Blair government in the late 90s.
Labour have split several times over their history between socialist wings and social democrats but they were never, as far as I could find, in favour of communism.
Yes. In the US, in particular, I suspect conflating socialism with communism is a vestige of the Cold War, with McCarthyism, several hot wars against communist regimes, etc. And of the two-party system not making room for more moderate socialists. And of post-war labor unions almost being more associated with the mob than socialists. With all of that, there was never much need to paint with nuances of red on the left. (Speaking of which… it is also unnecessarily confusing that Republicans are associated with Red and Democrats with Blue in the US.)
I did wonder if it was a leftover from the Cold War.
>Does everyone in America have this same interpretation?
No. People in India and Germany and Mexico and wherever all have varied interpretations about how these two ideas (socialism and communism) relate within their own countries and America is no different.
If you’re asking if “most” Americans have this same interpretation, the answer is still no. Most Americans could not define either word offhand with confidence (I’m one of them). If you’re asking if most educated conservative Americans have this interpretation, I think that’s an interesting question. I don’t think so but it’s hard to say. It’s politically convenient for a committed American righty to categorize as many socialists as no-good communists as possible, but to tell you the truth, this appeared to be far more common in the 50s-90s than it is now. Maybe a few American conservatives could give us their thoughts.
That was the basis of my question really: whether the conflation was down to political theory or political convenience for the purposes of discrediting socialism.
I see. Then I would say the conflation is down to convenience. American lefties, particularly social-democrats, don’t talk about socialism and communism as the same thing. I think average Americans, right and left, vaguely think of communism as socialism + more extreme shit.
Trump in 2015 described Bernie Sanders as a “socialist-slash-communist” and said something about how Sanders would take everything away from the people. I think Trump said “socialist-slash-communist” here because communism has a more negative connotation than socialism and most Americans of all education levels feel like they understand and agree on what a communist is, but aren’t so sure about what a socialist is. He was taking a shot at Sanders, not trying to fairly portray a difference in theory. But he also didn’t just call him a communist, which is worth noting.
Whether righty politicians and pundits who say stuff like this “believe” it, I don’t know. But I think it’s safe to say they think the gap between socialism and communism is much narrower than the lefties.
A lot of self-described Marxist revolutionaries who want to build a one-party Leninist state, decide to organize political parties with "Socialist" in the name. So it seems fairly natural to conflate them.
If you want "socialists who have no interest in communism" the usual term in English would be "social democrats" although even here the line is still blurry especially in other languages.
I don't think communism is necessarily totalitarian. There are lots of people who profess to support communism who want democracy or even anarchy -- the utopian dream of communism is a stateless society.
(Now the problem is, if the nice, democratic communism doesn't work, maybe people start trying to blame someone, and then they decide to build a powerful police organization to start rooting out the saboteurs causing all the problems -- temporarily of course...)
The bit where communism is associated with totalitarianism isn't because Marx said that it should be, isn't because there's anything in the theory or doctrine that requires it. As you note, many communists don't want totalitarian rule.
But communism is still associated with totalitarianism, because any implementation of non-totalitarian communism in a world populated by real human beings, will see the productivity in the not-totally-controlled segments of the economy go to zero (or to the black market). Since neither "everybody starves" nor "really, we're a black-marketist society" are acceptable to the sort of people who want communism, they're left with either going totalitarian or going home. And by the time they're running a communist state, they've probably burned too many bridges to quietly go home.
> If you want "socialists who have no interest in communism" the usual term in English would be "social democrats"
My research suggests that — in most English speaking countries — "democratic socialism" would be the appropriate term for socialists not in favour of communism whereas "social democracy" is merely a commitment to improving the lot of the least fortunate.
The short-hand conflation might be inexact (notwithstanding that even Marx used terms interchangeably sometimes, iirc) but the distinction is redundant if it's the case that Communism is arrived at by way of Socialism, and Socialism is distinct from "the government doing stuff".
> as demonstrated by the many socialist parties in Europe
There are all sorts of parties, including far-right, so I'm not sure what that proves. Maybe you were referring to policy here (e.g. healthcare, education) but in that capacity it's not meaningfully distinguishable from Liberal democracy. It's a mixed-market economy across the developed world, just to varying degrees.
> whereas communism is necessarily totalitarian.
I think that is a fair assessment, though where communists would quibble is whether it is also authoritarian. That certainly seems to be in line with their espoused sentiments, despite protests to the contrary, whichever flavor is in question (e.g. "we just need to *force* all the businesses to be worker-owned, you see").
I would agree that the USA has a mixed-market economy but the Labour Party in the UK certainly had explicitly socialist policies and nationalised a lot of industries. They never — except for a tiny fringe of extremists — had the intention of controlling the whole economy as they did in Soviet Russia. They didn't see themselves as a step on the way to communism. They opposed communism.
Do you think the Labour Party were mistaken when they called themselves socialist?
Yes if they were never intent on working towards a Socialist State. Nationalization of certain things does not a Socialist State make, though it's what you would expect Socialists at the helm to start with.
To expand a bit on a good comment by @TGGP below, socialism isn't a derivative of Marxism. Socialism, or at least some kind of proto-socialism goes back to the Levelers in the English revolution. It really peaked in France and elsewhere in the 19th century where there was this milieu of different thinkers from socialists to anarchists to Marxists and beyond. Read about the 1871 Paris Commune and stuff like that to get a feel for how all these different ideologies were interacting with each other.
So all socialisms, except maybe that one Italian/German one, share a common heritage and lots of common theory. Whether their current differences are significant...kinda depends on your perspective. From within the left, these differences can be really, really important. From outside the left, it's kinda whatevs.
For a similar perspective, think about Mormons and Catholics in what remains of the Religious Right. From an insider/Christian perspective, they have huge, almost irreconcilable differences. From an outside perspective, they kinda blend together because, compared to the average atheist, they share a lot in common.
It would help if you were to outline what your interpretations of socialism and communism actually are, and also what you think are the differences between them. Just saying that one is compatible with democracy and the other not does not help me understand what you think they are and how they are different.
I think the definition of socialism has evolved over the past century. Where it was originally about owning all the means of production, in modern societies, governments are more selective about which industries to nationalise.
For example, the UK nationalised gas, electricity, the railways, telecom, the health service, the post office, the airline, steel and coal production, education and the car manufacturers while other companies were free to innovate. The UK also had free and fair elections during this period but the Labour Party was most definitely socialist.
In communist countries, the government maintained stricter control over most of the economy (5 year plans and the like). Despite having "Democratic" in their name, neither East Germany nor North Korea were/are democratic. Neither was the Soviet Union. They were communist.
So according to you, only total socialism is communism? What percentage ownership has to be state to qualify communist? 50%80%?
I make the distinction by type of good - ownership of private good production is socialism
No. The distinction I have made is that communism is necessarily totalitarian whereas socialism is compatible with democracy.
The problem has more dimensions than that, given how diverse those who dislike socialism are. Caplan, for instance, is right to lump socialism and communism together because his primary interests are economic. If you think markets are the way to solve problems, you see socialism as a system that will fail to deliver and will require increasing state control, eventually leading to true totalitarian communism (e.g. let's say you want to nationalize some industry, but the industries up- and downstream of it start to act up, and you then have to nationalize them too). Someone like Jordan Peterson, on the other hand, is concerned about 'cultural marxism', which as far as I can tell is a movement that contains zero people who are philosophically marxist -- but which is fairly univocal from the perspective of someone like Peterson. So if in 1920 various people hated socialism/communism for being anti-market, anti-(your ethnicity), anti-religion, anti-freedom, they all hated the same thing. These days it's not clear that people who disapprove of those things are all hating the same thing or the same people.
Traditionally the difference between communism and social democracy was that the former wanted socialism through revolution, the latter through reform, but nowadays European Social Democrat parties have generally abandoned the goal of socialism, i.e. a society in which all means of production are communally owned, and thus one might argue that these parties are no longer socialist. The parties that used to call themselves communist rebranded after the fall of the Soviet Union but haven't abandoned socialism.
Most European socialists didn’t believe that - which is why there were also communist parties. Some believed that the “commanding heights” of the economy should be owned by the state - which is the same thing at all. Had the Labour Party implemented in full clause 8 then most of the economy would still have been capitalist.
As I understand it, the socialist/communist schism started with the establishment of the Bolshevic-lead Third International in the very early interwar years. After that "Communist" referred to those who aligned with the Third International, and "Socialist" could be used broadly to refer to the revolutionary left in general or narrowly to those who did not align with the Third International parties except perhaps as a temporary alliance of convenience. A central part of Bolshevik ideology was affirmation of Marx's idea of a violent revolution followed by a "dictatorship of the proletariat" as essential stages of the transition to Socialism, with the added idea of a "revolutionary vanguard" party that would lead the revolution and control an authoritarian state following it until the proletariat as a whole was competent to exercise democratic control over the state. "Socialists", on the other hand, often aspired to take power through the ballot box and to continue free elections and most other liberal-democratic institutions (apart from private ownership of the means of production) throughout the transition to socialism. Both views had been represented in the pre-WW1 Second International movement, but the Communists split from the rest of the Socialists after the war, so the narrow-sense Socialist parties after the split would sometime be referred to as Second International parties.
I think you're talking about a later split (post-WW2, I think) between Second-International-style Socialists and Social Democrats, with the former favoring public ownership of most of the means of production while the latter favored something closer to the Scandinavian model of redistributive taxation and robust public services atop a mostly-market-based economy.
That’s a Marxist view of their own history. The Labour Party in Britain - possibly amongst the most consequential - was not really influenced by Marx at all, despite him living there. It was different on the continent where Marxism had more relevance, but socialism, social democracy and even communism (a word that existed before Marx) did not depend on Marx at all. And anarchism was anti Marxist but not anti communist. They believed in communes of workers - which is where the word comes from.
Had Marx been hit by a bus after arriving in London - the Clapham omnibus preferably as that would do a man in for sure - the history of the Labour Party and labour reform in Britain would hand been exactly the same.
I didn't intend to imply that Socialists in general were Marxist. I'm more familiar with socialist movements in Germany, Russia, France, and the US, but my general understanding (which I think is compatible with my understanding of the Second/Third International split) is that many or most of the Socialist and Labour parties that were affiliated with the Second International were not explicitly Marxist: Marx had a lot of influence on the broader movement, but it was more common for Socialist parties to be influenced by Marx among many others (like the SPD in Imperial Germany) than to be purely Marxist like the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, and purely non-Marxist Socialist or Labor parties (like the Trudoviks in Russia) were far from unheard of. The Second/Third International split mostly saw the orthodox Marxist parties aligning with the Bolsheviks and the mixed or non-Marxist parties aligning against them.
This is true in their capacity as 20th century political movements, and monikers for those who ascribe to one or the other. There's a tired game of motte-and-bailey where commies of various stripes pretend these definitions (including as philosophy) aren't a thing so they can wheel out "communism has never been tried" like a blunt instrument, narrowing the definition strictly to "stateless, classless, moneyless society"... as though that is something you just "try", not a consequence of choose-your-socialist-poison.
The Labour Party abandoned socialism under Blair but it claimed to be socialist for 80 years before that.
There's a good substack article out this past weekend about this: https://www.theconundrumcluster.com/p/freepost-in-march-1914-socialist?r=192kfc&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true
Here's a bit:
lso notable is just how shameless everyone involved in this process was. It was obvious that this was not just a group of hungry men peacefully protesting, as IWW supporters loudly and indignantly claimed afterwards. In fact, it was a well-funded intimidation campaign, in which many of the participants were armed. That’s what Bolshevism is: the lowest elements of society intimidate peaceful law-abiding people into acquiescing to a series of increasingly unreasonable demands.
While liberal lawyers and journalists were talking about American democracy when they referenced the case, in reality what they were defending was mob violence. The goal was humiliation and dominance, to get the victim to discredit himself by accepting unacceptable behavior. They all supported and covered for the mob. When you read about the IWW being persecuted by local officials or vigilantes, assume that actions similar to Tannenbaum’s preceded this.
It’s important to note that, as is the case today, there is functionally no difference between leftists groups. Suffragists, communists, socialists, anarchists, labor organizers, civil rights activists, and mainstream liberals: they are all working towards the same ultimate goal. I sometimes use the terms interchangeably because they are interchangeable. They would support each other in any situation no matter how obnoxious the behavior at hand was. Tannenbaum did something indefensible and immediately had a massive media and legal machine backing him up.
>Suffragists, communists, socialists, anarchists, labor organizers, civil rights activists, and mainstream liberals: they are all working towards the same ultimate goal.
Much of the history of the Cold War was about mainstream liberals and democratic socialists choosing to side with their bourgeois governments specifically to combat the Soviet Union. If they hadn't done so, the Cold War might have turned quite differently.
I think the author's idea, btw I didn't write it but found it a provocative article, is that while these group were quite different they all shared a goal of a highly redistributionist social order, and they did in fact at many times all support each other - witness the support received by Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, just one example. But I take you point that mainstream liberals, JFK and Scoop Jackson, as well as unions like the UAW led by Walter Reuther, and the Teamsters were very pro American democracy and free markets.
My understanding is that Rosenbergs did actually not receive that much support for outright clemency outside of the Communist or Communist-aligned circles, and at least some of the campaigners who opposed their execution did so more because they were opposed to capital punishment in general than because they thought that the Rosenbergs were innocent. Here is, for instance, the reaction from Eleanor Roosevelt, one of the most influential figures on the left wing of the American liberalism of this era: https://erpapers.columbian.gwu.edu/julius-and-ethel-rosenberg
I think you’ve been duped by nonsense. If you are inclined to think that suffragettes and communists are the same - to pick the first two on that list - then you maybe should rethink your historical education. Ask yourself if you would remove votes for women now, and if not are you a communist?
The rest of the list is equally spurious. I myself read that article as far as that line, and gave up.
"ask yourself if you would remove votes for women now, and if not are you a communist?"
Yes and yes. A clearly failed experiment, and socialism relies on women having the vote, as they are the ones who vote for the left. In the US, the more right-wing presidential candidate would have won *every election since women got the vote*, if only men had voted. Over a century this represents an incalculable drift leftward.
"In the US, the more right-wing presidential candidate would have won *every election since women got the vote*" -- what is your basis for this statement for the elections prior to 1980? There being no statistically-valid nationwide exit polls before about then.
Also: according to the exit polling in 1992, Bill Clinton won the popular vote among men 41-38-21 which is only slightly different from his total margin of 43-38-19. He'd have won the Electoral College exactly the same that way as he actually did (the 2 percent shift to Perot would not have tipped any states to Bush or to Perot).
Also: According to the exit polling in 1996, Clinton and Dole were in a statistical tie among male voters. That election would have therefore been much closer in the Electoral College than it actually was, but the states shifted from Clinton (actual) to Dole (if women couldn't vote) would not have been enough to get Dole to 270 and the White House.
Not true of England though where voting Conservative is more female than male as I recall. Traditionally anyway. In why case suffragettism didn’t lead to communism.
"voting Conservative is more female than male as I recall"
Huge if large; my understanding was that women in England were more conservative than men *when they got the vote* because the alternative was the Liberal Party, which was quite obviously the liberty side of the classic liberty/security divide and refused to do things like promise to protect the flower of white womanhood from Johnny Foreigner, and that this is the direct cause of the Liberal Party being a humiliated rump in modern British politics. The Labour Party rose by taking advantage of women's craving for redistributionism and the patriarchal state, thus consuming the male-style freedom-loving Liberals and teplacing them as the Party of the Left. IANAE though, so...
Women were more likely to vote Tory than men up until *2015* in UK. https://theconversation.com/women-used-to-be-more-likely-to-vote-conservative-than-men-but-that-all-changed-in-2017-we-wanted-to-find-out-why-214019
Similar trends existed all over the world, though usually in most other countries the switch from women voting more conservative than men to other way around happened in the 70s or in the 80s.
The socialist parties were more popular with men and the women as long as their main focus was on labor union struggle spearheaded by male-dominated unions (miners, transport, factories etc.) with all of its masculine affects (men going against fatcat bosses and their effeminate agents to earn money for their family etc.), and the situation only changed once they scaled down the socialism/labor stuff and focused more on redistribution. If women's suffrage hadn't happened, it's quite likely that quite a few more countries in Europe would have gone communist during the Cold War.
I don’t think that there was much debate at all about immigration in the U.K. until the post war period, and even Labour was sceptical for a long time. Probably until the 90s.
The conservatives enfranchised women in fact, and had well organised women’s organisations, or at least organisations that trended highly conservative like the women’s institute.
In any case class and region the major determinent of how people voted in the U.K. which is still not communist.
I am a leftist and a liberal and I belong to leftist groups but I am neither a socialist nor a communist. Neither am I working towards the same goal as socialists or communists.
I am not sure where you get your information from but I believe you are mistaken.
I describe myself as a communist and as 'far-right' and as a free-market absolutist depending on the topic. If we accept any of the x-risk set [AI, meteorite, climate change, resource limits, population collapse] as valid, we're up against a coordination problem and might have to be something like communist-totalitarian (see Zizeks' points on this -- he personally is concerned with climate change, but the argument is the same for the others. Thinking that there is a meaningful sense in which a people can be said to have a right to a state (or to exist at all) can make me sound either like a "zionist" or "pro-palestinian" or "far-right" or "anti-semitic" depending on who's critizing me. Thinking that markets (including prediction markets lol) are obviously the best way to solve problems apparently makes me a liberal and libertarian and heartless pro-market absolutist.
> The ensuing controversy led to the victory of NY Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt over President Herbert Hoover, who was known to take a hard line against radicals, in the 1932 Presidential Election.
Hoover obviously lost to FDR because of the Great Depression, not the Bonus Army.
If socialism means the government owning the means of production (e.g. UK nationalizing a lot of industries the late 1940s and 1950s) then communism seems much like an extreme form of socialism.
Today, however, "socialist" countries tend to have lots of private ownership of the means of production and just have much higher taxes and more government spending on welfare.
This is one of those cases where I expect that most folks haven't made it clear what they mean by "socialism" (and possibly "communism" ... does communism require a secret police, gulags, etc?).
In some respects all socialism is communism which is what we had in the Soviet Union is similar to everyone getting their 15 minutes to be a Nazi from the other side.
Tax rates are mostly orthogonal to how an economy is organized.
But the words have been hijacked in mainstream discussion so it is difficult to have the conversation.
Communism is a relatively well-defined term - far from perfect, but at least ambijective, and more than unambiguous enough to be useful.
Socialism is used by different people to mean wildly, wildly different things. I gave up using the word at the point when Tony Blair declared that he was a socialist, and Ken Livingstone declared that he wasn't.
I don't think there are many socialist parties left in power in Europe — they are more likely to think of themselves as social democrats these days. But they certainly considered themselves to be socialist at least up until the 70s, even while condemning the communist countries for their totalitarianism and their excessive control of the economy.
I am currently working on organizing a forecasting tournament in a large Western-European government organisation. Due to overzealous compliancy officers, I will have to use tools that can be run locally on a network. As far as I know, this means the open source project by the Confido Institute is my only option. Are there other options ways to run a forecasting tournament locally on a network? Does anyone have experience running such a tournament and might be able to share resources (emails, announcements etc.)?
Request for help from a speaker of Greek:
Years ago I had a friend who constructed Greek words for various irrational fears using the suffix -φοβία, which could then be used in English. A familiar example is acrophobia, from the prefix ακρο, meaning "peak", and φοβία, meaning "fear". Using this construction, he coined the English words "ipsophobia", or fear of everything, "scataphobia", fear of shit, and several others I have forgotten.
I need a similar word for "fear of the Post Office". A friend has displayed this for years, and I thought she must be the only one, but recently another person admitted the same fear.
I have the opposite condition, an irrational love of the post office, so I guess I will need that word also.
What's going on with "ipsophobia"? As far as I can tell, that would be fear of oak, or maybe of woodworm, though in either case I'm not sure the root is correct. Wouldn't fear of everything be "pantophobia"?
Epistophobia -> except it already exists.
"Tachydromeo-" with -phobia/-philia. (Note, NOT "tachydromo-" because that would be fear of the mail/mailman, and not the office thereof.)
Also, "scatOphobia" in case it wasn't a typo.
People who like shit are "coprophiles", so I imagine using the same Latin/Greek mashup for the opposite would give "coprophobia".
What Latin/Greek mashup? That's Greek and Greek.
I should also note that fear is not the opposite of love; if you want the opposite of liking something, you'd want to use the prefix for dislike, mis-.
That's the more common word, and the one I knew, but I looked it up, and "scatophobia" is an extant synonym.
Thank you both for your responses, I greatly appreciate it.
Scott, I'm bumping: the Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024 listing for Newton, Mass. is still wrong.
Well, I'm officially Too Old because what the hell is a "community of practice" as in Newspeak's "emerging communities of practice"?
That's extremely vague to the point of being slightly sinister. "What are you?" "A community" "And what do you do?" "We practice" "Practice what?" "Being a community".
What it *sounds* like is "We train you to be a SPAD"
https://www.civilservant.org.uk/spads-homepage.html
Well you can’t say “field of study/practice” anymore because that has potentially racist and noninclusive connotations:
https://www.npr.org/2023/01/14/1148470571/usc-office-removes-field-from-curriculum-racist
In seriousness, it’s basically trendy corporate/academic speak for an informal, non hierarchal professional organization of people who do similar work. I lead one at my office that was basically a monthly opportunity to share war stories with people who had similar job titles in different divisions of the company.
I remember the racist fields, wasn't it to do with "Cotton was grown in FIELDS and those FIELDS were worked by SLAVES so FIELDS is RACIST"?
I'm glad you get the chance to have the 'water cooler chat' thing with a fancy title, I hope the company at least provides tea/coffee and bikkies! 😀
Have to hand it to Newspeak House, they've managed to create "pay us fees to do a Certificate in Schmoozing" and dress it up in the latest corpo-babble, by enticing people with the lure of "seek strategic positions in key institutions".
There's the usual nod to progressive issues but I think that's less of concern to all involved:
"a regular session to work on your tech side projects to help the progressive left campaign more effectively"
Well, they certainly could use that kind of coaching after the Carrick Flynn thing (is it unkind of me to Mention The War?) 😁
I'm an awful person but I'm laughing at this one - "hey, Huxley did LSD, come find out the rationalisation for why you like to get off your face so you can tell your parents you're not a druggie, honestly":
"Come if you are interesting in understanding consciousness, meditation, spirituality, psychedelics, neuroscience, neurotechnology, spirituality, the nature of pleasure and pain."
If I want to intertwine spirituality and pain, I'll stick to a decade of the Rosary.
Flip me, I hadn't even read down this far and yep, I was right about the LSD!
"Psychedelics. What do exotic states of consciousness can tell us about it? From models of how they work (e. g. QRI’s neural annealing) to writing rigorous trip reports to personal experiences."
Well, if they can gouge London prices for fees out of earnest middle-class strivers, good luck to 'em. Ah well, at least they're hosting a meet-up for the ACX bods, that's the most sensible thing on the menu there.
I suppose. What I've tended to interpret as meaning is that practice is the core of the community: you can't call yourself one of them unless you're doing the thing. I agree that it's a weird term to find unmoored from specifics, since the specifics are often the point. And that site is way too vague about what they actually do. Frankly, the whole thing sets off my quasi-scam alerts, but I'm just going to file this away under "being disappointed and sad that the London rationalists spent so much time around scammy people that they now sound scammy themselves".
This is a weird thing to get stuck on
If I say that the GOP is a political party, that doesn't tell you anything at all about their political leanings, but it's still true and relevant
A community of practice is a real thing, it's a kind of community. I'm sure Newspeak House is a community of practice, and they should say so. Less Wrong is also a community of practice, because people go there to practice being less wrong together
If you say that the GOP is a political party, you're telling me what it does (politics) and in what form (that of a party, as distinct from a belief system such as "conservatism" or a politically motivated street gang such as "the Proud Boys"). If you tell me that something is a community of practice, you tell me nothing about what it does, and very little about in what form ("community" can mean almost anything).
Yeah, but practicing what? Less Wrong is practicing rationalism. The GOP is practicing politics. "Communities of practice" means what? It could just as easily refer to "practicing how to forge better dollar bills" as to anything else.
It's corporate boilerplate, which isn't very encouraging as somewhere getting a shout-out on this site.
I can't say I was ever aware of the term, but evidently it's been around a while and is pretty mainstream. Here's a year 2000 article from Harvard Business Review...
https://hbr.org/2000/01/communities-of-practice-the-organizational-frontier
Oh, sweet Lord. "radically galvanize knowledge sharing, learning, and change".
So it is corporate boilerplate, a fancy new term for "professional associations".
"In brief, they’re groups of people informally bound together by shared expertise and passion for a joint enterprise—engineers engaged in deep-water drilling, for example, consultants who specialize in strategic marketing, or frontline managers in charge of check processing at a large commercial bank. Some communities of practice meet regularly—for lunch on Thursdays, say. Others are connected primarily by e-mail networks. A community of practice may or may not have an explicit agenda on a given week, and even if it does, it may not follow the agenda closely. Inevitably, however, people in communities of practice share their experiences and knowledge in free-flowing, creative ways that foster new approaches to problems."
Yeah. Like guilds. Or the Freemasons, or Rotary, or the Lions Club. Why does business feel the need to re-invent the wheel every so often?
"Me and the lads are not having after-work Friday boozing sessions where we talk shop and shoot the breeze, we're engaging in a community of practice that will radically galvanize in free-flowing, creative fostering! Umm, can I claim it on expenses now?"
And best of all driven it's driven by rounds of ale at the pub!
It's only a year long course, which isn't too bad, but I have the feeling that a lot of this "community of practice" is going to conferences and catered seminars and meeting people and networking, then going back to the workplace with the shiny brochure and assuring your boss that you totally learned exciting new ways of galvanizing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwCyq06aatA
I thought it was an April Fools prank, but it’s real (I think).
I've heard of it several times before April Fools day. It definitely wasn't just made up.
"Newspeak House"
"Political Technology"
I am probably more conservative (in both the express political sense and the temperamental sense) than the target audience for this group, but I definitely share your impression of perceiving this language as sinister. Would fit well into Lewis's Space Trilogy, as well as Orwell.
I thought MSNBC was Newspeak House.
So what's going on with the US's hypersonic weapons program, relative to Russia and China? In the popular media the narrative is that the US is in 2nd or 3rd place in the race to develop hypersonic missiles, and we've certainly had a pretty slow & inconsistent track record in building them so far. On the other hand, I've heard a variety of different responses (which kinda conflict with each other):
1. What Russia is building/using are not actually 'true' hypersonic missiles that we're building, so the 2 programs can't be compared
2. Hypersonics are actually of relatively less utility for the US given our existing missile/other capabilities, so advancements here are less of a big deal
3. Hypersonic missiles are overrated. Alternately, that existing materials technology can't make missiles sturdy enough for hypersonic speeds, so any true 'advancements' in the field aren't practical at this time
Any general thoughts on the field? I'm a little skeptical of what I read in the popular media about highly technical topics
1. "Hypersonic" is a speed regime, not a vehicle class; typical discussions get muddled because they treat it as a class.
2. Tactical hypersonic cruise missiles have *more* potential utility for the US than strategic hypersonic glide vehicles do for Russia or China. N.B., those are the pairings of system types & countries actually developing them.
3. Strategic hypersonic glide vehicles are overrated; they aren't that much of an improvement over pure ballistics (your course can't change very much when you're going that fast). Tactical hypersonic cruise missiles are only a meaningful improvement over the alternatives in a very narrow set of mission profiles (e.g., extremely high value targets of opportunity with very limited time windows) even before considering how much more they cost per shot.
Haven't seen it mentioned yet, so I would like to direct your attention to (IMO) an excellent breakdown of this exact subject from one of my favorite Youtube creators (link below). The long and short of it seems to be that while hypersonic weapons hypothetically have some distinct advantages over other rocket systems, they're also likely of limited tactical use due the immense expense (both in money and expertise) required to build them. Assuming of course that they actually work as intended and that counter-measures aren't able to catch up with them.
There's also some very good arguments to be made that the stated reason that Russia has given for development of hypersonics (i.e. to evade America's missile defense systems) is a load of crap given the fact that existing missile defense systems would be inadequate to stop an all out nuclear barrage. Which, given how damn expensive they are to produce, causes the word "boondoggle" to start rolling around in my head.
So likely not the doomsday superweapons some have been making them out to be.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0n3fjoacL20&t=2381s
It should be noted that Russia has a few programs that create a testbed and then go barely any further due to lack of funding. There are several jets and armoured vehicles that had a production run in the low single digits that still got massively hyped by Russia. Its hard to tell what is a boondoggle for Russia and what is simply an underfunded project done for the sake of appearing to still compete technologically.
Always remember, you can't spell "hypersonic" without "hype".
For at least twenty years, the hype has been that "hypersonic" missiles will be impossible to intercept, for reasons that are rarely spelled out. That hasn't been much of an issue for the United States, because none of the people we shoot missiles at can reliably shoot down ordinary old-fashioned ballistic missiles, but people who imagine they might someday be shooting missiles at the US or its major allies, have invested a fair bit in making "hypersonic" missiles.
Like, say, the Russian Kh-47 "Kinzhal" and 3M22 "Zircon", which unambiguously fly at hypersonic speeds. And as of last year, we know what happens if you launch them at targets protected by modern US/NATO air and missile defenses - they seem to get shot down pretty reliably (obvious caveat re fog of war).
So the claim is that Kinzhal and Zircon aren't *really* "hypersonic" no matter how fast they fly, and a real hypersonic missile with a real air-turboscramwarp drive will just blitz past any possible air defense system (even though it's slower than a 1960s style ballistic missile). Which is exactly the same claim that was made about Kinzhal and Zircon up until last year, so get back to us when you've got something real in the "actually exists on Planet Earth" sense and we can test it.
The United States will continue to hedge its bets both by developing its own hypersonic missiles, and by improving its missile defenses in their ability to stop such weapons. We brag a lot about the former, but keep the latter quite secret, so go figure.
All 3 are somewhat true.
1. Russia largely has tactical ballistic missiles with some limited maneuvering capability on reentry. This sort of thing has been around since the 1970s but no one called them “hypersonic missiles” until hypersonic became a buzzword.
Something more game changing would be scramjets (air breathing cruise missiles that fly in the atmosphere at hypersonic
speeds) or “glider” type hypersonics that are ballistic missiles with lifting body, highly maneuverable reentry vehicles that spend a substantial portion of their flight time in the atmosphere.
For various reasons, these are much harder to intercept than conventional ballistic missiles or cruise missiles.
2. Yes, to a point. The US has much better stealth capability and generally has a doctrine geared more toward tactical air power rather than artillery (which is effectively what the Russian missiles are - Very long range precision artillery). Also, China has the unique challenge of finding a weapon to counter US aircraft carriers relatively near the Chinese mainland - the US lacks that particular use case that drives a lot of hypersonic worry.
3. It’s less that they are impossible, more that the idea that they are some sort of major paradigm shifting wonder weapon that will render major parts of the US arsenal “obsolete” is vastly oversold. Look at Ukraine - the new technology impacting the war the most over there is cheap drones for artillery spotting and grenade dropping. Not Russia’s fancy air launched ballistic missiles.
It's mostly 1 and 2, with a little bit of 3.
The initial Russian "hypersonic" missile was the Kinzhal, which was just an older short ranged ballistic missile that was modified to be air-launched. Ballistic missiles reenter the atmosphere at hypersonic speeds, so *technically* they're hypersonic, but not in a way that changes the cutting edge of warhead delivery. What the US is working on are missiles that are hypersonic for most of their flight with the capability to maneuver, which is a much harder problem.
Why do Russia and China want them while the US was less interested in them? Well, it mostly comes down to other technologies. The US has a long history of missile defense, starting with fending off the kamikazes in WWII. In the modern era, we have fantastic missile defense systems that can defeat both cruise and ballistic missiles like Patriot, THAAD, and AEGIS. This makes it a lot harder for the missiles in Russia and China's arsenals to actually hit our targets. One solution: more speed. If the missile spends less time in sensor range then you don't have as much time to react and not as much data to use to defeat it. This improves the probability that the warhead reaches it's target. Why isn't this as important for the US? Well, the US went with a different strategy: stealth. Instead of racing the sensors and interceptors, you hide from them. This requires a different, less traditional set of engineering technologies, but it's one that the US has been working on since the 60s.
But why are hypersonics overrated? Well, like most of munition delivery, it comes back to the range equation. It takes a massive amount of energy to push a vehicle through the atmosphere at hypersonic speeds. That requires a massive amount of fuel and therefore an airframe to hold it, making them not very economical. By contrast, a stealth bomber or missile is the same size as a non-stealth version, and has the same range and payload. This makes them a lot more efficient once you have the technical and engineering skills to make them.
With all that, then, why is the US still investing in them? The answer is that speed is useful for more than just evading missile defense systems. They can be useful to hit a high-value target that can only be pinned down for brief periods of time, or any other time quick reactions are needed.
Hopefully this helped you understand hypersonics a bit better!
Let me try (Note: Not a weapons expert).
1) Just going fast (Mach 5+) doesn't make a weapon hypersonic. ICBMs already do this and that is not what people mean by the term. To be a hypersonic missile the bugger must also be fairly maneuverable at speed. This is fuzzy, but there isn't much (any?) evidence that the Russian missiles maneuver enough to count.
2) Hypersonic weapons count on speed and maneuverability. This may (or may not) matter as much as other things (e.g. flying low and terrain following). Back i the 1960 the US was pursuing a "fly high and fast" strategy for bombers. This culminated in the B-70 which could fly at Mach 3+. The US built a total of two of these. The US pivoted to flying slower but a lot lower and eventually produced the B-1. This wasn't because the B-70 couldn't be built. The military just decided it made little sense.
So ... the US has known about hypersonic missiles for a long time and has also had some sort of development program underway. It is quite possible that the US military is behind and "they don't do much" is the party line until the US catches up. It is also possible that they actually don't make a lot of sense (at least of the US). I can't tell you which one is correct. I do NOT believe the hypersonic missiles cannot be shot down because of their speed.
3) This is a variant of #2
Note also that what works for US doctrine with other existing US weapons may be a poor fit for Russia and/or China. The F-35 probably means that the US military can get missiles closer to targets before launching than either Russia or China. That may well make the relative benefit to the two different. As an example of this, consider whether lots more artillery makes sense for the US Army (assuming that the US Army will be fighting a land war rather than providing some weapons to other countries). Probably not, given US doctrine about air superiority and the existence of F-35s, etc. Artillery makes a lot more sense for Russia. Hypersonic weapons could be another example of this.
This is a situation where I really notice how unseriously people take the tic-tac
We know that either Russia or China is so far ahead of the US on some sort of flying vehicle that it literally looks like magic. It feels almost pointless to talk about a super-sonic missile gap in that context. The technological superiority of our missile delivery systems is probably squarely in the past, right? It's gotta be
If the tic-tac is Russian or Chinese, how come they, our inveterate enemies, aren't using it and the underlying technology to comprehensively defeat us militarily when they clearly desperately want to do so? The idea that it's enemy technology fails the first sniff test, namely, that the Russians and Chinese behave exactly like militarily and industrially inferior opponents who are extremely assmangled about being global #2 and #...like, 8?, which they emphatically would not do if they had a technological advantage so vast that we can't even interpret it.
Therefore, the tic-tac is either ayliums, our own black tech, somehow faked by US intelligence agencies, or some unintelligible weather phenomenon/reflection/sensor error/perceptual issue which will be explained by relatively mundane means.
There are a lot of military technologies that could be invented by Russia or China that would resemble magic and still not change the calculus of MAD either through nuclear, conventional or even economic means. I'm not sayng the Tic-Tac is Chinese (or even real) since its wild conjecture at best but the fact they haven't used it to kill us all isn't exactly evidence against.
There would be no need for them to kill all of us, they could just strategically kill the important ones who keep us from being paralyzed and conventionally invaded. Plus, according to Logan's hypothesis, US military decision makers have *no idea* what these things are; if you have an unmanned aerial vehicle (if a real craft, it has to be unmanned, as one of the remarkable things about it is that it can juke with higher acceleration than a human body can withstand) which can move at these speeds and which the US cannot intercept, cannot identify, and cannot in any way connect to you, you can just take one of them, zip into Washington, selectively blast the Oval Office, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and whoever else your intel says is necessary, and leave with full plausible deniability. Who's the retaliatory nuclear strike going to target? You can't just glass Russia *and* China on the suspicion. This type of weapon, if it really exists, is in fact the best way to *round* the MAD conundrum yet conceived of.
Even if we assume the tic-tac exists, why do you think it's not ours?
If the tic-tac is ours, then a lot of US Congressmen are doing a very convincing performance. They've passed bills ordering the DoD to investigate it, they've given interviews about how big a security threat it is. Obama has done this, Rubio has done this, Schumer has done this. Over the course of many years.
Do you think that's realistic that Congress would put on a show like this just to misdirect people? Do you think it's realistic that so many Congresspeople could lie so convincingly across multiple instances for so long? That's not a rherorical question. I've more-or-less ruled it out, personally, but it's possible I'm naive and that's a realistic explanation
I think it's likely that if the tic-tac is real, that congress would have no idea about it. But it's gotten enough press recently that people want their congresspeople to look into it (or congresspeople realized they can parlay the hype into getting attention).
And this is more-or-less fine. Bleeding edge military tech should prob be on a "need to know" basis, and congress critters def don't need to know.
Yeah, the situation you're describing is 100% illegal. Not in general, I know Congress doesn't necessarily know about everything the DoD is doing, but in this instance they passed a law in 2022 demanding that any relevant information be found and turned over to Congress.
It's possible that this was us and Congress just didn't know. But in that case, either they were told in the classified briefing in 2022, and everything since then has been misdirection; or else they weren't told in 2022, and it's a criminal cover-up, a rogue group inside the US government building military vehicles and harrassing US aircraft carriers then actively concealing their efforts from the Secretary of Defense. Those are the only possibilities, unless you accept that it's not ours.
Here's the text of the law: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/50/3373
And here's an excerpt where they specifically direct the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office to investigate the possibility that you're proposing:
> (ii)include a compilation and itemization of the key historical record of the involvement of the intelligence community with unidentified anomalous phenomena, including—
> (I)any program or activity that was protected by restricted access that has not been explicitly and clearly reported to Congress;
> (II)successful or unsuccessful efforts to identify and track unidentified anomalous phenomena; and
> (III)any efforts to obfuscate, manipulate public opinion, hide, or otherwise provide incorrect unclassified or classified information about unidentified anomalous phenomena or related activities.
I mean, are you trying to imply it's aliens?
We know for sure that Congress claims to have no idea who built the most advanced hypersonic aerospace technology known to man. Either they're lying, or Russia/China built it, or some alternative explanation which I don't consider a serious possibility (it's mass hypnosis, it's aliens, it's a non-government actor)
I think he's referring to the "tic-tac" UFO from a while back, and assuming that it's a Russian or Chinese aircraft. So no, we don't know that at all.
Neither a military man nor a pundit, but my impression is that the answer is 4. Russia's strategy is to publicly announce and hype up new weapon developments whereas our/the US' habit is to largely clam up about advancements until they're part of the last generation of military hardware, and this is directly connected to the fact that we are leading arms development: Russia wants to convey (primarily to its own citizens) that they are not behind in the race, which they are, whereas for us it's more strategic to keep our mouths shut about our capabilities until they can come as a horrible surprise to our enemies.
I think this is a lot of it. Russia in particular loves touting super weapons that they don’t have the industrial base to build in quantity, nor the integrated military capability to utilize effectively (e.g. the SU-57 and Armata tank).
On the Chinese side, they have a specific need for hypersonic missiles (land based defense against US Navy ships) that encourages them to invest heavily there, where the US does not have an equivalent use case.
I suspect the truth is somewhere in between the Russians being as brilliant they say and as bad as you say.
That said I’m leaning towards the west being not as industrially capable as thought. Particularly Europe.
I didn’t say they were bad, I said they lack the capacity to build a war-altering number of them and the military organizational capacity to employ them effectively. Which seems objectively true in Ukraine.
On a one for one basis, they are fine weapons.
So let’s say he actually does fifteen out of the twenty-five years. Will the DNC return to his victims the millions the ‘effective altruist’ Sam Bankman-Fried so generously donated to the Democratic Party?
If, after he’s served his sentence, SBF is able to conjure the $32B he was convicted of making disappear through his cryptocurrency exchange and hedge fund, he will have earned a taste over $2B per year.
If he can only conjure up a sorry billion, he will have earned a mere $67M per year. Not bad, but pitiful for a gamer yearning to join the pop pantheon of tech savants.
But security could be is a problem. When one makes so much money disappear — and the vanishing includes the investments of others — some people will likely be unhappy. The more money involved, the more victims and the higher the losses will be. Some investors could be very unhappy. The good news is that victims of the thief know where to find him, which is bad news for SBF.
Housing would ordinarily be in a dorm with maybe a hundred other men, all one’s possessions in a 2x3-foot box. That would cost the government about $35 to $40K per year. But in a dorm, too many parties would be offering and counter-offering protection schemes, it would be impossible to keep track of all the shakedowns, and his safety would still be at risk. An open yard would be too stressful and problematic, and emergency medical care pretty rudimentary.
If he ends up in administrative segregation, the cost will about double; in full protective lockdown, probably triple. But either way, the abrupt change from the stimulation of gaming during business conferences, etc., to roosting on a bunk with no electronics — and the stark simplicity of incarceration — will be a shock. The immature 32-year-old should change considerably. The psychological tedium and carb-rich diet will take their toll. Electronics and the cyborgery will be quite different in two or three decades. Whether his incarceration will set back the development of cryptocurrency or ‘effective altruism’ remains to be seen. And the DNC is likely to remain pleased to be a beneficiary of Bankman-Fried’s effective robbery. For a libertarian, he sure flashed Democrat bona fides in giving away other people’s money.
He (directly or through associates) also donated to republican politicians, he just did it quietly. Bernie Madoff had the same class of enemies and died of a heart and kidney disease in jail. Not everything results in mass conspiracies.
No matter his stated political beliefs, his actions show him as a criminal first and foremost, that is how he should be judged not by loose political connections.
That money is long spent and no politician is ever going to disgorge the funding they received. But part of the problem is "so who gets it?" because it's not at all clear who is or should be first in the queue to get money back, plus the way SBF set up management (as in, 'he didn't') at FTX and Alameda Research, it's hard to say who signed off on what and where the funds came from and are they part of personal fortune or siphoned off from the clients' funds?
Some of them have pledged to return the money, and may indeed already have done so:
https://cointelegraph.com/news/who-has-returned-donations-or-contributions-from-ftx-amid-the-firm-s-reputational-risks
"The Democratic National Committee, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee all reportedly pledged to return more than $1 million in donations from SBF they had collectively received since 2020. CNBC reported on Dec. 20 that the Senate Majority PAC — supporting Democratic candidates — planned to return the roughly $1 million received from Bankman-Fried and $2 million from former FTX engineer Nishad Singh."
That's good to hear. Thanks.
But what about the dark money SBF claims he gave to the GOP?
>> Although federal election receipts show that Bankman-Fried donated almost exclusively to Democrats, he claimed on a November phone call with YouTuber Tiffany Fong that he donated an equal amount to Republicans and Democrats.
>> “All my Republican donations were dark,” he said, referring to political donations that are not publicly disclosed in FEC filings. “The reason was not for regulatory reasons, it’s because reporters freak the f—k out if you donate to Republicans. They’re all super liberal, and I didn’t want to have that fight.”
>> Given that he donated nearly $40 million to Democrats in the 2022 election cycle—and he admitted to giving an equal amount to Republicans—his total political contributions may have actually been around $80 million.
https://time.com/6241262/sam-bankman-fried-political-donations/
If that's true, Republicans should step up and return the funds to the court. If not just for the ethics, at least to help stabilize and redeem cryptocurrencies.
But it's all getting very spooky: we're at a point now where someone could fabricate a momentous event and broadcast it around the world on the internet and video media, collect billions in subscriptions or fees or insurance in crypto currency to either support or defend against the staged event.
And Poof! Before we could determine the event was a phantasm and demand our money back, all the value could vanish. No Kool-Aid necessary.
Yup!
I learned about the prophetic perfect tense from here a little while ago. I found, in the wild, as it were, a similar weird tense when talking about the weather forecast: something like, "it was raining next Monday, but now it's mostly sunny."
That’s mostly an omission for convenience isn’t it? What’s really being said is:
It was [forecasted to be] raining next Monday, but now it’s [forecasted to be] mostly sunny.
Is that the nature of the tense?
> I found, in the wild, as it were, a similar weird tense when talking about the weather forecast: something like, "it was raining next Monday, but now it's mostly sunny."
There is a school of thought that says that English only has two tenses, past and nonpast, and future reference is, in English, a distinction of mood rather than tense. That analysis is drawn from the syntax; English verbs do not inflect into the future, and future-tense verbs in other languages tend to be translated into English with the modalizing auxiliary verb 𝘸𝘪𝘭𝘭.
I think this is going a little overboard, but I'd say it is the correct way to analyze your example. "It's raining next Monday" is a normal way to indicate that the weather forecast for next Monday shows rain. If you want to apply the past tense to the concept [the weather forecast for next Monday shows rain], you might end up converting that sentence into the past tense, yielding "It was raining next Monday". It would be more felicitous to be more explicit about what you're describing, along the lines of "they had it raining next Monday, but now it's mostly sunny instead", but people have to speak in the moment.
Bitemporal tenses are interesting. What's the converse, where a past fact will be revised in the future? Some breezier form of "The UK wasn't in a recession at the end of 2023 but soon it will have been"? https://www.bbc.com/news/live/business-68680004
"The extinction of the dinosaurs will be caused by the eruption of the Deccan Traps."
I’ll be a genius when my kids have kids of their own
That's just the future tense, isn't it? EDIT: Unless you're already a grandfather, in which case it's a valid example, but I don't know what it means.
It’s a reference to the idea that kids think their parents are dumb when they are growing up (which is in my past and present) but are expected to realize in the future, when they have kids of their own, that their parents weren’t so dumb after all (in the future-revised view of the past)
Yeah, I get that. But okay, perhaps one can parse that "I'll be (at this present moment, as I am speaking) a genius when (in the future) my kids have kids of their own" instead of like "I'll be(come, in the future, after something changes) a genius when [I take noötropics]." But I think this potential ambiguity makes it a bad example.
I am kind of struggling with a personal decision and so I am doing the only reasonable thing and turning to internet strangers for help (because I am horribly unconfident in my ability to make decisions). I currently hold a full scholarship to a law school (it's a strong regional school, not a T14 or anything) and an offer from LSE for the MSc in Philosophy and Public Policy. I don't really think that I will enjoy law school, the people, or the intellectual topic there, (at law school events, I mostly spoke with the friend I brought and got blank stares from future classmates that weren't in philosophy or civil service already) whereas I have strong reason to believe that I would enjoy the program, topic, and people at LSE.
That being said, law school has a really clear path to a career, while the MSc definitely does not (the program emphasizes PhD placement). I'm really torn and don't know which to pick. Does anyone have any advice about it?
Do you think you could get a good career from Philosophy and Public Policy?
Things that are valuable are frequently not fun. School is supposed to be valuable, not fun. Don't think in terms of which option will give you the best 3 years, think about which option will give you the better life. Do you like the idea of being a lawyer in a likely-tedious-but-well-compensated low-risk career? Then go to law school. Do you lack the self-discipline to make yourself grind hard for many years and do you have the risk tolerance for getting a more open-ended degree? Then go to LSE.
What do you want your degree to teach you to think clearly about, and qualify you to get paid to do? Looking at real world info about jobs in the field and what degrees their holders have should help you decide that. Look up stats about income and hiring in various fields, blogs and professional newsletters in fields of interest, job application sites and Glass Door.
Also: I have gotten to know a number of students at my local, very high prestige, law school, and it's changed my picture of what law school and a law career are like. Positives I have learned about law school and a law degree that might matter to you:
-Students find law school very stressful, but generally are not depressed and lost the way many people getting PhD's are.
-Social life there is very lively, and it's a great place to network.
-A law degree improves your overall hirability because it is taken as strong evidence that you are smart, practical, hardworking and clear-thinking. If you have a law degree and also non-degree expertise in something else, especially something in STEM, you're in a really good position. You have a decent chance of getting a good non-law job in the area of your non-degree expertise.
-There's a lot of variety among law students' goals. Plenty of people are there because they want to be empowered to change the way various things run, not because they want to get rich. Students whose goal is to get rich doing corporate law respect those who have other goals.
I tried to do a law conversion course, and dropped out before the end. I don't think I wasn't smart enough (I passed the first year exams), it's just that I wasn't really interested, and I hadn't seen the path to any jobs that I wanted to do.
You say the scholarship's important - what happens if you don't complete the course? Would you be on the hook for the money?
Yeah, I know a little bit about the law and I'm just not impressed (someone described American Common Law as "legal fanfiction," and that seems kind of dreadful to me, but also accurate). I'm sorry to hear that it didn't work out for you!
If I go to the law school and drop out, I would not be on the hook for tuition or anything, but I would be out of the money that it cost me to move to the city the law school is in and a year of rent, neither of which is cheap (but I have enough savings to avoid debt).
"I know a little bit about the law and I'm just not impressed (someone described American Common Law as "legal fanfiction," and that seems kind of dreadful to me, but also accurate)."
This is a bit of a head-scratcher for me, so I wonder how confident you can really be about whether you would like law school or not. To be fair, most people seem to not like it, so I guess all else equal that would be the way to bet. I personally loved law school. It was really like a whole new domain of knowledge of which I was theretofore almost completely unaware, aside from criminal law TV shows.
Law school has a clear path to a career in *law*, if your objective is to make the law degree maximise its value. Otherwise, it offers the same entry point into (say) the civil service as the MSc, though potentially it'll be slightly more restrictive than a policy degree in the first instance. The complicating feature is the scholarship, which will certainly make short term life easier.
But I'd ultimately go for the MSc. You can make it do more work for you, and if you're posting here in the first place, law is likely to feel like choking death after a few years. The MSc is also less overfitted, and so more more immune to AI automation.
Oh yeah! This is a great point on two fronts. The first is that I do understand that a JD is really only useful as a degree if you want to be a lawyer (you can do other things with it, but you don't need the JD to do anything other than be a lawyer). When I consider these two paths, I conceive of two completely different careers and trajectories; I'm sorry if it seemed like I thought that they could lead to the same end!
The scholarship is a huge factor for me. Moving to London and taking out loans for the MSc would be difficult (I have never been in debt before, and it's extremely nice to not be in debt, not gonna lie).
On that last comment, what sort of probability do you put on the legal profession being automated in the United States by 2035? I feel torn because a lot of the work that lawyers do is rote and can be done by machines, but lawyers also run the world and will probably defend their jobs by hook or crook.
> On that last comment, what sort of probability do you put on the legal profession being automated in the United States by 2035?
Zero; that would literally be the dream of "gentlemen, let us calculate!"
The future you're imagining requires that whenever any two people have a dispute, there is no point at which a human decides what the outcome will be.
Note that the prestige and power associated with being a lawyer can vary even while the background reality that sometimes people disagree does not.
Lawyering is among the more automation resistant professions because your automation can't just be 98% accurate it needs to be 100% accurate to really be used.
I agree with you and think your argument is even stronger than you're presenting it as; I don't think even 100% accuracy is, *in itself*, sufficient, given that *somebody* has to be legally liable. You can't fine or imprison an individual instance of a large language model; consequently, either the legally responsible entity is the company making the AI, in which case they'll be swamped with autogenerated lawsuits in less than one second, or it's the law firm, in which case a human being has to go through the entirety of each AI-generated document or [thing, generic] with a fine-toothed comb to *verify* that it is in fact 100% accurate, attest to it in a way that makes the firm comfortable with giving the document its imprimatur — which will actually take about as long as a human just writing the brief-or-whatever in the first place. I don't think there's any meaningful efficiency to be gained in practice.
Apropos of this, I'm curious about who is liable if, today, an LLM responds to a query with a hallucination which libels someone.
This is a live issue right now, and Eugene Volokh used to blog about cases that touched on the topic. Depending on how curious you are, you might try emailing him.
There has to be human intervention. Which is good as replacing us all is a bad idea, speeding up production is a good one. Panic over.
I don't know much about your opportunity cost (the value of the MSc and its career path) but I can tell you that getting through law school, taking the bar, finding a job, and being a lawyer (at a big firm) are pretty unpleasant if you aren't intrinsically motivated. Source: did that
and p(lawyers disappearing by 2035) << p(AI-savvy lawyers thriving in 2035)
April fools day and Dyngus day. There's a joke in there somewhere, but I can't find it. Enjoy the day everyone!
So I've been reading about polyamory here and on the old SSC site for years now, and I still just don't get it. I've had friends that were in *open* relationships, but that was just about sex, and I've read here and elsewhere that polyamory is about being in a relationship with multiple people.
I've been married for almost 20 years and relationships are *hard*. You have to establish boundaries, build communication skills, learn to fight fair, deal with in-laws, baggage, hammer out a mutually agreeable position on children, finances, leisure activities, etc. I'm frankly having trouble processing the idea of trying to do that with more than one person at once (much less doing it in a way that bucks strong societal norms). Intuitively, at least to me, it seems like the following trilemma must hold and at least one of the following is true:
1. The difficulties of being in a relationship scale sublinearly to the number of participants
2. Poly relationships are shallower than traditional monogamous ones and avoid a lot of these problems
3. Poly relationships tend not to be stable long enough to hit the many of the above issues
2 and 3 seem to contradict the writing on the topic from poly folks, and I'm reluctant to discredit somebody else's lived experience. 1 if true would be *fascinating* and somewhat surprising. Any poly folks want to please explain this to my tiny traditional brain? What am I missing here?
(1) is definitely true. As Jeff said, relationship skills are mostly transferrable and scale well. In my case, I got into my first serious relationship late into college, and got to benefit from watching all the ways my dumb teenage friends blew up their relationships, and continued building on those lessons through later relationships.
It's harder in some ways with three people, but also less hard in others - having a partner that doesn't exclusively rely on you for all emotional needs helps act as a buffer when you, for whatever reason, aren't in an ideal state to provide it, which helps a partner not feel neglected. This might be part of what you're getting at with (2), which is almost certainly true "all things being equal".
However, I see a TON of monomuggle relationships (especially with people that have been together for a long time) that implode from one or more partners' needs not being fully met (emotionally, sexually, or otherwise). These relationships are often in a state where the monogamous couple invest less emotional effort in each other than I see in your average polyamorous relationship, and they grow to resent each other over what they're each not getting.
The monogamous assumption that you have to get *all* of your emotional and sexual needs filled by one partner often causes as much strain as it resolves (if all people involved have a low enough natural jealousy impulse to be a good fit for poly - what Aella calls "orientation-poly"). Likewise, not having to have the exact same boundaries with every partner makes it easier to compromise with each and still get your needs met.
As for (3)... maybe. In practice, most poly people I know have one stable "primary" and further relationships are more fleeting or shallow. I've always felt like the people who act like "poly" means "stable, equal relationships with multiple people" are sort of fooling themselves. The line between open relationships and serial polyamorous dating are blurry, but there are lots of examples of relationships that *do* remain in the "primary with various intimate partners" state for a long enough time that I'm comfortable using the word "poly" to describe the relationship dynamic.
To briefly address point one, when you learn to be a good partner and have a good relationship many of those things don't scale much with more people. Learning to fight fair for example, once you've learned how to do it with one partner you can pretty easily apply it to more partners.
We sort of have to unpack point two to talk about it because if we talk about relationships on a shallow to deep scale we're generally conflation two things, the level of emotional connection and the level of life intermingling. In a monogamous framework these things go hand in hand but in the poly framework they are less connected. As such when someone poly is saying "Our relationships are just as deep and serious" they're talking about the emotional connection involved.
Eric's observation is spot on. Just briefly touching on some shared hobbies (as a SFW sample of differences): I watch movies with one of my boyfriends. I roleplay with the other. I talk science with my girlfriend. We're different things for each other.
Beyond that, I think it's also a question of how lucky you get with compatible personalities. I have three stable long-term relationships, all 10+ years by now, but I credit part of that to that my partners are all introverted and happy to be left alone every once a while to recharge. Basically, my polycule is boring in the right ways. I can definitely imagine plenty of relationships in theory where even one would be too much for me to juggle. I'm just not in one of those.
Dan Savage used to joke that he had been to many poly “weddings” but zero poly 10th anniversary celebrations.
Different parts are probably going to be true for different people, too.
1 and 2 work together, and I think those are true of, say, Aella's writings on the topic.
3 is likely true of most normies that try it, and I suspect there's a fairly strong inverse correlation between people that write about poly and people that have long-term success.
Related to Eric's response "kind of like friendships," part of it (seems to me) to be concurrent trends in the weakening of friendships and the weakening of the meaning of and/or desire for sex. There is, in some social circles, a desire to not require too much "emotional labor" of your friends- so for those that you are willing to ask "emotional labor" of, they're more than friends. When Facebook acquaintances become 'friends,' people you actually care about become need a new label. Possibly also some overlap between that tendency and a desire for a non-traditional concept of identity.
I also don’t get it. I wouldn’t kick down someone’s door or tell them to end decades old relationships, but I also don’t think there is anything there to get beyond a few surface level “yeah, I guess maybe in some situations. Still not something that’s going to scale.”
Many people in poly relationships are getting different things from different partners. So they may have kids with one, and kinky sex with another, and go hiking and having deep conversations with a third. Kind of like friendships, but you also kiss and or bump uglies.
I think the people who call poly relationships “shallow” have a bit of a point. It’s all well and good to say oh I have kids with Alice, funtimez with Brianna, and deep philosophical discussions with Carol.
But what if Brianna gets a great job offer in another state, do you and Alice and Carol and your kids with Alice all follow Brianna to that other state? Or do you break up, or pressure Brianna into not accepting the job? If Carol wants to have kids with you, does Alice get to say, no way, we can barely afford the money and time for the ones we already have?
If, heaven forbid, Carol gets into an accident and is in a coma, and Alice says it’s kinder to pull the plug but Brianna says that would be murder, who gets to decide?
It’s all fun and games until life happens.
This.
There are some truly committed poly relationships out there, not just pairs but even an occasional triad. (Haven't heard of anything bigger surviving a true test.) But often, instead, it's a zero-sum game: there's only so much commitment to go around, and only one piece on the chessboard that can't be sacrificed.
With the exception of sex, it seems to me there's a much lower social cost to doing all of those things in the context of friendship. Being open as "poly" rules out the majority of the dating market, particularly those you'd care to have kids with (imo). Granted that in monogamous relationships it's possible to overstep bounds of comfort even without sex involved, but in general it can be achieved by leveraging group hangouts, such as with multiple couples.
I think primarily this is about sex, but that is still a perfectly understandable motivation. Despite the popular assurances that those in relationships have more sex, I think this is only because there are more persistent opportunities with a reliable partner. Frequency still wanes, enthusiasm tends to as well. Maybe you could chalk some of that up to age (or having kids, stress, etc) but I don't think it's the full picture.
Thank you! I *knew* I had to be missing something obvious here. I'd still love to hear some others weigh in if anybody sees this and is willing, but I think that probably covers a lot of the mental gap I had on this.
Eric is right, but most true monogamy fans would describe that kind of arrangement as shallow. The interesting questions (to my mind) are 1) what do we really mean by 'shallow' (and is 'deep' just a way of describing people who have grown together like two closely-spaced trees over a period of decades); and 2) Is there a sort of structural stability to spreading the distancer/pursuer dynamics over more people?
Can anyone tell me whether the Groenlinks-PvdA party in the Netherlands is running primarily on YIMBYism?
From a recent Christopher Caldwell essay (https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/flooded-with-migrants/):
"The Labor Party (PvdA), an electoral juggernaut in the 20th century, has steadily lost working-class voters. Last year it had to merge with a second party, GroenLinks (Green-Left), to scrabble 16% of the vote. What does this consolidated party stand for? Gentrification, mostly—it wins neighborhoods convenient to city centers where public housing has been privatized and the old tenants pushed out, like those just east of the center of Utrecht."
This jumped out at me in an otherwise pretty boring essay. I'm not sure if this is some dig at the left but if any place was going to have an explicitly YIMBY political party, it would be a European country with a parliament and like 30 tiny parties fighting to be in a coalition. And a primarily YIMBY party would be really interesting. But I don't know anything about Dutch(?) politics and I thought I'd ask.
I can't speak for 'primarily', their housing policy could be described as YIMBY but as far as I'm aware, neither NIMBY ot YIMBY are identifiable camps in Dutch politics, and the terms are not used by anyone to describe their stance on housing. Quickly checking their site, Groenlinks-PvdA advocates for rental price maximums, building more housing, reducing vacant housing and improving tenants' rights. Housing is one of the bullet points on their election programme but not at all the main issue.
In case you're not aware, the Netherlands has focused their urban planning around maintaining walkable cities and avoiding car-dependent design since around the fifties. Traffic infrastructure gives more importance to bicycles, pedestrians, and public transport as it gives to cars. The restrictive zoning that produces US-style suburbs is far less of a problem here. I have never even heard of a homeowners association or any equivalent in this country. So, a party running on YIMBYism would be a solution in search of a problem.
My colleague and I wrote this piece as a summary of the science-based arguments for God I posted here last year:
https://www.physicstogod.com/3-proofs-of-god-from-science
The commentators here were very helpful in asking questions and engaging in respectful dialogue. We'd be interested to know what your thoughts on this piece are.
A few thoughts from me. I'll note here that I'm not an atheist, but I am a believer who thinks arguments like these are unproductive. I'll explain why below.
1. Is this "god of the gaps"? I'm not convinced by your argument. It feels very much like god of the gaps. Back before we split the atom, people thought atoms were fundamental to physics. Many arguments (both scientific and theological) were made based on the idea that atoms are fundamental, assuming this scientific understanding would forever hold. Thus, any argument based on the requirement of atoms being fundamental necessarily failed when it was proved that atoms were not fundamental. Indeed, I'm not sure you understand god of the gaps at its most basic level. This is always how it does. Something about the current state of knowledge is assumed to be necessarily true about the universe and this es explained as evidence for god. Later, we discover that this fundamental knowledge wasn't fundamental at all, but rather just a gap in our knowledge. Hence 'god of the gaps' as an argument is retrospectively observed, though seldom prospectively made intentionally. "But the constants of nature ARE fundamental! The mathematical equations ARE fundamental!" Sure. This argument will stand until we understand physics better. At best, it's a placeholder for future arguments. Now, maybe it will be a placeholder for a long time, say the equivalent distance from Newton to Einstein. Maybe not. Either way, I wouldn't bet my faith on it, given the history of such arguments. Nor would I recommend anyone else do so. I'll also make a prediction that if there comes a day that we discover more fundamental laws than these this same argument will be used to justify the existence or non-existence of god. It will be built upon the same shaky foundation as this argument.
2. What's going on with your entropy argument? First, let's start with the basics. Entropy is an observed law. It's not necessarily true, it's just that it's something we always observe, so we assume it to be true. Okay, fine. I'm willing to still call it a law. But it's a law defined as increasing disorder OVER TIME. In other words, time is part of the equation. If you're measuring entropy in a closed system while running a clock forward through time, you will observe entropy increasing. It's a circular argument to say, "We observe increasing disorder over time," define that as a law, and then say, "the fact that disorder increases over time is proof that god exists." If we had observed a past state that was more disordered to any degree, we wouldn't have defined entropy as a law - we would have updated our models to incorporate this new information. Similarly, if we do define entropy as a law of increased disorder over time, we can't expect the past to be anything BUT less disordered. Corollary: if you define distance = rate * time, you can measure rate and time and find that your derived distance equals your measured distance (ignoring relativity for simplicity). But the fact that you were able to do so is evidence you understand the system's parameters, not a probabilistic outcome that proves the system's rules must be externally derived.
3. Why are you so easily dismissing the biology question? I feel like you don't understand the arguments in biology well, given the way you discuss them. You act as though arguments about abiogenesis are ... good. They suck. We really don't understand abiogenesis, and all the supposed 'mechanistic' arguments about origins of life are terrible. It's been a few years since I delved into the literature on this one, but I'd be surprised if anything has gotten better since the last round of bad arguments, or the round before that, or the round before that... While we do understand much about evolution, there's a lot in the theory that very poorly explains the development of most biochemical mechanisms. Yes, I've heard all the arguments, and they're not that convincing even if they're not capable of explaining any SPECIFIC mechanism or of being falsified, or whatever. The theory of evolution works great for a lot of things, and it's a powerful idea that every biology student should be required to learn because it's so good. But let's not oversell its explanatory power, here. It quickly becomes useless (in its current form) at explaining most things at a biochemical level, and it has nothing meaningful to say about abiogenesis. The RNA world hypothesis is severely lacking, and we should stop teaching it to young, impressionable minds, along with a lot of the magical thinking behind most abiogenesis arguments. Now, I'm going to VERY EXPLICITLY say right here that I don't think we should invoke god to explain either of these processes. Especially not using the type of reasoning you've invoked. I'm just saying these are open questions in biology that need better explanations than the ones we currently have. That should be enough for everyone! The boundaries of our current state of knowledge should be something believers and unbelievers alike can agree about and agree to work to push backward. I would not suggest any atheist invoke the current inadequate hypotheses about abiogenesis and biochemical complexity as a foundation for their positions, any more than I'd advise a believer to invoke fine tuning as a basis for faith. Better to just admit to areas where knowledge is still developing, than to invoke poorly understood processes as anything like 'proof' in the existence or non-existence of god.
I think there are problems with current theories in physics and biology, sure. But I don't think arguments like these are at all helpful at addressing those problems. As a scientist and a believer, I need more from a "theory of god" than something that holds true only so long as we don't discover something new or more fundamental about the nature of the universe, or some brilliant scientist finally arrives at a unified Theory of Everything, or whatever. The problem with your approach is that it is always reactionary. Believers are always following the science, waiting for the next shoe to drop so they can craft a new argument for why this discovery doesn't necessarily disprove god. Believers who follow this approach are practically excluded from the process of discovery, because it requires them to tie a bow on the current science and say, "we're done here" instead of accepting that "wow, something feels like it's missing. I wonder if I could help fill in the gaps in our knowledge?" (And as I pointed out in point #3, I don't think this type of thinking is something atheists are immune to. Everyone can fool themselves into using the debate about a creator to accidentally shield themselves from pushing the boundaries of science.)
Thank you for your clear and well reasoned comments.
1. It's interesting how I can agree with you almost entirely, yet disagree about your conclusion. Meaning, I agree it's entirely possible that what the standard model of particle physics considers fundamental might be replaced by something deeper and "truly" fundamental. (For example, if string theory is correct, then electrons aren't fundamental, but rather strings are.) In fact, I would think that's it's more likely than not that at some point in the future both the particles and current laws will be explained by something deeper.
The question is how to interpret that point. You cynically say "I'll also make a prediction that if there comes a day that we discover more fundamental laws than these this same argument will be used to justify the existence or non-existence of god. It will be built upon the same shaky foundation as this argument."
I would interpret it in the opposite way. Whenever science show deeper laws, they too turn out to be fine tuned and designed. The design argument was applicable to ancient science and it's true now. It was true about classical physics and it's true about modern physics. The apparent design in biology is dependent on the design in physics. All explanation of design by deeper theories ultimately show even deeper design. It is greater intelligence to design a system of physics in which life naturally emerges. That is not a shaky argument, but a robust argument that explains the intuition that many people throughout history have had that there is tremendous order and complexity in the universe that can only be explained by intelligence.
2. It could be that we weren't clear about the entropy argument. We're not saying the existence of the second law directly proves God. We're arguing, like Roger Penrose, that the second law implies that the universe had a low entropy initial state. That highly improbably state indicates an intelligent cause. You can see a clearer presentation of the argument in episode 8 and 9 of our podcast (about half an hour each). https://www.physicstogod.com/podcast-episodes
3. We're not trying to take sides in the debate between biologists and those that argue for intelligent design in biology. I agree that the current scientific explanations for the origins of life are very weak. I also agree with you that we should look for a better scientific solution instead of just saying "God did it", as that would be a God of the gaps fallacy.
Our two main points are to show the superiority of the fine tuning argument from physics, and to point out that even if someone did accept the claim that biologists can fully explain the origin and evolution of life, all of biology (including RNA) is still dependent on fine tuning, design, and order in physics.
1. I'm still unconvinced by this argument. I'd like to start by pointing out that you've shifted from the bailey to the motte. The original argument was "look at these fine-tuned constants. They have to be exactly these numbers or nothing exists. Therefore we've finally come to the point where we can observe intelligent design." I challenged you that this is 'god of the gaps', because it essentially takes the viewpoint that "scientists don't have a satisfactory explanation for this so we're going to infer that intelligent design forced the constants to manifest the universe as we know it." It is only valid until some physicist discovers a new set of governing equations that somehow explain a phenomenon that currently appears to be fine-tuned.*
I think this bailey is not a strong place to be, so let's move to the motte: Your new claim is that all laws of physics point toward intelligent design. The claim appears to be that because we continue to see complexity governing deeper levels of the system this implies design at each level, thus every time we discover a deeper level of complexity this necessarily implies design. I'm not convinced. I can't say that I have a strong principled stance against this argument, so much as that it just doesn't feel convincing to me? I know that's not fair to you, since it doesn't give you much to go on. (But then again, I'm not the one making a claim to have a proof, here.) Maybe you could articulate it better and then I could take a stronger stance either way. As it stands, I feel like we do observe naturally-occurring phenomena that have emergent fractal levels of complexity. (By which, I'm not invoking self-similar fractals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gB9n2gHsHN4). But I should articulate my demand for a better argument as well. Non-self-similar fractals occur naturally, while simple examples of designed systems with only one layer of complexity are also observed. I'm not convinced that either a.) design is implied by multiple layers of complexity, or b.) the absence of multiple layers of complexity implies non-design. Thus you appear to have outlined a heuristic that cannot be falsified and is non-exclusive. In layman's terms, this looks like cheating unless you can define some limiting factors/features that actually point to design.
*Look, I'm not saying it's impossible that finally, after all these years, we've dug deep enough to discover the fingerprint of god in creation. But as of yet, we don't have enough evidence/clarity to distinguish between a fingerprint left by god and a smudge left by a passing dog. Maybe we don't know because we haven't figured it out yet and we will next week. Maybe we can't ever know. Whatever the case is, being good scientists, we shouldn't make assumptions that lean way out past what where the data lead.
2. The only thing entropy has to say about the probability of a state is that it's LESS probable to see a lower-entropy state when you go forward in the time direction. The corollary to this is that it's MORE probable to see a lower-entropy state when you go backward in time. So contrary to what you're arguing, if we're observing initial conditions the most probable state is one of maximum entropy. Indeed, we should be surprised to discover an initial condition that isn't at least very high in entropy. Unless you're trying to make some mathematical claim about the rate of entropy (which I haven't seen) then the base claim that a high-entropy state is unlikely is a fundamental misunderstanding of entropy. Am I missing something about your argument, here? (Haven't listened to the episodes you linked to.)
3. As much as over-exuberant atheists point to the flawed RNA-world hypothesis as a 'nail in the coffin' explanation for abiogenesis without looking deeper at their theories, I feel like you've done this with physics. You claim to have proven something as fundamental as whether god exists, but I'll be honest that the arguments (besides being ones I've seen elsewhere) are really only convincing to those who are already convinced. If you're going to make big claims, you need to bring strong evidence. This is true of both abiogenesis and the existence of god.
I'm reminded of the story of Watson and Crick discovering the structure of DNA. We tell this story poorly, IMO, because we like something clean and tidy. We talk about Avery's experiments with smooth and rough bacteria, Chargaff's rules demonstrating the AT/GC symmetries, etc. It's a nice neat story about how scientists made stepwise discoveries that led from the discovery that DNA is the genetic material, to the discovery of the structure of DNA.
This isn't how it felt to live that story, though. If you go back and read Avery's original paper it was ... terrible. He separated out DNA, sure, but he never did the negative controls. Anyone reading the paper wasn't forced to admit that DNA alone was required to transform those cells. Thus, it was largely ignored by most serious researchers outside the weird world of those interested in DNA for some reason.
No, DNA had largely been dismissed as the genetic material - even after Avery - because it was too simple. (Frameshift mutations and a triplet code wasn't figured out until Crick-Brenner years after the structure of DNA - in what was apparently Crick's first major foray into a biology lab.) More likely it was just an unimportant structural molecule. Proteins! Now there was where the action lay. Ribosomes and proteins had massive amounts of variation and everything scientists expected from what should carry something as complex as the genetic material. Contrary to your expectation that atheist-led theory would bias toward the simple, biologists expected life to be extremely complex, and something like the genetic code needed to be very complicated indeed if it were going to produce all of life.
What did it feel like to be Francis and Crick? They were working on a nothing molecule. Sure, the eminent Linus Pauling was working on it as well, but he got it wrong, too. His simple paper, if not followed/corrected by F&C, might have been the end of the matter. What's DNA? Some weird structural molecule. We'll get to it later.
What did Pauling get wrong, though? Go back and read his original paper with a triple-helical structure. He put the phosphate backbone at the center and faced the hydrophobic bases outward. He even admits to some Van Der Walls overlaps! Why postulate something so ridiculous? Because, Pauling says, the X-ray crystallography demonstrated a helical structure, but the bases wouldn't pair! He tried it every way from Tuesday and couldn't make it work.
What about Chargaff's rules? Nobody read the paper. Maybe F&C attended one of his lectures, but maybe not, it's hard to tell. Still, that clearly wasn't enough. Seriously, though if Pauling had just thought to pair the bases and try to match them ... but wait, he did, didn't he? He admitted as much. Why couldn't he get the bases to pair?
F&C were trying that, too, to no avail. Then one day, as the story goes, Crick was chatting with a chemist and he happened to be playing around with some cutouts of the bases. The chemist took one look at the structure and asked, "Is there a reason you're using the enol form instead of the keto form?" Turns out the whole messy business was cleared up by doing a little enol-keto tautomerization. (i.e. someone originally wrote down the DNA base formulas ... not wrong, exactly, just not with a good understanding of organic chemistry.) Suddenly the bases paired. F&C published their DNA structure (but of course they missed one of the hydrogen bonds between C-G) and overnight everyone realized there was this much simpler explanation for the transmission of the genetic code. Literally, the story went in the reverse of how we tell it to undergrads.
(Was Franklin important? Meh. Pauling had the B-form data, too, and didn't get anywhere with it. That doesn't make stealing her data right. But she wasn't robbed of the credit to the extent many have made it seem.)
What's the point of this long, rambling story? Sometimes, when you see a bunch of scientists working on the 11th epicycle of Jupiter's moons the thing to do isn't to say, "Wow look at how complex that theory is! That's evidence of god right there."
1. Our argument is still from the fundamental fine tuning of the constants, design of the fundamental laws, and ordering of the initial conditions. I was responding to your question that perhaps one day these will be replaced by deeper fundamentals. My answer was that even if that happens we have every reason to expect to find that they too will be fine tuned, designed, and ordered. This is based on historical precedent that every time science had discovered that the design and order of the universe is even deeper than we originally imagined.
2. I don't think your understanding the argument. I think you'll really enjoy the ideas, even if you don't agree with it in the end. Episode 8 and 9 spell it out well (I think).
3. Our hope is that undecided, open-minded people will benefit from the arguments. We know it's very hard to change an adult's mind once it's been decided.
Let's take another biology example: clonal selection theory and affinity maturation. The strength in this is that we now understand these ideas, even if they're not well known by most educated people. So if you don't look them up until after I've described the problem below, you'll see what it feels like to go from an improbable observation to a mechanistic interpretation.
Your body is able to make antibodies that specifically identify tiny markers (epitopes) on viruses, bacteria, fungi, etc. and then accurately identify which type and sub-type of invader that marker belongs to. What's fascinating about this is that your body can identify this unique epitope even if it's a completely novel mutation that has never been seen before.
(How many possible epitopes are there? Many billions - think of how many ways a 3D configuration of amino acids might organize - though admittedly restricted to the 3D pocket of an antibody's recognition arm.)
Let's say we made this observation based on the principles you've outlined. We have something highly ordered that couldn't possibly be evolutionarily determined. It's a dynamic response to a novel stimulus. And, indeed, we can even sequence the antibody-producing B-cell to discover that the antibody is genetically encoded - meaning that this novel gene was created to address this specific threat. Not only that, but this B-cell is unlike other B-cells in your body, so we know that this individual B-cell's genetic code specifically encodes the epitope-recognizing antibody to a unique virus, while that one over there specifically encodes the epitope-encoding antibody to a specific parasite. (In practice, you'll have multiple antibodies to the many different epitopes of each virus/parasite - or rather multiple antibodies to each protein on each virus/parasite.)
Improbable, sure, especially when we see tens of thousands of unique B-cells that have done this independently. We don't have to go outside this one human body to hit astronomical numbers for improbability that this is a stochastic event. If this were simple Darwinian selection, every woman would have to have more babies every hour than stars in the universe before one would be able to have this kind of immune system by chance.
But it gets more improbable! For each of these B-cells, there's a T-cell that independently encodes an epitope-specific T-cell receptor (think of a TCR as being like a cell-bound antibody - but separate from IgD) and that these two cell types work in concert to produce a virus-specific or parasite-specific response. So whatever that old probability was, you have to raise it to the new probability of having perfectly matched T-cells for every antibody-producing B-cell, and then raise that again by the improbability that the epitope is able to distinguish among many different types of invaders.
How else can we explain such complexity - all stochastically generated on the spot. We can't explain this as some long-run genetic process, because each B-cell's epitope-recognizing antibody is genetically distinct and capable of recognizing novel threats. And indeed, we can directly determine that none of these B-cell/T-cell pairs capable of recognizing specific threats were present at birth, demonstrating this is an acquired response.
We've effectively proven that this arrangement of DNA is clearly not evolutionarily encoded. At this point (unless you cheated) it's hard not to see the evidence of design at each step in this system based on the principles you've outlined. No way could we get there without an intelligent hand directing the process all along the way. Indeed, this is even stronger than the initial conditions argument from physics (despite the large double-exponent) because we observe the process acting in real time with each new babe that develops a novel adaptive immune response! Probabilities vanish into nothing when we consider that we can predictably rely on this happening every day, as ever much as the sun rises.
This must prove the existence of a creator! It's too fantastically unlikely this would happen in an ongoing way by chance. There MUST be intelligent design at work.
I know at this point you can see where I'm going with this: that there is actually a mechanistic explanation for all of these phenomena, but for the sake of the argument I'll ask you to play along as we double down on this one last time. After the second and third exposures to this pathogen, we go back and test these antibodies/T-cells only to find that they are a million times stronger in binding to the epitope. Something is going in and refining how well the antibodies bind. This is CLEAR evidence of directed design, no? There's no way to randomly come to that coordinated endpoint time after time without invoking a creator, right?
You obviously see the trap here, which is why I bring it up. I imagine that you read the foregoing and constantly thought, "yes, but there's already a solid mechanistic process describing how we got from all these individual observations to what only looks to an outside observed like an impossibly complex and improbable outcome. You're forcing me to see this as just a matter of improbabilities, but I know it's actually a defined set of mechanisms that drive all of these observations. You've just presented it in a way that it seems probabilistic when it's not."
Exactly! The only difference with the physics you've described is that we're all still outside observers, ignorant of the driving mechanisms that explain those probabilities. So when you pile improbability on improbability you're not proving design. You ARE demonstrating that we don't currently have an explanation for the organizing principle at work behind the order we observe.
What's inescapable is that where we see order, there must be some organizing principle at work driving that order. In the case of understanding the adaptive immune system a lot of hard work and many years brought us to the point where we finally understood the basics of clonal selection theory. Many more years of work helped us understand affinity maturation. We're STILL working on fully understanding principles like Danger Theory and deeper problems of immunology. These are processes that do not depend on the constant intervention of an intelligent designer to maintain highly-ordered, statistically impossible results in each instance.
That's never how we interpret new evidence that doesn't fit with current theory. It's entirely unhelpful to do so, and it's damaging to the scientific process to teach these kinds of intellectual habits. It virtually assures that the kind of people who buy these explanations will cede the ground of scientific discovery to those who reject them.
This argument from stochastic improbability is the CORE of your argument, and yet we see stochastic improbability all the time, driven by underlying mechanisms, whether well defined or poorly understood. If you want to argue that some force has to be the original organizing principle at the base of the stack of turtles, that's fine. But you're arguing about specific observed states, claiming that there's NO other explanation than that this is the level of analysis at which we must impose the will of a creator. The existence of a highly ordered state is not enough evidence to make that case - no matter how many zeroes you add to it, and no matter how many interconnected ordered states you invoke. All you've done is demonstrate that some set of organizing principles must be in effect. But nobody was arguing otherwise!
Now, if you want to argue against certain organizing principles as sufficient explanations I'm absolutely willing to follow you there. Multiverse is a sloppy import of biological ideas of selection without any evidence. It's grasping at straws, and trying to piggyback on the flawed MWI interpretation of QM. Simulation theory is so near to creation and god of the gaps that nobody can tell the difference.
I listened to the two episodes, and I think I see your point. (Although the thought experiment with flipping the single coin out of 100 is bad statistical analysis, the question of how you randomly get high-entropy initial conditions isn't.) You're saying that if we assume a random possibility for initial conditions it's effectively impossible to come to a highly ordered state - not with regard to the arrow of time, but rather to ask how we came to have an initial high-entropy state at all.
(This is all assuming the state must have been random in the first place. I have my own private thoughts on why we should expect to observe the initial condition we do. I think certain specific details have been ignored, suggesting the initial condition was natural - but that's all speculative so we won't go there.)
I will agree that this implies some organizing mechanism. But again, I think it's not good scientific practice to insert god at this stage. If every time you see order you point to that order and say, "This is evidence of an intelligent creator!" you're falling into one of two major traps, which I've outlined above.
Trap 1.) Over-reliance on the state of science as it is currently understood. This means that any revolution in scientific understanding upends your entire argument. (From epicycles to 4 humors, from natural philosophy to quantum field theory. And beyond.)
Trap 2.) God of the gaps. Despite your frequent protestations to the contrary, you still haven't escaped this problem. It doesn't help your case to point to other bad theories and say, "they're wrong, so we must be right." The popularity of multiverse ideas doesn't help you here. It's possible for everyone in the world to be wrong. That's always the case with every scientific principle that hasn't yet been worked out.
At root, the problem is that your philosophy is reactionary. It leaves believers perpetually in the lagging wake of cutting edge science. They will never be able to delve deeper into root causes for fear of upsetting the foundations of a temporary explanation for god. I know you insist multiple times that these are fundamental principles you're building on, but if anything all you've demonstrated is that they're not. They're either evidence of a flawed theory that will be replaced, or they are evidence of gaps in knowledge that remain to be filled.
It's interesting how much we can agree upon, yet still come to different conclusions. I agree that just because multiverse is a bad theory that doesn't mean that God is the correct inference. I use multiverse to show people without first hand knowledge that there must be a substantial problem if scientists are willing to say multiverse. This lends credibility to the point that fine tuning is real and demands investigation and a paradigm shift.
I think our argument comes down to whether there is validity in drawing conclusions from the fundamental laws of current science.
I'm saying that it's true things can always change but as far as we know an intelligent cause is what current science implies. It's not absolute knowledge but it is knowledge.
You're saying that since science can always change, even on a fundamental level, there is no legitimate inference to draw from it. Therefore, we should always say "we don't know" and look for other ways to establish whether or not God exist.
Science used to be dominated by believers who pushed the boundaries of knowledge. And while there are plenty of believers who are scientists (source: personal experience), the sad truth is that they run around excluding/pretending away their faith in their professional life because of arguments like these ones. I'm not saying believers have to stand up and give talks declaring, "QED, god exists!" Quite the opposite. I'm saying it shouldn't be the default 'understanding' in scientific circles that we've proved the non-existence of god (when we haven't) and anyone who disagrees should remain mute or suffer the mockery of the enlightened masses who 'know' god is a delusion. To my mind, reactionary theories like these only serve to push believers onto their back feet, forever unable to push science forward for fear of destabilizing the shaky foundations they built their faith on.
A better way: My personal heuristics include the following ideas.
1. Understanding how God created the universe isn't the same as disproving creation. The question "what came first" will never be answered, because it's an infinite problem. Fine. Leave god in the infinite and work on figuring out the finite.
2. A 'miracle' is, by definition, something that can't be attributed to normal, natural processes. If God intervenes, we're not going to be able to use statistics to explain that one-off event. We should stop trying to do so. This doesn't go the other direction. If we see an event we want to explain, we should absolutely use scientific processes to figure out fundamental explanations. I'm just not worried about figuring out a 'natural' explanation for why someone in South America saw a statue bleeding. Whatever, I'm not going to explain it, and I won't worry about trying to do so.
3. Faith is a subjective experience, while science is objective. That's not to say subjective experiences aren't important or real. Both love and pain are subjective and yet incredibly important and very real. You can't objectively prove someone is in love. You can't even prove that someone suffers from chronic back pain. Yet people get treatments for chronic back pain all the time, and I'm not about to tell them their subjective experience is unimportant and should be ignored, just because they can't provide objective evidence of it. Even so, some people fake both love and pain, for whatever reason, so I'm not about to stake my understanding of reality on the existence/non-existence of someone's chronic back pain. Similarly, faith in god is a subjective experience. Any argument that seeks to imbue faith in an unbeliever through objective 'proofs of the existence of god' will fail to generate any subjective faith in god. These two things are qualitatively different and must be treated as such. Failure to do so will, at best, create a poor foundation that will easily crumble in the future. A better approach is for believers to stop fighting atheists! There's no need to do so. (Unless you're one of the wacky few who believe the only way for god to exist is if the the entire universe were created from nothing in 7 days each 24 hours long.) It's enough to simply reply to those who believe they've somehow proved the non-existence of a thing (something that's been long admitted as impossible) that it's fine for them not to believe in god. That I believe for subjective reasons is enough, and I don't expect an unbeliever to be convinced from my own subjective experiences, any more than I can know whether someone is in love or has lower back pain just by them telling me so. I don't begrudge someone their loving relationship or their pain meds, and I won't be offended if they suggest that I should try out this love thing, or if they suggest that tramadol works great if I find myself with lower back pain. We run into problems whenever we treat subjective evidence with the same standards of universal acceptance as objective evidence. Both are real, but both should be treated qualitatively differently.
4. A fundamental problem I see in scientists today is a seeming inability to accurately answer questions of unknowns appropriately by declaring, "I don't know." Sure, we're often encouraged in PhD programs to speculate based on what we do know, but too many take these speculations to be likely answers and move on as though the question has actually been answered. To explore unknown problems, in my experience, it's vital to be able to hold open in your mind a space for things not known. To be able to hold open questions that aren't answered in your mind and operate in the world anyway, without fooling yourself into thinking you have the answers already, is part of the scientific process. It allows you to see anomalies and say, "I wonder how that might fit?" as opposed to simply trying to explain them away within the theory you currently understand. I feel like this is a skill I've developed over many years as a scientist and a believer. I think any good scientist needs to develop this skill and I find that, for myself, belief has helped me hone it well. I think it's a skill any atheist scientist can also build, so I'm not claiming exclusivity here. I'm just saying that explanations like yours feel like they get in the way of developing this skill in believers without providing enduring principles on which to build subjective faith in god.
Materialism aside, one could also criticize your conclusions from a theological perspective. You seem to be hypothesizing a "watchmaker" god, who wound up the universe and is letting it tick away without interference. Or is your creator god also driving/guiding the emergence and evolution of life and consciousness? And does your creator god involve itself directly in the affairs of the sentient beings that emerge in its universe?
Anyway, your arguments also suffer from a theological modal scope fallacy. You seem to default to the toned-down Enlightenment version of the Abrahamic creator god, when other god-scenarios could also explain the universe we observe. For instance, why does a god-entity that's powerful enough to create a universe *necessarily have to create* an actual universe? What if the god-entity is a Yaldabaoth-like god? The Gnostics believed that the universe we observe is a vast illusion promulgated by Yaldabaoth who actively deceives our conscious minds. Rather than go to all the trouble to create a material universe, the Yaldabaoth god-entity could just be feeding us the information that we perceive with our qualia. Of course, this would be a variation of the mind-of-god/cosmic computer hypothesis.
And even if you limit your god-entity to being a watchmaker, does the craftsmanship of the universe tell us anything about this entity? Even if the watchmaker is hidden from our observation, is it fully hidden from our reason? If you posit a creator-god, wouldn't you want to create theories about why it exists and what its motives are? The Jewish Merkabah mystics believed that the Earth was an emanation of Heaven, and it floated on top of Heaven (which reminds me of how our 4-D universe is supposed to be an emanation of a more complex 11-D universe). In their mystical trances, they'd try to descend through the earth to heaven to view Yahwah, and they attempted to measure him. (According to their visual calculations Yahweh was a giant humanoid being who was many leagues tall, but he had an enormous head compared to his body and he had very long arms, but very small hands, and very short legs.)
Then there's the Vedanta and Buddhist idea that the universe goes through endless cycles of creation and destruction. The Buddhist Mahayana philosophers went one step further and posited a multiverse of universes going through endless cycles of creation and destruction. Each universe has its own Brahma-deity who handles the creation of, the running of, and the destruction of their universe. Better yet, eventually, as we ascend the spiritual path through eons of reincarnations we could all become Brahma-deities with our own universe to play with! (The Mahayana see that option as a trap because Brahma-hood involves all sorts of karmic burdens — better instead to not reincarnate and settle into the blissful substrate of the metaverse.) I've been told by some LDS members that they believe they'll eventually get their own universe to play with (but I don't know if this is official LDS doctrine).
If you posit a single creator-entity, why not posit a society of creator-entities each with their own universe or their own infinititudes of multiverses? Anyway, once you posit a single hyper-powerful being, it's a slippery slope...
I can answer your first line of questioning now. The fine tuning and design arguments only point to a God who intelligently caused the universe. It doesn't directly prove anything about divine providence (in a positive or negative way), though it does set the foundation for a further argument to build upon. We think this is a very significant first step, even though we recognize that most people want more.
With regard to all your other questions, we're going to address them all (at least indirectly) in a satisfactory manner in season 3. I know that might sound like a cop-out but there is a reality of these arguments taking time to develop. At this point, I'll grant you that all we've shown is a compelling reason to believe the universe has an intelligent cause without fully justifying or explaining what that cause is.
it seems like you're ill-prepared to discuss these issues if you haven't already worked through a decision tree of responses to all the possible objections to your arguments. By delaying your responses to our objections until some future date it seems like you're avoiding any rational engagement on these questions. All of the materialist and theological objections I raised have been raised before by others, and you should be familiar with them. So you should be conversant enough with this material to be able to rattle off some counterarguments. "I'll get back to you" isn't a persuasive response. I'd certainly be interested if you had come up with a new proof for the existence of a god-entity, but nothing you've presented so far seems very convincing.
BTW, don't forget to check out Gödel's mathematical proof for god. A good discussion of it is in section 7 of this article. Very chewy! But using Gödel's reasoning, the author comes up with at least 720 necessary god entities.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ontological-arguments/#GodOntArg
On further thought (see my previous response), I think your arguments suffer from the modal scope fallacy. The seemingly fine-tuned constants of nature, the "design" of the laws of nature, the [questionable] ordered initial conditions of the universe can be explained without the necessity of invoking the god-principal. Granted, *none* of the non-god explanations (infinite multiverse, the universe as a simulation, or the fecund universe hypothesis) are falsifiable by our current science, but neither is the god explanation. And if we accept the god-principal, we then have to ask how did god come into being. Adding god to the mix just adds another turtle to the stack of unknowables. And if god is self-existent, that begs the question of why the universe can't be self-existent.
Another question we should ask is whether our universe is itself an intelligent entity that is directing its evolution for its own purposes—i.e. the universe *is* god. Although "I Am that I Am" is the common English translation of what Yahweh (as a burning bush) said to Moses, a better translation of the Hebrew would be "I will become what I choose to become."
Full disclosure: I am not an atheist. When it comes to god questions, I'm an agnostic. But I have a mystical intuition that universe has its own directed intelligence.
Our universe can't be self-existent because it had a bounded beginning in time, and nothing can cause itself to exist (because things that don't exist can't cause anything). Therefore something else besides our universe must exist that caused it. That thing could be self-existent, if it has always existed. Theists posit that thing is God, some non-theists posit simulators, infinite multiverse, etc.
We don't actually /know/ it had a bounded beginning in time.
Our ability to extrapolate the state of our universe at a given time in the past by applying our best theories to our knowledge of its present state breaks down when we go a finite length of time back - we hit a singularity, a bunch of zeroes in our maths, and we can't recover the conditions at that point for much the same reason that we don't know what got multiplied by zero to get zero when all we have is the result of that operation; but this is not quite the same thing as knowing the universe had a bounded beginning.
Other explanations than the ones listed are also possible.
To date, every experiment to recreate conditions closer and closer to time zero has validated the best known model we are using to predict them, but it may be that there is some scale / energy / etc past which our models do not match reality and we will need to fix them; just as there are situations where Newton's models fail to match reality badly enough that we can observe the discrepancy, and Einstein made a more precise model that gives answers closer to what happens in reality in those scenarios, so it is possible that ongoing experiments might lead us to realise we need something new here, and that new thing might avoid the singularity.
Another family of possibilities are the various cyclic models, which posit that time zero of the presently observable universe is the result of a previous universe collapsing - a variety of ways such a collapse could occur, and ways the universe we currently observe could end in such a state, have been proposed.
It seems more likely than not that it had a beginning, as far as I can understand the science.
Before the Big Bang theory the general consensus was that our universe was eternal in time, with no beginning or end. There was a lot of philosophical resistance to the idea of the Big Bang at the time because the universe not clearly being eternal and self-existent weakened philosophical materialism. As the astronomer Robert Jastrow (an agnostic) put it: "At this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation. For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”
The trouble with all the theories of the origin of the universe — *including the god theory* — is that require a causative agent which is outside our ability to observe or measure. If our universe was bounded in time by an initial singularity, then we have to assume there was something before the the (hypothetical) initial singularity of the Big Bang — unless you're one of those cosmologists who believe the universe exists in some sort of timeless quantum soup in which our universe is an enormous bubble of space-time. But that's an unsatisfactory answer, too — because we still have a theory that is unfalsifiable outside our limited view of our local universe.
If we posit that a god-being created the universe—or created the computer that runs our universal program—we then have to account for the god-being. It doesn't help us understand squat to claim, "Well, the god-being is self-existent and it is/was powerful enough to create our universe." Actually, that places an extra barrier of faith between us and understanding. God is an intellectual cop-out — and I'm not making that claim as an atheist — because I am definitely *not* an atheist. I make that claim as a mystic — who was raised by rational materialists and who understands the materialist cant — but who understands that any idea of infinite regress is infinitely unknowable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down
Well something has to be self-existent. If there is nothing that is self-existent, and has always existed, then nothing would exist. The fact that our theories on what that self-existent thing is are not falsifiable doesn't mean they can't be closer or farther from the truth. There are a lot of true things we believe that aren't falsifiable, like that other people aren't p-zombies or the Pythagorean theorem. Just because it's not falsifiable doesn't mean it's not satisfactory, or a "cop out".
You're asking great questions and we're going to address them all in season 3 about God. Without answering those questions and presenting a clear, coherent, logical idea of one simple God, we haven't really finished the argument. I know we work slow but if we try to do it all at once it wouldn't be nearly as clear and convincing.
I'll await your next installments, then. But as of now, you've failed to convince this agnostic. I'm a bit surprised the radical atheists haven't chimed in, yet. I have fun arguing with them, too. ;-)
Not a science-based argument FOR god, but a way to avoid the god-implications of the Fine-tuning argument, is Lee Smolin's fecund universe hypothesis (aka cosmological natural selection). Smolin hypothesized that black holes can create new universes, and they can reshuffle the parameters of fundamental constants (masses of elementary particles, Planck constant, elementary charge, etc.). Each universe thus gives rise to as many new universes via some or all of its black holes. And the reshuffling of information about the constants of the originating universe leads to creation of universes with similar but not necessarily identical constants. Universes whose physical constants could generate more black holes would be selected for more than universes whose constants didn't favor black holes. Somewhere in his book _The Life of the Cosmos_ I think that Smolin suggests that the constants that favor black holes would also favor the emergence of the chemistry of life (but don't quote me on that).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTKvW3l-dio
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uieNKqUTans&t=436s
We'll have a lot to say about Smolin in season 2 of our podcast "Physics to God" (we're devoting a full episode to him). In the meantime, here is an excerpt about one aspect of what is wrong with his theory:
Besides the fact that Smolin’s premises are unsupported, there’s a problem with Smolin’s prediction as well. While it’s very good for a scientific theory to make concrete predictions, it’s very bad for a theory to make false predictions. In 1992, Smolin originally predicted that astronomers would never observe a neutron star more than 1.6 times as massive as the sun. However, in 2010, a neutron star twice as massive as the sun was observed. Then, in 2013, Smolin wrote (in Time Reborn, page 281, footnote 7) that he was originally going to admit that his theory had been falsified by this observation. However, after looking into the matter again, the experts realized that his theory tolerated a kaon-neutron star being just up to twice as massive as the sun, but no larger. Then, in 2022, a massive neutron star was discovered with a mass of around 2.35 times as much as the Sun. While this would seem to conclusively falsify Cosmological Natural Selection, we don’t know if Smolin has responded to this observation.
See my second response to your post. Respectfully, I think your arguments suffer from the modal scope fallacy.
As an aside, I've often wondered why the proving or the disproving of god is so important to people. I suspect it's because our minds insist on a narrative framework to account for our observations. People don't seem to be able to stand back from the question, shrug their shoulders, and just enjoy their existence in an inexplicable universe.
I think you might be confusing the way we present the argument with how others do. Can you elaborate on why you think that our formulation suffers from the modal scope fallacy?
I think it matters to people what is real and some people are compelled to use their intellects to best determine that. Some people can shrug their shoulders and move on, but others can't. Our article and podcast if mostly for the later.
I think your arguments suffer from the modal scope fallacy because you're assigning an unwarranted necessity to the conclusion. The three issues you highlighted as indicative of a god-principal could also be equally indicative of a multiverse, a fecund universe scenario, or the universe as s simulation.
We are going to address both multiverse and the fecund universe in depth in season 2. What I can say here that will allow you to pursue it on your own if you don't want to wait is that the multiverse ultimately fails because of the measure problem and that the fecund universe fails because of what it's originator Lee Smolin calls the meta-law dilemma.
Why do you think that the universe being a simulation would help explain fine tuning, design, or order? Wouldn't it push the question to what fine tuned the complex computer the simulation is running on?
Two thoughts:
1. The arguments you present, taken at face value, would also be consistent with the argument that the universe is a simulation. In fact, give that the mechanisms of simulation are (in principle) accessible to us, simulation is more plausible than an inscrutable god. As you don't mention simulation but are surely aware of it, it makes me suspicious of your bona fides.
2. By the same token, you do no mention the anthropic principle. It is staggeringly unlikely that the materials conditions at the start of the universe would result in me, yet here I am. That's because I could not have this being unless the the conditions of being me were met. So too with the universe: there is no high entropy universe that would permit us to be aware of it. And because we live in a low entropy universe, here we are.
1. A complex simulation begs the question of what fine tuned, designed, and ordered the computer (or whatever) the simulation is running on. It does nothing to resolve the underlying issue but only pushes it back one step.
2. We discuss the multiverse which is based on the anthropic principle and we spell out the reasoning behind it.
Could you clarify how positing an intelligent being called god outside our universe who created our universe in some way that we can't begin to explain in terms of things we understand helps "resolve the underlying issue" instead of just "pushing it back one step" in any way that positing an intelligent programmer outside our universe who created a computer simulation of our universe does not?
I'm not sure how simulation theory is materially different from creationism. In fact, if I were categorizing simulation theory, is there a good argument for putting it in ANY other bucket? It literally posits that the universe is a creation.
It's a excellent question that we're going to develop in depth in season 3. The short answer is that the key difference is the idea of God that emerges from these arguments is a simple God, while an intelligent programmer outside our universe who created a computer simulation of our universe is a complex being. Therefore, it's sensible to ask what designed or fine tuned the complex programmer that has parts, while it doesn't make sense to ask what fine tuned and designed the simple God with no parts.
Interesting. So, is it that God didn't make computers and computer programs, or is it that he couldn't have used them as tools?
I guess we can pick this up after season 3. I look forward to finding out how an intelligent god is simple, especially given the watchmaker argument the text also spends significant time on which explains that a complex designer is necessary to create complexity in the world (fascinatingly, that analogy begins by contrasting a clearly intelligently designed object with its surrounding world before performing a bait-and-switch, but that is a separate conversation).
If you want to learn some of the background concepts in advance, this source lays out the idea of divine simplicity fairly thoroughly with a layman audience in mind.
https://iep.utm.edu/divine-simplicity/
General question: why do you expect to be able to unambiguously logically prove the existence of (the Christian, based on your text) God when the Bible tells us that faith in God is something that God grants people who seek him - that reaching God is not something people can do solely by their own effort?
Christians have been claiming to logically prove the existence of God since the early Church Fathers. I don't see any problem between logically proving the existence of God and Christianity. Belief in God does not equal faith (trust) in Him. Even the Demons believe, after all.
People have indeed been making the attempt, as you say; and yet somehow the matter remains stubbornly unsettled.
Meanwhile, e.g. Eph. 2:8-10: "For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith, and this not from yourselves; it is the gift of God, not by works, so that no one can boast."
Note that I am not attempting to argue against apologetics - finding flaws in proofs of God's nonexistence is also very much a time-honoured activity, albeit one with a considerable success record.
The Scholastics would say that the matter has been settled, and that any disagreement about it is the result of an inability to understand the proof. As I don't yet fully understand the proof(s) myself, I can't say for certain. But I don't think that having a logical proof of God is in conflict with salvation by grace, through faith, as a gift of God. Belief and faith are not the same thing.
We're not Christian and we aren't discussing religion. Also, we write in the first few paragraphs:
"To answer this question, we need to clarify what we mean by ‘prove’. If we mean an absolute proof, like a mathematical proof, then the answer is no. There is almost nothing other than mathematics that can be proven absolutely.
However, another meaning of proof is a science-based argument that clearly shows God exists. The argument must be able to convince a reasonable person that God is real. Using this more limited notion of proof, it’s conceivable that science is capable of proving God. That doesn’t mean that it’s easy to do - only that it’s possible."
But reasonable people have come to other conclusions via their own reasoning. Of course, the Principle of Sufficient Reason is the great bugaboo of Western philosophy and science.
Great pick on Instacart! The stock has gone straight up since you did your piece on it.
3 Body Problem.
(Spoilers follow.)
Someone please explain to me how its RottenTomatoes approval stats (77% with the pro critics, 81% audience) are possible, because holy hot damn, is it wildly incompetent at storytelling.
First, my background: I went to technical film school, and, between the ages of 19 to 26 or so, I made it a personal mission to see *every* movie that came out in every theater in my region (first Phoenix, then L.A.). I made an exception for The Barney Movie (although I never quite felt right about deliberately breaking that streak), and certain special-interest releases (Christian propaganda, etc). After seeing a movie, I'd read professional reviewers, like Ebert, for further education. I usually wrote my own reviews on Livejournal.
In other words, while I am not a professional critic, I certainly had the viewing-and-reflection habits of a professional critic, and thus I tend to have broadly similar standards and tastes of a professional, not-ideologically-captured critic.
Which is why I'm so bewildered that *any* professional critic could give 3 Body Problem a positive review. The choice to relocate the story from China to England had dire consequences on the believablity of a story which requires draconian government control, a China-sized government infrastructure and resources, and a culture of isolationism.
The show attempts to recreate the CCP's draconian power by imagining an unnamed British shadow agency to whom all other agencies and government officials unquestioningly defer. They are fully empowered to do CCP-esque things like send a heavily armed strike force to arrest everyone at a peaceful semi-religious gathering of 100+ people with no probable cause, to commandeer military personnel and equipment at whim, to detain people indefinitely with no probable cause, to access and monitor people's home security cameras, internet and phone communication, to straightforwardly murder 1000+ people *including children* living on a retrofitted container ship in pursuit of a MacGuffin, and do it *IN THE PANAMA CANAL*, in broad daylight, like *TEN MINUTES AFTER A CRUISE SHIP GOES BY* and surely like *TEN MINUTES BEFORE THE NEXT SHIP IS SCHEDULED TO COME ALONG,* without said large-scale murder and extremely visible carnage being noticed and investigated by the Panamanian, American, or any other government.
The issue of scale and isolationism is likewise just as absurd; I routinely laughed out loud at the scenes of a dozen British scientists formulating an elaborate nuclear powered space probe plan to gain intelligence about a coming alien invasion without any seeming awareness of, or intention to, consult with NASA, Elon Musk, the European Space Agency, the Chinese National Space Administration, etc about said plan. There is even a speech about how these people in the room are so very critical to future, and the show certainly seems to want the audience to believe that the future of the species depends on these people in this room, particularly our protagonist, and and no one else executing their plan.
Not until said plan was fully formed, anyway, at which point Shadow Government Guy picks up the phone and tells an American, "Hey, we have a plan and you're going to go along with it, we gotta borrow Cape Canaveral and your nuclear bombs."
There are almost as many other problems with the script as there are scenes across all the episodes. In one scene, a human who's been having phone calls with the aliens (or the aliens' AI) for decades reads the story of Little Red Riding Hood, at which point it the alien starts asking questions like, "why did Little Red Riding Hood want to get eaten by the wolf" and eventually asks enough questions that the human realizes that the aliens *don't understand the basic concept of deception,* lying, fiction, and presumably metaphor, exaggeration, figures of speech, etc. due to their form of instant psychic communication.
First, how did this not come up sooner after decades of chats? This is the very first time the human is reading the alien a work of fiction which prompts the alien to ask a couple of illuminating questions?
Second, bullshit, because the aliens (or their AI, which would of course be a reflection of their knowledge) have built an advanced video game for humans, which would require the aliens/alien AI to be capable of imagining and envisioning things that aren't real and didn't happen, and thus capable of fiction.
Third, bullshit again, because in the very first communication with the aliens, an alien tells a human, "don't try to reach out to us again, our civilization sucks," and when the human does it anyway, the next aliens are like, "hey, we're great and come in peace."
Fourth, bullshit again-again, the aliens/AI later take control of every screen on the planet to tell all humans, "YOU ARE BUGS," which stands in stark contrast to Shadow Government Guy definitively stating in one of the strategy meetings *after* this event, "we know the aliens can't lie" as an expository rule of this particular universe.
Then there are the hundreds of little details which are just wrong, like a 40 million dollar estate which includes a business and homes being liquidated and distributed into the bank account of one of its heirs within two days; the existence of a somewhat dilapidated bungalow perched in perfect isolation over a deserted beach by what sure looks like the White Cliffs of Dover, an inability to track a helicopter and a general lack of awareness about a retrofitted container ship with a 150ft satellite dish perched on its deck (is that even seaworthy for a transatlantic crossing?), an extremely high-value target in tremendous danger of assassination being escorted into the UN building through the front door and then getting shot in a bullet-proof jacket by a sniper who doesn't bother to reload and try again, despite said character being very obviously unharmed and with an unprotected head, and on and on and on.
And then there are all the other more ephemeral problems of the series; disastrously awful casting choices, laughably inept visual effects sequences, flat cinematography, a score which is somehow intrusive *and* boring at the same time, and on and on and on.
With the exception of perhaps one or two well-acted scenes and one well-written scene, the entire show is just...utter...clownshoes.
So I ask...*how?* How can anybody watch this show and not notice these glaring, unforgivable errors?
Errors which purportedly cost $20 million dollars an episode to produce?
And no, critics are not supposed to "shut their brains off and just enjoy" a given work of art; their whole job is to analyze it for people who don't want to invest any time in a work which might disappoint them.
"It doesn't have to be good" is never an excuse.
Practically all sci-fi is unrealistic because real science is boring, expensive, and slow in the best of circumstances. You simply wouldn't have a story where things regularly happen if you have to have a story that addresses all of those concerns. If you want to hew to perfect realism, just do actual science
Perfect realism is never a requirement of fiction, but consistent internal logic *is.* A piece of sci-fi or fantasy can introduce wildly impossible conditions, but so long as those conditions (explicit or implicit) are never sloppily contradicted within the story itself, the audience won't notice or care about the overall implausiblity of the premise.
3 Body Problem's biggest...problem...was its inability not to contradict its premise: It asks, what if extraterrestrials were headed here into the *real world* that we, the audience, live in? How would current-day humanity react?
And then it fails utterly to represent anything that remotely resembles the "real world" we all know.
And on top of that, it establishes (or appears to establish) several "rules" about the supernatural force coming to confront humanity and then contradicts those, too.
The Expanse is great, even though many things in it are unlikely or impossible, because the unlikely and impossible phenomena have their own set of "natural laws" (if you will) which are never contradicted. We accept natural law and so we can temporarily accept fictional phenomena that seem to operate under a natural law.
I'll happily go along with an argument that 3 Body Problem shouldn't have been made at all if it was going to have all the issues I outlined.
>I'm so bewildered that *any* professional critic could give 3 Body Problem a positive review.
Uh, The Fabelmans - easily one of the worst movies I've ever seen - won 2 Golden Globes and was nominated for 7 Oscars. If you have _any_ positive opinions of the current state of film criticism then you have much bigger problems than Three Body Problem.
I've had The Fabelmans on my queue for a while and now I might be intrigued enough to actually watch it! What made it "easily one of the worst movies?"
Despite my outrage in this thread, review aggregators are still almost always useful for identifying the very best, most competent media, especially when there is a unanimous or almost unanimous consensus a few weeks / months after release (96% or better on RT / Metacritic / etc). Sometimes that media isn't *for* me - it's a genre I dislike or has themes I loathe - but analyzing how a work executed its vision rather than if I just *liked* it is its own source of pleasure.
In fact, I can't think of 96%+ rated works that I would consider to be "objectively" bad the way 3 Body Problem's internal contradictions, plot holes, inconsistencies, and inexplicable character motivations make it "objectively" bad. I'm sure those works exist, but I'm not able to call any of them to mind.
Well watch The Fabelmans and get back to me. It's hard to explain how bad it is: wooden acting, no plot, self-indulgent self-worship, zero dramatic interest. It fails along almost every dimension. I saw it in the theater and my date and I spent the second half of the movie just making fun of it to each other.
Top Gun: Maverick has a 99% on Rotten Tomatoes. Need I say more? I generally use critics as an anti-signal when picking movies now.
Had I been writing a review professionally, I would have given Maverick a positive review.
Professionals (and near-pros) must judge according to what the movie is attempting to do, the way dogs are supposed to be judged according to their breed standard and not the judge's pet at home. While a critic's personal taste is inevitably going to play a part in reviewing, personal taste should never be the primary information in a review.
Maverick certainly managed to revive the tone and feeling of the first movie, and it had some truly exquisite flying sequences.
Would I have *personally* preferred to experience those exact same flying sequences but in a 45 minute IMAX documentary? Yes. I thought the story part of the movie was a little cheesy for my personal taste.
But it had a goal and it achieved its objective, and that makes it a "good" movie even if *I* didn't really enjoy it.
Really? How, exactly, does Maverick surviving a mach 10 ejection contribute to the movie's goals?
Also I disagree with your premise. If a movie decided to dramatize 1930's segregation in a way that justified the institution, I guarantee no critics would give it a positive review even if it succeeded at that goal. Critics absolutely weave their own tastes into their reviews, though some are better than others at distinguishing personal claims from universal ones.
I think you'd be surprised what critics can positively review despite their personal distaste for (virtually) universally objectionable content, case in point, A Serbian Film (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Serbian_Film).
And, hilariously, Roger Ebert on The Human Centipede (https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-human-centipede-2010).
While your hypothetical is ridiculous, in that such a movie could never be made and then receive the kind of wide distribution in 2024 which would merit professional criticism, I think that were such a movie to be made, the more intellectually honest reviewers would condemn its sinister effectiveness. Any reviewer with a formal background in film studies would be used to the practice after studying Leni Riefenstahl et al.
> How, exactly, does Maverick surviving a mach 10 ejection contribute to the movie's goals?
It's pleasing to the kind of audience who thinks the scene in the diner is so funny it's worth ignoring the absurdity of a mach 10 ejection...or not even being aware of or capable of noticing that a mach 10 ejection is absurd.
Now *I* am not that kind of audience, but I can understand when and why a given joke might land with a person who isn't me. Ditto certain kinds of story beats, overly insistent musical cues, impossible VFX, and so on.
Being able to say, "I didn't like this, but I can tell it's well-made, and people who liked [such and such similar thing] will love it" is arguably *THE* primary ability any critic needs to have.
"How, exactly, does Maverick surviving a mach 10 ejection contribute to the movie's goals?"
It gives everyone who would otherwise refuse to suspend disbelief re the many absurdities of the main storyline, the ability to opt out of that and enjoy the cinematically glorious final fantasy of a man being torn apart by a Mach 10 airstream somewhere over Owl Creek Bridge.
The fantasy was glorious, and I did enjoy it.
> Someone please explain to me how its RottenTomatoes approval stats (77% with the pro critics, 81% audience) are possible, because holy hot damn, is it wildly incompetent at storytelling.
You could say the same thing about A Song of Ice and Fire.
You know, it is weird that they relocated the setting to England instead of the US, considering the latter could plausibly get away with all of that.
Your post does make me wonder what the actual value of media criticism is, however. I'm in the middle of reading through Catch-22, a novel that has been praised to the point of being considered one of the best novels ever made. And I do really like it as well, it's just that... there's no way the average person would enjoy reading this. The way it's written is utterly unhinged and schizoid (which I personally find relatable). And of course, I was right: the initial reception to the book was incredibly divided. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catch-22#Reception (The New Yorker's criticism of it is particularly funny: "doesn't even seem to be written; instead, it gives the impression of having been shouted onto paper.")
Anyways, the point I'm trying to the make with this is that... what's the point of critiquing media in a way that is utterly irrelevant to most of the population? No offense to them, but the comment below me is infinitely more representative of the audience than you are. If the goal of a critic is, as you say, to "analyze it for people who don't want to invest any time in a work which might disappoint them" then the critics who rated this show highly are providing far more value to more people than you ever would. Why do you expect the world to cater to your tastes, or even give a damn about them in the first place?
I wanted to put in a comment here just to note that I loved Catch-22, and I'm not unhinged or schizoid! I wouldn't exactly say normal, but I'm a pretty middle-of-the-road reader.
I want to make the case for snobby criticism too. The function of criticism is definitely not only to sift things for the audience. Critics also notice what's new and important. I wouldn't say they get it right, exactly, but I do find when looking back that historical critics do home in on the novelties and important features of brilliant and/or controversial books, and recognise those things that will have an impact on audiences and other artists going forward.
Like... I'm trying to think of an example. I think I read some contemporary criticism of Arthur Conan Doyle, which took a negative view on the character of Holmes, and compared him unfavourably to other contemporary detectives - who have now been completely forgotten. That is, the critic spotted what stuck out, and even if they weren't able to appreciate it, they were right that it was the uniqueness of Holmes that defined those books - and in the end made them last, where other similar works have not.
> If the goal of a critic is, as you say, to "analyze it for people who don't want to invest any time in a work which might disappoint them" then the critics who rated this show highly are providing far more value to more people than you ever would. Why do you expect the world to cater to your tastes, or even give a damn about them in the first place?
Because the world indeed often caters to my tastes!
I fucking love truly great art, and it absolutely exists *for me and the people who have my taste.*
That's why Succession exists.
That's why Blue Eye Samurai exists.
That's why Arcane exists.
That's why Mad Men exits.
That's why Fleabag exists.
That's why The Expanse exists.
That's why Hannibal exists.
That's why Bluey exists.
That's why [etc a bunch of my other favorite highly-rated acclaimed media] exists.
That's why Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul and The Sopranos exist - even though I don't really *enjoy* them due to an idiosyncratic quirk. But I've seen enough of them to agree they exist to be great.
Because someone cared enough to make them *actually* good, so good that people just like me, people with an education and vast experience in media, universally agree not just that they're good, but about *how* good they are.
It sounds like many of the pro critics might have had their opinions stepped on a bit by Netflix, as was mentioned below, plus criticism has become considerably less reliable in an era of virtue-signaling. And to be fair, many of the top critics aggregated on Rotten Tomatoes offered qualified reviews, like:
"If one thing holds it back from greatness, it’s the characters, who could have used some alien technology to lend them an extra dimension or two. But the series’s scale and mind-bending turns may leave you too starry-eyed to notice," and,
"The themes are fascinating, the ideas fresh, and with a bit of fine-tuning, it could be great; here’s hoping Netflix bucks the trend and renews it for a second season."
But 3 Body Problem is so consistently clumsy that I'm legitimately stunned that the same community of pros who correctly post positive reviews for the titles I mentioned could offer positive reviews for 3 Body Problem.
I enjoyed this movie a lot. It is just a story, a fiction that is meant to be enjoyed not to make sense from the point of view of reality. Just like Star Wars or anything else that is a science fiction.
This movie also had some fantasy in political or social aspects. The same thing applies, not to be taken seriously but merely to be enjoyed, like a joke or fantasy.
Tastes differ. I don't like some fantasies. I couldn't finish watching Dune. It seemed too boring to me even though I cannot clearly explain why.
3 Body Problem however was mostly fun. I liked the characters, how they talked, how they acted, their accents, white cliffs of Dover, almost everything. Of course, the plot had too many holes and inconsistencies to take it seriously and likely it will not become a cult like Star Wars. And it doesn't need to. It is just for entertainment, to relax and have fun.
I provided my background to avoid this exact kind of comment.
"Someone please explain to me how its RottenTomatoes approval stats (77% with the pro critics, 81% audience) are possible, because holy hot damn, is it wildly incompetent at storytelling."
Same way Rings of Power got good reviews; the Big Beast making the show (Amazon in that case, Netflix in this) leans on such organisations to remove "reviewbombing by trolls", that is, if the review is negative or critical, it isn't counted.
So you end up with only the "five stars at minimum" reviews being scored for viewer reviews. Less than that, you're a review-bombing incel misogynist racist homophobe which is why you hate the Diverse Inclusive show, not that the show stinks.
Professional critics working for paying news media get the message that they're threatening to pull advertising if this gets a negative review, so they give it a positive one. Or reviewers who give negative reviews aren't invited to screenings, get the press packs late, and so on, so they can't issue a review in time.
Erik Kain talks about Rotten Tomatoes in the context of "True Detective: Night Country" and why the critics' reviews are so high:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fdv_z1ZfJA
Taking a closer look, a lot of the Top Critic reviews are qualified (lots of folk saying the acting is bad, but the ideas are interesting!), *and* it's worth noting that many times a critic is previewing the first 2-4 episodes, before the story has really had a chance to step on its own dick yet.
And of course RT is a measure of how many people agree a thing is "C+" or better; you can easily have a "high" RT score which reflects 92% of people agreeing a work is a "B," not that 92% = "A-."
I now do a lot of extra math to account for virtue signalling; my current personal algorithm includes both the aggregator sites scores *and* reviews by critics I've been following so long I have a deep understanding of their personal taste.
None of the latter had taken on 3 Body Problem yet when I saw it, but I can't wait until they do.
Edit - That Erik Kain video was satisfying, thanks for sharing. I had no idea Rotten Tomatoes automatically assigns a positive/negative, not the individual reviewers.
Yes, Erik's explanation helped me understand a lot better how it can be "Why are the critics on Rotten Tomato all giving this a 90%?" He's a professional critic, writes for Forbes, so he knows how it works.
As you say, he also says critics sometimes review based on the first two or three episodes of a show. He was the same with Rings of Power - based on the first two episodes, he was positive and telling everyone to give it a chance, it looked really good and he thought it would be good. Then the third episode made him revise downwards on that, and subsequent episodes converted him into One Of Us (the deplorable trolls and racists review-bombing, if you believed the studio). Looks great, writing is terrible.
Always interesting to see how the sausage is made!
LOL One of Us.
I am also One of Us.
As mad as I am at RoP for being incompetent, I'm even madder at it from distracting from House of the Dragon, which I think was mostly excellent! There were a few stumbles here and there, but it was satisfyingly free of many tiresome agendas, including inexplicable token casting and relentless Girl Boss-ism. It sure didn't *look* that way from the early publicity, but the story on its own was perfectly coherent and mostly very satisfying.
Oh, House of the Dragon definitely ate Rings' lunch, most people seem to consider it a much better show. Just better writing all round, in part because the creator is still alive and can advise on it, in part because they had room to extemporise as there wasn't "this is the story in canon" laid down as solidly, and in part because there was very little of the "updating for a modern audience" nonsense.
I think people who saw both agree that HotD was much better, but I suspect it didn't get nearly the attention it deserved because people were (rightly) still wary about how GoT ended, but also that when two somewhat similar works get released at vaguely the same time, "normies" will only ever see one of them.
And for whatever reason, it's usually the shittier one!
So you have Armageddon/Deep Impact, Volcano/Dante's Peak, now RoP / HotD.
Oh man. RoP sucked.
"Trolls" might influence user reviews, not critic reviews. And there has been plenty of time for people to review the show now even without advanced screening.
Critics are extremely averse to being seen as trolls, in league with trolls, and/or dupes of trolls. So if there's a broadly accepted narrative of "the racist misogynistic trolls are trying to convince people not to see this great movie", professional critics are highly motivated to give that movie a good review, or a meh review phrased to count as positive, or to suddenly find that they are too busy to review this particular movie. Doesn't matter whether that narrative is due to actual trolls, or studio PR flacks, or some combination of the two.
Note that even the 2016 "Ghostbusters" remake got 76% favorable reviews from critics on Rotten Tomatoes. Perhaps we can draw the conclusion that the Three Body Problem series is *very slightly* better than Ghostbusters 2016? Though I don't think the "racist misogynist trolls!" narrative is as strong with 3BP.
As for why critics are turning coward over this, note that critics are a subset of journalists. There have been high-profile incidents of journalists being hounded from the newsroom by staff revolts re their Crimes Against Wokeness, and the ability of journalists secure reliable paying jobs is nose-diving as a precipitous rate. It's not worth the risk, just to give a few honest reviews of crappy movies and TV shows.
The Metacritic score for the 2016 Ghostbusters is 60, 10 points lower than 3 Body Problem:
https://www.metacritic.com/movie/ghostbusters-2016/
I didn’t like it compared to the books but I think for some people watching it they probably hadn’t ever heard of the Fermi Paradox before, so it was probably so mind blowing they didn’t pick up on the other stuff.
Also, I’ve always thought the books had a little bit of a blind spot with the sophons. Simply revealing that sophons are possible would be much more insightful and valuable than particle collider experiments. We’d have direct evidence that there are extra dimensions than we now and that one of the things you’d an do with it is make a proton the size of a planet.
I liked it, and found it improved on the (first) book in some ways https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2024/03/29/the-three-body-problem/
The book doesn't depend on China specifically having an authoritarian government, rather there's an international effort against the enemies of humanity (the US/NATO is explicitly part of it). China alone could not interfere with the Panama Canal, but the US of course created the country of Panama so it could have such control in the past.
The "bugs" thing is not a lie. Mike Evans tells the aliens their enemies are "pests", and they ask him to explain what that means, and he tells them it means easily disposed of.
Why not send the message "YOU ARE PESTS," then?
I haven't seen the TV show and won't, but this is a direct quote from the official English translation of the book.
Bugs was given as a synonym for pests, and it's shorter.
I am not going to argue with you about plot holes because it heavily depends on accepted premises what counts as such an error.
In any case, the Netflix TV show is an amalgam of all three books of the trilogy (Remembrance of Earth's Past), not just the first book as sources like Wikipedia claim. Roughly: things that happen in China, the game, and fight against ETO (ship scene) are from the first book; everything to do with Wallfacers is second book; sending a probe with the dying's friend brain is third book. Many characters occur only in one of the books, and the group of friends as depicted in the series does not exist.
In the trilogy, most of the issues you mention make a lot more sense because the world around them has been constructed in more detail. In the TV show, the events are constructed to depend on each other; in the books, many events happen in parallel without a connection (that I recall) other than happening in the same era.
On to your question, "How can anybody enjoy that show": You have a point regarding many issues, but I was too drawn in by the theme: What happens if humankind receives the attention of a vastly superior civilization?
Edit. I totally forgot: If you want to nitpick, a crucial part of the story's premise is flawed. As far as we know, quantum entanglement does not help communicating information faster than light. Entanglement is possible over large distances, but querying the states would break the entanglement.
>On to your question, "How can anybody enjoy that show": You have a point regarding many issues, but I was too drawn in by the theme: What happens if humankind receives the attention of a vastly superior civilization?
My problem is that I've experienced the theme executed much better, elsewhere, so I can't be forgiving of the absurd clumsiness of 3 Body Problem in this, the Year of Our Lord 2024, especially not when it was produced by show-runners as powerful as David Benioff & D. B. Weiss.
If Netflix wanted to spend $20 million an episode adapting a sci-fi novel trilogy about humans receiving the attention of a vastly more advanced civilization, they should have adapted Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis (or Lilith's Brood) series.
Likewise, the movie adaptation of Michael Faber's Under the Skin, while diverging wildly from much of the content and the tone of the novel*, also managed to execute the theme far more skillfully.
* The novel is the best horrible thing I've ever read. It was so disturbing I had to treat it like the videotape in The Ring and immediately give it to a friend.
Given that the aliens in Independence Day were taken out by a Mac laptop, we can argue whether or not they were in fact "superior," but I'd argue that even that goofy movie is much better at what it's trying to be than 3 Body Problem, and mostly with better-executed, far more exciting VFX.
It's just not okay for something like 3 Body Problem to suck as much as it does.
The scientific inaccuracy that bothered me the most (in the first book, the only bit I've seen) was the depiction of the three body problem itself, which the author clearly did not understand despite naming the book after it.
To me all that stuff was justifiable. The part that came off completely ridiculous and artificial was the gang of protagonists (they gathered every important character in the books from across centuries and made them all college friends for some reason) who're supposed to be brilliant scientists but all act like a college improv group (especially the angry-social-activist woman who's supposed to be a scientist/CEO but acts like a college social justice activist, where they try to make up for her implausibility by having everyone constantly talk about how brilliant and amazing she is). The only characters that acted remotely realistic (or at all like their book counterparts) were Jin and the cancer guy, and they hardly got any scenes together (which is a shame because the scenes they did get were some of the few the show really pulled off).
There's something here about hollywood diversity - they took a story that was genuinely different than most of what hollywood writes (and was written in an actually different culture), removed most of the actual diversity in the tone (to the point where, as you point out, what parts of it are left stop making much sense), then stuck in a bunch of female/black/brown/LGBT characters who all act like hollywood writers and their college friends to achieve "diversity". It's very frustrating to watch (but had just enough good scenes that I still did).
I LOLed so hard when one of the characters observed the nano fiber chick was "beautiful, but in a boring way," and "looks like the lead hot girl in a Speed 3 sequel."
It was much, much funnier than they intended it to be, I think.
The only LGBT person is the son of the detective, barely a character.
Changing the culture is actually a matter of contractual obligation. Tencent made a Chinese version, so the rights to a Chinese version were still exclusive. Netflix was permitted to make another version only if it wasn't Chinese, with the amount of Chinese dialogue being limited.
You don't have to shut off your critical faculties, but if you're going to criticise...
There are several errors in your understanding of the plot. For example, Mike Evans has not been having conversations with the San Ti for decades. Communication was extremely slow before, as it was limited by light speed. The sophons, which allow instantaneous communication, arrived in the solar system only recently - in fact, it's their arrival that kicks off the events of the show.
The video game was not created by the San Ti, but by the human organisation, aided by San Ti technology.
Wade is portrayed as British in the show, but works for a multinational agency. In the books, he was CIA.
You are bugs is a metaphor, not a lie.
And did you not learn from Snowden and Zero Dark Thirty that western governments are capable of some pretty shady stuff?
...
That said... yeah, there are a bunch of plot holes.
I liked it, and I assume it got good reviews because other people liked the core element of Ye Wenjie. A bit like the way Orson Scott Card explored the idea of the extermination of an entire intelligent species, this story looks at the convulsions of China and asks, is this enough to make you lose faith in humanity? Would it make you exterminate them? And what would that mean for the rest of your life? I thought both Rosalind Chao and Zine Tseng were good, and held the whole thing together.
But I admit that the rest of it was very average; and my enthusiasm may in part be driven by the fact that I like the book, and like Chinese-international flavoured media in general.
Wade worked for the CIA in the books? I thought he worked for some chinese agency, but it's been a while since I read them.
I think he had worked for the CIA in the past, but worked for some new super international agency by the time the story starts.
I wonder if something like the Rotten Tomatoes scores happens because it's an aggregate of up/down votes. In other words, if 100% of people think a show is 51% good, it'll get a 100% RT score. Meanwhile, a show that turns off 30% of it's viewers to say it's only 49% good (only 2% different from the other movie), but the other 70% of the voters think is the GOAT, it will only get a 70% RT score. This despite the fact that most people will agree that the movie that got a 70% RT score is much better than the one that got a 100%.
This is a good point, but I always skim the "headlines" critics submit to represent the tone/content of their review, and there were many glowing ones!
Though to be fair, many of the reviews marked as "positive" were decidedly qualified.
Metacritic tries to weigh how much critics liked or disliked something. It has a 70 there https://www.metacritic.com/tv/3-body-problem/
Yeah, I didn't read the book, so my criticism is taking the show exactly as it is presented.
I did watch the show with two other fairly savvy and sophisticated media-viewers, and the fact that none of the three of us picked up on many of the details you cite, including that Mike Evans only recently started chatting with the San Ti (how recently, exactly?) is sort of its own proof of how bad the show is at communicating extremely critical details to an audience completely unfamiliar with the book.
And there are still holes to poke even in your explanations - if instant communication only began with the arrival of the sophons, how did the human organization get the tech for the video games, which (I think?) existed before the sophons which disrupted the collider data (as that is the first scene of the show)? Like, literally, how was the headset tech even delivered to the human org? Where did they get the materials to manufacture them, and who manufactured them? Like, where are the facilities to make the 100+ years in the future headsets?
And why do the San Ti even have a tech for experiencing fiction if they don't understand the concept of fiction?
We can quibble if the scale of Wade's power is remotely plausible even as a CIA executive, but if the show is saying he works for a multinational agency with access to global resources, why is he limiting his team to a handful of British physicists and not collaborating with, you know, everyone else?
Forgive me, I don't mean to swipe at you or your enjoyment of the show, but poking at plot holes is as fun for me as popping bubble wrap.
I can imagine San Ti not understanding lie and at the same time enjoying fiction. On the Earth we call it autism. Many people don't understand autism. San Ti could be extreme version of autistic group mind that somehow they missed the concept of lies. They could probably understand the concept when they are explained of it but they might never actually engaged in it so far.
The problems with the plot I noticed immediately was about entanglement that actually doesn't provide instant communications. Just have to accept like faster than light travel.
Another thing where I needed to suspense my disbelief was accelerating a proton with extra dimensions. Would the laws of physics really make it possible to hide the mass and yet allow to accelerate it without additional energy?
The origins and purpose of the futuristic game wasn't really explained enough.
Social aspects: Someone from Sat Ti sent a warning that they are going to exterminate. But they didn't. From their capabilities through sophons they could really do it, kill all intelligent life on Earth and arrive to pristine planet with all resources. Instead San Ti behaviour mimics humans. Respecting other life but also worried that it could kill or subjugate them. Potential fight for earth resources after their arrival could turn unpredictable, so both sides were panicking.
There are so many problems with the story that I actually couldn't even remember all of them.
If the San Ti can control people's sight, then why not just...shut it off?
Everyone. Everywhere. The entire planet, blind.
Writers need to be really careful not to introduce obvious tools and then not use them for non-obvious reasons.
The answer is simple – San Ti don't want to kill humans or significantly harm them.
They just wanted to stop human scientific progress so that when they arrived, they wouldn't be destroyed by humans.
Some believed that San Ti are evil, others believed them to be benevolent like gods. Maybe neither would be truth.
I was reading about tribes that lived in the Canary Islands and how they all got wiped out or made slaves after being discovered by Spanish. And yet, many other tribes who were more advanced all around the world survived contacts with others. Apparently both civilizations have to be approximately on the same level for both of them to survive.
Why would the San Ti deliver the message...
YOU ARE BUGS
...in the most traumatizing and intimidating way imaginable if their intention is to eventually peacefully coexist with humans, despite being "afraid" of them?
If that is their plan, this action is, frankly, the r-word that we're not allowed to say anymore, in the very specific '90s slang meaning of that word (which sadly has no contemporary equivalent).
Edit to add: Also, if the San Ti intend to peacefully co-exist with humans, how come the very first message from a San Ti to earth was "Yo, we suck, absolutely do NOT try to call us again?"
Just on one of those - the game isn't a fiction, it's a historical reenactment.
It's fiction in that the players are able to take actions that didn't occur in history. They aren't witnessing a record of historical events, they're interacting with it, which makes it not-history anymore.
Also, given that the Santee claim to not have human form, casting them as humans makes it historical fiction, at best.
The point about human forms is a good one! I don't know any way to square that that lines up with the Netflix presentation.
I can think of counterpoints to the other objection, but they all rely on knowledge/presentation from the book, not the Netflix series. The TV writers did a lot of work compressing and streamlining the story (and, honestly, made it a much better *story* for their trouble - go watch the Ten cent Production version to see a more faithful reenactment of the book to see what I mean) and in the process they lost some number of important details that make the whole thing hang together.
Wade seemed to be collaborating with a lot of people other than just the main characters.
Yeah... working at Oxford (home of the Oxford Particle Accelerator!) doesn't really make you British. The lead has a Kiwi accent and comes from China; the nanomaterial scientist speaks with an American accent and comes from somewhere else.
The idea of holographic/full sensory communication doesn't really imply fiction. You could use it to communicate truth over a distance, as many highly truthful Netflix documentaries do.
I dunno, you're obviously right that it leans hard on a lot of tropes. It's not making the effort to create a new or realistic vision of the future. It's like: imagine if we lived in the land of Sci-fiOpia - you know, the place where The Creator and Edge of Tomorrow and Tomorrow War and Inception took place - now here's a story to present my ideas about how/why civilisations die. If you don't like the show you start picking holes in the underlying tropes; if you like the show, you let the tropes carry you along.
All right, conceded, not every core character is British, however, they're all apparently *living* in England when the story kicks off, and so Wade was able to collect them from an incredibly localized pool of experts. What a lucky coincidence they were all school chums living in or making an extended visit in the same general area!
One of my disappointments is that many of the professionals reviewers are saying there are fresh new ideas in this show - which is a load of utter nonsense, as you observed. The reviews plus folk raving about the novel ten years ago motivated my watch group to give the show a shot, and I'm still just boggled that the public "consensus" was so misleading, even with the plausible explanation of Netflix stepping on the different review aggregator sites.
Sci fi doesn't have to be tropey and/or bad. The Expanse was executed almost perfectly. Sense-8 was executed almost perfectly (aside from the rushed ending due to cancelation). The OA was executed perfectly, RIP.
So far no one has made a very passionate or robust defense of the show, but I'd still be interested to hear one.
I mean... compare anything to The Expanse, and it's going to come off badly. I loved that show too, but it didn't quite escape trope city. The crew of the Rosi just happening to end up at the centre of every galactic crisis... the first mate just happening to have a child with the most dread pirate of the solar system... one of the others just happening to be bezzie mates with various supercriminals back on earth... I mean, talk about the small group that turns out to be at the center of everything trope! And in series 1, the renegade cop who no one listens to... But in The Expanse they didn't grate.
It is worth realising that if you've seen about 10 years' worth of TV, you know more than most TV reviewers. It's a badly paid job for newspaper interns. And these days, increasingly captured as part of the hype machine.
If you have any interest in the sci-fi aspects of Three Body, you could check out the best sci-fi channel on YouTube, which is called Quinn's Ideas (must be no relation to the Al Quinn below!). He has liked the books and the show, and will tell you all about them in excruciating detail.
LOL alright, fair enough re: The Expanse; there were a number of coincidences that brought the core Rosi crew together for most crisis.
And I completely forgot about the first season, which I consider to be pretty damn weak.
BUT. In my defense, the last couple seasons of the show were so strong I literally forgot the first season was kind of weak. That's a neat trick, and everyone who produced the show should get some credit for that!
I'm ironically watching the show, having read (and hated) the books, which were a complete illogical mess. Given what they were working with, I don't think it's *that* bad yet, but it is certainly not at all good.
I think nearly everything sucks, especially given the low-brow aim most media has these days. But I did want to second your endorsement of The OA--best thing Netflix has done by far. The only other Netflix series I would consider good is Unbelievable (a limited series).
I still spontaneously think about The OA, like once a month or so.
I haven't heard of Unbelievable, but if you're a fellow OA fan, I will add it to my queue forthwith
Most of the "Oxford Five" don't work for Wade. Most of the people who do work for him aren't members of the Five.
The OA was amusing, but the word "perfectly" doesn't belong near that show.
Uh, what?
Aside from the jolly fat guy who gets murdered, everyone gets sucked into one of Wade's projects / plans. They might not be his direct reports on a corporate or government org charge, but objecting to "working on a project he's spearheading" vs "working *for* him" is pedantic.
And The OA perfectly executed its storytelling *objective* (well, until cancellation was forced to leave it hanging), thus the word "perfect" is indeed justified here.
Jackass is another example of something which perfectly executes its objective - whether it's to your personal taste or not, you can't deny it does what it sets out to do.
I love The OA but I'm very aware it's not for everyone.
Wait, people are just outright linking to their blogposts and not getting banned for doing that? Cool, here's mine:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/t9dGiqj9M3Ataaueo/d-and-d-sci-the-mad-tyrant-s-pet-turtles
(It's a data science challenge I'm currently running on LessWrong; should take an evening or two to play, depending on skill level; if you post an answer before next Monday you get bragging rights when I release the solution.)
After being here for a bit, I think the rule is mostly “Don’t be obnoxious and make sure it’s relevant.”
There is a very loosely enforced suggestion to please not do it more than twice.
I have kind of a strange question that's sort of about music theory kind of but not your typical music theory concepts such as chords, scales, etc. Maybe it has more to do with the psychoacoustics than music theory. But I also don't hear psychoacoustics people talking about this either. I was going to ask it in Reddit, but I don't even know what Reddit would be appropriate for this, what category it falls into.
My question is kind of about how we perceive rhythm instruments. I'm wondering why is it that drums are so important to music, especially modern music such as rock and jazz. Why is it that we need to have a separate instrument that doesn't really play notes, but just hits the rhythm? As anyone who is a great musician will tell you, when you're playing, listeners should always be able to feel the pulse of the rhythm through your playing. This stands true whether or not you're playing guitar. piano, or just about any other instrument.
Every instrument in the band makes its own rhythm, so why is it important that we have another separate instrument devoted entirely to just creating the rhythm? Drums add so much to music, but I'm not sure I understand why. Especially when there's a backbeat, drums make the music feel like it moves, whereas if they're not there, the music simply feels much more static
Taking a wider ethnomusicology view, the role of drums in various genres of music around the world is quite diverse. In some African music it's all about the drums and polyrhythms and the role of melody and harmony is small. An Irish air has no drums at all, maybe not even a meter.
Not every genre with drums has a backbeat. It could be argued, depending on how you define it, that the backbeat only dates from the early 20th century with the precursors to jazz, from whence it spread to blues, r&r, American pop, and now, thanks to American cultural imperialism, the whole world.
Just gimme some of that rock and roll music
Any old way you choose it
It's got a backbeat, *you can't lose it*
Any old time you use it
Gotta be rock roll music
If you wanna dance with me
--Chuck Berry [emphasis mine]
The back beat in the kinds of 20th century American music intended for dancing makes them extremely easy, indeed near irresistible, to dance to--you can't lose the beat no matter what the other instruments are doing. And because rock and roll in particular began life as music to dance to at parties, the backbeat became an integral part of it across time and genres. You might say the form grew around them.
You don't absolutely need the drums to tell you what the groove is supposed to be when you're listening to "Baby I'm-A Want You" by Bread or "Where the Ocean Meets the Eye" by the Stratford 4, and you're likely not dancing anyway, but when a form of music has evolved over decades to include a backbeat, it will sound very odd and static without them, and the artists will only omit them when they're trying to make it odd or static.
Hmmm. Until the 20th century percussion was as much about accent and timbre as rhythm e.g, a snare drum alongside a flute in colonial patriotic songs.
The best explanation I’ve heard for drums in rock and jazz is that it puts sex in the music, a primal feeling that takes a song from merely an interesting melody to lustful (or martial in some cases). I’ve heard it theorized that the original evolutionary use of music was drums leading up to battle. The synchronization makes the fighting force seem bigger and more disciplined.
The original evolutionary use of music was to scare off predators that might want to eat us if they caught us alone.
http://www.meltingasphalt.com/music-in-human-evolution/
That's just, like, your opinion, man.
By which I mean anybody can come up with a "just so" story about how some aspect of culture evolved, but I wouldn't take any of them too seriously.
A relevent Chesterton quote, from "The Everlasting Man":
"Science is weak about these prehistoric things in a way that has hardly been noticed. The science whose modern marvels we all admire succeeds by incessantly adding to its data. In all practical inventions, in most natural discoveries, it can always increase evidence by experiment. But it cannot experiment in making men; or even in watching to see what the first men make. An inventor can advance step by step in the construction of an aeroplane, even if he is only experimenting with sticks and scraps of metal in his own back-yard. But he cannot watch the Missing Link evolving in his own back-yard. If he has made a mistake in his calculations, the aeroplane will correct it by crashing to the ground. But if he has made a mistake about the arboreal habitat of his ancestor, he cannot see his arboreal ancestor falling off the tree. He cannot keep a cave-man like a cat in the back-yard and watch him to see whether he does really practise cannibalism or carry off his mate on the principles of marriage by capture. He cannot keep a tribe of primitive men like a pack of hounds and notice how far they are influenced by the herd instinct. If he sees a particular bird behave in a particular way, he can get other birds and see if they behave in that way; but if he finds a skull, or the scrap of a skull, in the hollow of a hill, he cannot multiply it into a vision of the valley of dry bones. In dealing with a past that has almost entirely perished, he can only go by evidence and not by experiment. And there is hardly enough evidence to be even evidential. Thus while most science moves in a sort of curve, being constantly corrected by new evidence, this science flies off into space in a straight line uncorrected by anything. But the habit of forming conclusions, as they can really be formed in more fruitful fields, is so fixed in the scientific mind that it cannot resist talking like this. It talks about the idea suggested by one scrap of bone as if it were something like the aeroplane which is constructed at last out of whole scrap-heaps of scraps of metal. The trouble with the professor of the prehistoric is that he cannot scrap his scrap. The marvellous and triumphant aeroplane is made out of a hundred mistakes. The student of origins can only make one mistake and stick to it."
While I rarely agree with Chesterton on much, I do agree on this. Prehistoric physical evidence (particularly evolutionary evidence) is _sparse_. And there are far too many just-so stories. I've seen articles spin whole prehistoric diet hypotheses out of a handful of 16O/18O isotope ratio measurements - barely sufficient to broadly constrain the ratio of two very broad food groups.
Not my opinion specifically. Kevin Simler writes the Melting Asphalt blog, I write this one https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2015/09/10/kevin-simlers-melting-asphalt/
I'm aware it's not your blog, but you are the one who said "The original evolutionary use of music was to scare of predators." Which was the sentiment my comment was aimed at.
"Of all singing creatures, humans are the only ones who use rhythm."
...Wait what? Obviously birds have a sense of rhythm as well, have they not heard them sing? They'll also perfectly capable of dancing to rhythm as well, as seen in plenty of videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8pMJuEIOd8
More precisely, humans and some birds are the only known creatures that can entrain to a rhythm. Other primates cannot. When, how and why humans evolved this ability is controversial.
I think that’s the piece I first heard it from. It seems like for natural predators, such as lions, yelling and throwing rocks would be enough. (On hiking trails in Colorado I never saw advice to sing if you see a mountain lion.) But for human-ish predators chanting and moving in rhythm would be more intimidating, which is what that piece says.
I often hear advice to make noise on the trail *preemptively* to alert human-averse animals like black bears of your presence, so as not to startle them and provoke a violent response.
Since this is something you're supposed to do every so often, rather than in response to an attack, it does lend itself both to singing and "drumming." Sometimes I make up fun bear-related lyrics and sing them to the tune of popular songs.
I think an actual lion would not be that intimidated by a single human.
Lion evolution occurred in an environment where humans traveled in packs. Almost certainly the evolved response to a single human includes the suspicion that there's probably a pack of them not too far away.
As a drummer and someone with a Master's degree in music, this might one of the few questions I'm able to attempt an answer for. My sense is it comes from different things happening at once:
Music can be divided simplistically into three parts -- melody, harmony, rhythm. Often, an instrument will primarily contribute to one of those elements. E.g., in a jazz trio, sax = melody, piano = harmony, and drums = rhythm. While each instrument overlaps somewhat into the other categories, having the drums lead the rhythm helps bring to the fore those elements that otherwise aren't being lead so well by the harmonic and melodic instruments. A good example is in a phrase of music. The melody will often have a contour (e.g., ascends, hits a high note, then descends to starting note) that gives it a sense of complete-ness. In the harmony, you'll have the chord progression ending with a cadence (e.g., a V - I). To accomplish the same thing rhythmically, you'll have the drums play an ostinato (the beat) followed by a fill at the end. All three elements--descent to starting note, cadence, the fill--contribute to a stronger sense than any one instrument alone.
You mention 'drums make the music feel like it moves'. There's an excellent book called 'Note Grouping' by James Thurmond (highly recommended). In it, he tries to explain the mechanics of why certain musical performances feel like they 'move' or have motion (but not from a human psychology perspective). To summarize (overly) simply--he says it's placing accent or stress on the 'weaker' beats of a measure or phrase. E.g., in a bar of 4/4, putting the accent on 2 and 4. I agree with him and I think drums are a straightforward way to accomplish that in both genres you mention.
There's probably more to mention, but hope this is a helpful start!
Thanks so much! I'd love to know more about what you're saying about the backbeat. That's another niggling question that's alway been on my mind that I haven't been able to find by searching online; why does a backbeat particularly feel so powerful and moving? I'll look up Note Grouping, too
You can imagine a performance of 'Amazing Grace' with a straightforward crescendo up to the high note and then diminuendo to the last note. Thurmond's point is keeping that crescendo / diminuendo but adding subtle stresses to notes on weaker beats (and vice versa for notes on stronger beats) in the phrase will help give the phrase much more motion. E.g., at the end of the first line, putting 10% more emphasis on the 'the' in 'the sound', helps with the motion. I think a backbeat is a distillation of this principle.
In a 4/4 bar, beat 1 is the strongest, followed by beat 3. So at the level of the downbeat (talked about in 'Note Grouping'), the snare in a backbeat puts stress on the two weakest of the four downbeats, giving it a simple kind of motion mentioned above.
As to why that provides motion, my best guess is it relates to tension and release. In a simple chord progression, like I - iv - IV - V - I, the V chord has that strong pull to resolve to I, and when it does, it provides a nice release of its tension. I think a similar thing is going on rhythmically. In 4/4, you feel a pull to end things on beat 1, so beat 4 has a similar pull to beat 1. By emphasizing beat 4, you are heightening the tension, so to speak. The same can be said of beat 2 in relation to beat 3.
I think this is also why, if a drummer is going to drop one of the two snare hits in a backbeat, it's almost always dropping the hit on beat 2, since it's the hit on beat 4 that provides the most rhythmic tension. In jazz, you see something similar with its standard drum beat (ride pattern with hi-hat on 2 and 4), but taken further with the use of 'the big 4', an extra emphasis on beat 4 in certain styles.
This is all very well put, and certainly may help explain why so many modern songs and genres routinely include backbeat drums even when the music isn't meant to be full of primal sex or aggression.
Did you mean I - vi - IV - V - I, btw?
Thanks!
I did, good catch.
Wow, that's really interesting! I think a lot about tension and release, particularly about how beat 4 leads into beat 1, etc. I've read Hal Galper's Forward Motion, which focused on that a lot. But I never really thought too much about how backbeat hits on 2 and 4 are a part of that principle, too.
So if i'm understanding you correctly, you're sort of saying that it's kind of a mini phrase that happens every beat 2 and 4, with the start of it on 2, and the end of it on 3 (and same for 4 to 1). I always used to think of it the opposite way, as a call and response between (in rock) the kick on 1 and the snare on 2.
Just a listener, but drums have a physical effect that other instruments don't. A loud enough bass drum will make my heart beat with it, or at least resemble the effect.
Most questions like this are best answered by music history, since music is no less affected by fashion than literature or visual arts.
The quick history is that military style bands (think Sousa) are the direct ancestor of jazz writ large, and therefore rock and hip hop. Military bands music is designed for entraining coordinated movement in large groups. Sound familiar?
Percussion (unvoiced) is the most refined tool for marking time and coordinating movements, whether military drills or dancing. It has a clearer transient than any other instrument type, and the broad spectrum noise “cuts” through the ensemble.
That being said, you’re right that anything can groove, but percussion is the most “insistent” way to do it.
would disagree with this for jazz.
consider pieces in which drums are important not just to keep the rhythm. here, for the rhythm piano and bass do just fine:
https://open.spotify.com/album/6hRtnGFtIzAlYh05Ehog4h?si=gbk5G4JzQSWKOeCKkVrzOQ
https://open.spotify.com/track/1J24vNYCuLaJ3qm0SioL8A?si=9306b67b5fc047b4
drum solo here, is it just about rhythm?
https://open.spotify.com/track/01qqs2S9rb01JaXSYiaBk0?si=8e0b54b54a0e4b9f
what about this one? drums are barely noticeable yet the whole piece is about the rhythm:
https://open.spotify.com/track/5xQi0S19LLAy7EXIapTYY0?si=542facbef28548b4
So, in many cases drums are not for keeping the rhythm, but more like to enrich and widen the spectrum, make the music more nuanced and interesting.
I think the drums do a lot of work in those songs, except maybe the last one since I couldn't really hear them at all. But take that first song for example. Really try to imagine what it would sound like if the drums laid out for a chorus then came back in, really visualize it. I think for that chorus, to me it would sound like a bit of a rhythmic break was taken, then when the drums came back in, it would feel like the piece was actually starting up again, and moving again. Yes, the piano keeps the rhythm, but it doesn't "drive forward" like it would when drums are in.
yes, drums do help to drop the bass )
This is a great question! The following is a guess from someone who doesn't really know what they are talking about. But my guess is that there is a tradeoff between how much initial transient response you get from a sound vs how nicely distributed the sound is over the frequency spectrum. In order to get the hard-hitting crack of a snare drum, you have to let in a range of frequencies that deviates from the harmonic series, which means you're no longer playing a recognizeable note.
A piano can be considered a type of a percussion instrument: when you press a key, a hammer hits a string. And piano can be played very percussively, e.g. Bartok, ragtime, etc. But you'll never get it quite as percussive as a snare or a kick, because you're still demanding that the sound has the right overtones.
So the benefit of adding percussion to a song is that you can strengthen the sense of rhythm by adding this special ingredient that maximizes the initial transient. Blueberries have some sugar in them, but you can still make your blueberry pie taste better by adding some refined sugar to the filling.
Hey guys.
Come see about me and my slice of Internet bullshit when we ask the question - why do some people feel the need to do unpaid PR for those more powerful than themselves? I wish I had the answer, but come see what I wrote about it anyways 💋
https://kyleimes.substack.com/p/doing-unpaid-damage-control-for-the
Have you given any thought at all to the possibility that some people have opinions on the subject of TED, Neil Young, etc., that differ from yours?
I know that people have different opinions on things than me, yes. I'm curious what part of my words came across as opinion, though. For instance, it's not my opinion that Neil's actions and reasons contradict his previous ones, it's that they meet the definition of the word. And that's kinda the point. If you're going to aggressively push back on that observation, you either don't know what a contradiction is, or you have some other agenda that I cannot understand. I'd love to know which one it was, or if it's something I haven't thought of yet, but people only ever launch into personal attacks at this point. Which I'm going to keep taking as a sign that they don't have any other actual points to make.
Against the extermination of hard games
https://grauwacht.substack.com/p/against-the-extermination-of-hard
In this post, I argue against the extermination of hard video games, that is games that are hard to beat, even on the easiest difficulty setting. Those who wish to exterminate these games usually do so by broadly advocating for the implementation of easy modes. I deal with two main arguments, the "narrow liberal" argument and the argument from accessibility. The narrow liberal argument simply asserts that the inclusion of an easy mode does not harm those who wish to play on a harder setting. I refute this by showcasing advantages of unique difficulty settings. The argument from accessibility states that accessibility concerns should trump concerns regarding the enjoyability of the game. I show why this doesn't make sense. Lastly, I take a broader perspective and end up with the metapolitical implications of applying a "narrow" or "broad" liberal worldview.
Several observations:
I don't think It's necessarily true that adding easy modes will detract significantly from dev efforts. To take a kind of joke-y example, I wanna be the Guy scaled its difficulty by removing saves the higher it goes, Doom Eternal scales damage and number of AI decisions per time down (this was already a parameter they could tune, and presumptively did when play testing). Slay the Spire is very winnable at low ascensions, where I think basically everyone can win, until Ascension 20 heart where it's basically impossible for a blind player to succeed.
These are examples of the culture correctly segregating into hardcore vs more casual people, and as far as I can see this can be accomplished by having the devs state a particular canonical difficulty level, or to have an easy base game and a very difficult (but still playable) set of hard mode modifiers.
Imo it's not true that everyone has to do game design if there is a difficulty slider, Doom Eternal for example has the director saying that Nightmare is the intended difficulty, and as far as I can see everyone into hard games did just that, while my more casual friends played on Hurt Me Plenty or ultraviolence. (although, yes I agree with you that people who are asking for easier DOOMs because they godstomped 2016 are wrong!) although it's funny, all of my hard game loving friends complained a lot about the BFG, a weapon with highly limited ammo that can trivialize any single encounter: they don't like having to guess which encounter will be the hardest, and thus hold onto ammo overly long! Talk about not wanting to do game design!
Also if you're unaware, Sekiro, while being undeniably the hardest from game to complete, does have consumable plus sub weapon usage as a way to substantially trivialize fights. All of the damage buffs can substantially shorten fights, and some sub weapons can reduce a phase to sub 10 second affair. This is not obvious and considering how much grinding you'd need to find this out it's not surprising most people don't discover it.
Anyway if you want some hard games, here's a list:
Doom Eternal, with both DLCs and all master levels.
Recommendation: Nightmare, although I think doing ultraviolence first in the base game then Nightmare for everything else is better if you get stuck for, say, 2 hours on the first level
Lies of P
Recommendation: It's a soulslike. It's a really good one too.
Aeterna Noctis
Recommendation: Noctis mode, since that was the only mode until devs listened to complaints about the game being too hard
Ravi Ribi, alternative item mode
Recommendation: no consumables or town buffs. First playthrough Hard into second playthrough Bunny Extinction
Note that both Aeterna Noctis and Rabi Ribi are 2d metroidvanias.
Didn't Elden Ring sell over 20 million copies? I don't think hard games are in much danger of extermination.
Sure. But FromSoft games are always the target of these articles. It already feels like they almost incorporated a form of easy mode in the ash summons. And, as I wrote in the post, there really aren't all that many alternative games that offer unique, difficult challenges.
Eh, not convinced. I'm of the position that
* games are probably better for having an easy mode
* if they don't then that's the dev's choice and that's fair
* if people would like to enjoy the game but it's too hard then they can complain and that's fair too
So I read your post and honestly started skipping somewhere in the second sections. I was just disagreeing so much already.
I do not feel it would be productive to go through it point by point and express why I disagree, so let me pick 3 disagreements I have with the first section, in case you want to discuss.
1. You argue that the statement "Just add easy mode, literally no cost only benefit" is wrong and disrespectful. This is only technically correct, I'm left unconvinced that it is meaningfully correct.
* You show that there is greater than zero cost, but that feels pretty uncompelling, because I what I actually believe is the weaker version "Just add easy mode, little cost mostly benefit". I feel that's the actual argument to beat if you want to change minds, because that's probably what most people that want easy modes actually believe. Your arguments do not seem strong enough to support "Easy mode introduces significant cost or little benefit", which is what you would have to show to convince me that "no cost only benefit" is not at least approximately correct.
2. You argue that having easy mode available devalues / lessens the satisfaction of beating the game. Beating the game on "hardest" is just not the same.
* I played Cyberpunk 2077 a while ago on the hardest difficulty and in one of my saves I went with the secret ending. It comes with the warning "very hard, expect to die a lot" and it absolutely was. But after some hours of dying I beat it and felt great accomplishment, even the next couple of days it still made me happy to remember. I felt that sense of accomplishment because I did something very hard and managed to beat it through stubbornness and skill. The fact that the game has an easy mode or easier endings did not detract from that one bit.
* If only want to argue "there is some non-zero cost" then you saying "it costs me, personally, satisfaction" is enough. But I don't believe this is universally true and I would argue that spending 3 hours to finally beat a boss on whatever-difficulty-it-is-you-are-playing-at feels like an accomplishment regardless of the whether or not higher or easier difficulties exist.
3. You argue that it is disrespectful to say "there is no cost to easy mode" because it does cost you (and other people) and not acknowledging that is disrespectful
* If you assume that somebody saying "Easy mode has no cost only benefits" actually means "literally zero cost, I'm aware of your feelings on the matter but they do not count" then I would agree that that's offensive. But I would argue that precise and concise communication is hard and rarely worth it in casual conversation. As a result people say slightly-wrong things all the time and this is probably more good than bad overall. As someone who would say "easy mode only has benefits" is approximately correct, I would say that it more accurately translates to "I believe the trade offs for introducing easy mode to be easily worth it", at least when i say it. Which you are free to disagree with, but I feel does not merit the "disrespectful" label.
I'm aware that you made many more arguments, many of which I've not addressed here. But this post is far too long as it is and there's probably no point litigating every detail anyway.
PS: Frohen Ostermontag, hoffe du hattest auch frei heute :)
1. I set my post up in such a way that I first counter the argument that is literally being made every time the topic comes up, and then I steelman it successively to what people probably mean. I think that, depending on what you value, the cost can be significant. I don't mean to convince anyone that they now also have to like hard games, just show that reasons exist why other people might. My argument against the steelmanned version of the argument is that looking at it from a game by game perspective is flawed. The vast majority of games is already easy, therefore the cost of reducing the last remaining hard games is high.
2. That's cool. I don't mean to argue that this is the case for everyone, or that the satisfaction is completely gone. I just noticed for myself that when I grind against a game that I play on a difficult setting, I wonder "What am I doing with my life? Why am I doing this to myself?" but playing it on a lower setting is also boring. I usually don't get that feeling when there is just one difficulty. The answer is obvious, I want to progress in the game and grinding against it is the only way forward.
3. Do you think that the downside of having an easy mode is not important for you or for other people? If it's only for you, then it's not disrespectful, but it also doesn't merit the conclusion that hard games should be exterminated (which is what I am arguing against).
If it's for everyone, I find it disrespectful because it's just blatantly disregarding what many people have already stated about their own frame of mind. Generally, this should be respected, unless there is some strong evidence to the contrary.
If you acknowledge that some people find it important, but you still think that the benefits of including easy modes are more important, it's not disrespectful. Here, I would refer back to the broader perspective of the entire industry, in which difficult games are rare.
PS: Dir auch!
I'm not in favour of the extermination of hard games, but for what it's worth, I'm always happy when a game has an easy or story mode. I respect anyone who plays video games as a test of skill (and I can play a lot of games on hard mode if I bother), but I prefer video games as a story-telling medium or immersive exploratory experience, both of which tend to get disrupted by repeatedly dying.
I'm not going to demand an easy/story mode for any game, though. If the devs want to include it, that's great. I'm happy SOMA, for example, had a story mode added; it's easy even without it, but I can savour the environment more in story mode, and pace myself in my exploration as I like (and with all honestly, the scary part of SOMA is the *story*, not the monsters).
There are also some exceptions to the rule of 'disruption'; I don't know what it would mean to make an easy version of, say, Super Meat Boy, or even of Super Hexagon. That seems contrary to the idea of those games. But they're also not about a story (well, Super Meat Boy I guess technically has one, but it's window dressing for a hard platformer).
So, long story short: Agree with your premise. Mildly disagree with some of the arguments presented on an individual basis - games usually mean something different to me than to you, and they almost always gain when they are given a story/easy mode.
That said, I do also mostly play games that don't have modes at all, and wouldn't work at all with them (e.g. Manifold Garden, Antichamber, Baba Is You, et cetera). And I do break myself against some of them, and it's fun; I am still doing Manifold Garden's "The Game Is Not Enough" run, for example. I've solved it, technically, but I think there must be a more elegant solution for the last couple of steps somewhere (the things I'm doing seem overly elaborate compared to the rest of the run) - I've been aggressively avoiding all walkthroughs. There's a meditative quality to the game for me, but it's all exploration, no dying; just endless searching and searching and trying cursed things with cubes.
This article reads like that one Ninja tweet: https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1753628-ninjas-its-just-a-game-tweet
Folks here might be interested in this: https://www.wired.com/story/deaths-of-effective-altruism/?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us. It’s a pretty critical piece on EA. The author is Leif Wenar, “the Olive H. Palmer Professor of Humanities at Stanford, where he is Professor of Philosophy, and, by courtesy, Professor of Political Science and Professor of Law.”
I think this is a really interesting article and worth thinking about. Thanks for sharing it.
It appears to be paywalled. Can you summarize and/or link to the links it uses?
I don't hit a paywall when I click the link. Try a different browser, or clear cookies maybe?
Ok, Firefox and/or the adblocker on there got rid of the article-blocking subscription pop-up. Apart from the malevolent sleight-of-hand about Saudi Arabian Islam in the first couple of paragraphs, it brings up several objections I usually have when EA comes up, and definitely seems like it's worth digging into in some fashion.
I was coming here to post the same one. I never got that deep into EA, but are Wenar's characterizations of Givewell accurate? I was under the impression that they were a lot more rigorous than this. No ethnographies?
Perhaps I shouldn't give this piece the oxygen - as Scott says, it is terrible. But I have to say that I very much enjoyed the description of rationalists as "mensa with orgies". That's just a funny phrase.
It's also amusing to note that this piece was inspired by a trip to Bali, where the author really got in touch with reality in a whole new way. Dude.
In general I want people to avoid spreading Bad On Purpose To Make You Click things here and enriching their creators, even (especially) if they're about a topic we care about.
If you genuinely think this article is valuable and enlightening, ignore this comment.
As someone who thinks the concept of EA is good but doesn't identify with the EA tribe, I think the article was...surprisingly not that bad. I didn't get the vibe it was deliberately bad on purpose merely to get clicks; I think the author very likely believes the things he wrote: that any given act of charity is likely to have unintended consequences, even when people try really really really really hard to think of all the potential consequences beforehand, and - ahem - maybe take a bit of pride in doing so better than most other people.
But even if the article was nothing but mustache-twirling propaganda against EA, shouldn't all EA evangelists be familiar with its content and able to calmly debunk its points should the article be brought up at a cocktail party or whatever? "Oh yeah, that Wired article. It brought up mosquito nets being used for fishing, but actually that's not a legitimate gotcha because [insert reason here]..."
Like, I dunno, man. Announcing an intention to deliberately ignore mainstream criticism about EA, especially after it's experienced an extremely embarrassing public relations fiasco, doesn't seem like the best defense strategy for EA.
Yeah I thought the article was great and don’t get the hate for it. I have read the replies to it in Reddit and other forums, and no one has challenged the main thrust of the article— instead attacking minor points like “oh fish nets”.
I see a lot of cognitive dissonance in the EA community. If the Catholic pope or the Mormons had bought a £15 million manor in Oxford all the while claiming to help the poor , these same people would have been pointing their fingers and laughing. I suppose people in the cult don’t realise it’s a cult.
The main criticism of the article isn’t even new— Over educated white guilt types who think they can solve other countries problems because they know how to use a spreadsheet and can make everything look “mathematical”.
As someone who grew up in India , I’ve heard this debate a million times before but I’ve never seen such a cultish fervour to a clearly bad idea.
Honestly, guys, maybe it would be best to wait and take guidance from the Newspeak House on this.
"Announcing an intention to deliberately ignore mainstream criticism about EA, especially after it's experienced an extremely embarrassing public relations fiasco, doesn't seem like the best defense strategy for EA." Yep, that's what I think too. The article linked was harsh, and took a couple of pot shots, but the author is a legit scholar with the proper background on this topic and gave some real criticisms. We're not talking Alex Jones here.
https://denovo.substack.com/p/methods-in-engineering-of-avian-ova
Avian ova can't yet be grown in vitro, but they can be engineered in culina.
I've been studying factors that correlate with the COVID death rates of US states. The correlations are not all in the same direction, because some factors are good things when high (like GDP per capita) and others when low (like obesity rate.) Here are the correlations I've found, from strongest (largest absolute value) to weakest.
+0.70 Poverty Rate
-0.68 Social Capital Index (State-Level)
+0.58 Gini Coefficient of Inequality
-0.57 Life Expectancy
-0.56 Average IQ
-0.51 % of Adults with High School or Higher
-0.49 % of Adults with Bachelors' Degrees or Higher
+0.46 Obesity Rate
-0.43 % of Population Vaccinated (Fully)
+0.42 % of Population Black
-0.35 GDP Per Capita
-0.33 % of Population Vaccinated (One Dose+)
-0.27 Tax Burden
-0.23 % of Adults with Advanced Degrees
+0.16 % Republicans
-0.083 % of Population White
-0.045 % Democrats
+0.0019 % of Population Urbanized
I'd be happy to add other factors to this list if you point me to decent sources, or discuss the data I've used or other details. We all know about confounding variables, and how spurious correlations can trick us.
Anyway, based on this data, it looks like a lot of things help keep the death rate from a pandemic like COVID down. Being generally healthy helps. Being clever or educated, helps. Being in a rich state, helps. But from a public-policy perspective, if you want to make things hard for the pandemic, what you need to do is get poverty down.
I'm guessing what's going on here is that poor people live in ways that make things easy for the virus. They live in crowded apartments that are often multigenerational. They have employment precarious enough that they can't afford to take days off when they're sick, so they go to work and infect people there. And they delay seeking medical care, because they have trouble affording it.
Edit: Added correlations with vaccination rate (one dose and full) and Social Capital Index.
Most of these are just things that make you more likely to die for any health condition. It'd be helpful to see the same values but for different common disease like heart disease or viruses like the flu. Being poor, overweight, or undereducated is almost always associated with bad health outcomes.
I may have nerd-sniped myself here. But I did find something that correlates almost as strongly with the COVID death rate as the poverty rate: the social capital index. This stuff: https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/republicans/2018/4/the-geography-of-social-capital-in-america
The correlation is -0.68, with the poverty rate at 0.70.
There are statistical approaches to data of this kind that take into account the fact that many of the variables predicting death from Covid are correlated, and would give you a figure for the individual contributions of each variable with the effect of confounds filtered out . I believe regression is what you’d use, though I’m no expert. You should talk to someone who is.
Yes, I suspect there are more powerful or appropriate statistical tools for this sort of thing. I did take some very mathy stats courses back in the day, so I have some idea of what I'm doing, but it has been a long time. Perhaps a masked statistician will step out of the shadows to show me what's what.
Ha, yeah my stats courses are way back in the day too. But I'm pretty sure knowing what stat would work for your data does not require advanced knowledge. And there are some very mathy people on here. I once asked a stats question I knew was pretty hard, and got multiple sophisticated answers, plus a chance to watch a debate among the Mathics regarding some fine points about the optimal approach.
It's worth noting that many of those are not independent variables. (I know you didn't imply that they were.)
Altitude. At high altitudes it's easier to run out of oxygen.
Poor people were more likely to refuse the covid vaccine.
Interesting stuff. I feel like if you did some kind of dimensionality reduction on it, you could probably reduce this quite a bit since there are clearly correlations between several of these items. Take IQ, education, and GDP per capita, for example -- likely pretty tightly correlated. So I suspect you might see a highly predictive factor emerge that ties those things together.
Bryan Caplan named the Mellow Heuristic: https://www.betonit.ai/p/the_mellow_heurhtml
>The rule has two steps.
>Step 1: Look at how emotional each side is.
>Step 2: Assume the less emotional side is right and the more emotional side is wrong.
I myself have long used something similar, let's call it the Debate Heuristic:
>Step 1: Look if one side systematically refuses to engage in calm, rational debate.
>Step 2: Assume that the side willing to debate is right and the side that refuses is wrong.
Obviously the pitfall off both these heuristics is that I conclude that grey tribe autists who think and talk like myself are always right.
Are there any good case studies through history when these heuristics are obviously wrong with hindsight?
I can't point to a case study, but the Communism Panic (McCarthyism) of the 1950's-1960's was a social nightmare against creatives, there was a ton of shrill debate, they didn't catch a single commie, and the USSR really did have spies, and really did intend to spread communism by insurgency or war.
Thinking about this a bit, it seems like this heuristic is very sensitive to how widely you're looking for people willing to debate. Like, if you want to debate:
a. Evolution didn't happen
b. Vaccines cause autism
c. 9/11 was an inside job
d. The holocaust didn't happen
e. Sex with animals and children is fine
etc.
you will find that most people will not want to debate you on these matters. There are people who will debate you on all five of them *someplace* in the world/on the internet, because the world and internet are big places. But like 99.9% of people and forums are going to tell you to get lost with your "the holocaust never happened, fight me" bit, because life's too short to argue with either trolls, crazy people, or idiots, and approximately everyone who wants to have that debate with you is one of those three.
Similarly, people will get very mad at you for (d) and (e). The reason isn't the rightness/wrongness of the claim (young Earth creationism is more counterfactual than holocaust denial, in the sense that there's more contradictory evidence to explain, but most people don't get that mad about it), it's the emotional and social and political implications and overtones. For that matter, (e) is a moral argument which no factual evidence can really answer, but you're arguing for violating some very basic moral intuitions in our society, so people are going to get very emotional about the matter.
So I don't think these heuristics are all that useful, neither the calmness one nor the willing-to-debate one.
The calmness heuristic also has the property of biasing your conclusions when the position is more emotionally salient for one side than another. If you're proposing taking away everyone's children and having them raised in state-run creches, parents are going to be a whole lot more emotional and angry about the whole plan than non-parents, and yet I don't think that tells you whether the proposal is a good one.
This.
Have you ever see one person (kids, usually) verbally torment another after getting under their skin (metaphorically speaking)? One appears calm and smiling, and the other is a foaming ball of rage.
Well, I personally see nothing wrong with these heuristics. When I talk about wanting to kill people, everyone's like "waaah, you can't just kill innocent people, human life has intrinsic value!!!" Pure hysterical nonsense, of course. And then when I try to debate them on the possible utility value for killing people, they just keep making excuses, like that "murder is abhorrent and unethical no matter what" and "please start taking your medication again". Obviously they're just too scared to admit that I might be right.
Then Caplan ought to embrace 'far-right' views on race.
Leftists on race: Hysterical screeching about "nazism" "white supremacy" "oppression", use of threats, abuse, actual violence to silence dissenting views, construction of elaborate oppression narratives and hostility to any disagreement with these, significant use of 'lived experience' (anecdotal) evidence, intolerance of dissident speakers from even appearing on a university campus, trying to get dissident scholars fired and their access to databases cut off , think it should be literally illegal to claim race differences exist
Rightists: Dispassionate posting of data, statistical analyses, scientific studies, interested in falsifiable claims that can be tested, support s|c|i|h|u|b and think that scientific studies should be freely accessible to everyone and that scientists shouldn't be beholden to ideological restrictions on their research
Obviously flattering my own ideological convictions here, but this is pretty trivially true from a broad perspective.
And "grey tribe" aren't a thing - they're just the more reasonable blue tribers.
I think there's not a royal road to getting the right answer without evaluating the actual arguments. Most controversies don't matter enough to worry about, some do and then you actually can't get by on deciding which side has more red faces and raised voices, any more than you can get by on which side has more women and people of color, or which side has better-dressed people advocating for it, or whatever.
Many fringe ideas with diehard supporters fit this. Consider: I'm not willing to debate Mormons that stop by my door. Or consider people being emotional towards Holocaust deniers.
IMO heuristics arise when a correlation is observed. There's definitely a correlation between debate/discussion and finding truth. But a high correlation only lets you speak generally, not about specific instances.
But there are plenty of people who debate Mormons, I can find a hundred Mormon debates on Youtube if I want to. Same goes for Holocaust deniers. I'm not saying that anyone who refuses a debate is wrong: I'm saying that if one side systematically refuses to engage in debate it's likely wrong. The anti-Mormon side and the anti-denier side does not systematically refuse debate.
EDIT: I guess the Holocaust deniers actually doesn't get debated much even though they want to. It's hard to find a serious debate with David Irving, for example. Also the laws against it in e.g. Germany. I guess this is the exception I was looking for.
I guess the other category of people who wouldn't want to debate would be people who believe that public discussion about a topic is going to do more harm than good.
Maybe I don't want to debate you on vaccines causing autism because I think more discussion of the matter is in general going to "raise awareness" of a goofy non-issue and convince more idiots not to get their kids vaccinated for measles, and lead to more suffering in the world. (That is, I think your claims are wrong but debating them in public will lend them credence.)
Maybe I don't want to debate you on the cause of the black/white IQ difference because I think it's better that fewer people know about it at all--I may agree with you on the factual question but think it should not be discussed in public because most people ought not to hear about it. (Maybe because I think most people are waiting for an excuse to put on Klan robes and this will do it, maybe because I think most people will come to dumb conclusions when they try to understand the difference between a population, population mean, and individual drawn from a population and will end up thinking black physicists are dumber than Asian janitors.)
Maybe I don't want to debate you on it because I think it's some kind of infohazard--for example, maybe I think civilization relies on widespread shared religious belief, and so a public debate about the existence of God has the potential to wreck civilization. This could be consistent with me agreeing or disagreeing with you.
(1) In the Mellow Heuristic, how "emotional" is emotional? What are the signs of (bad) emotions? Raised voice? Agitated body language? that's just good public speaking, there is a reason that both politicians and evangelists (defined broadly as those arguing for a religion) converged to it across hundreds of cultures and thousands of different eras. Good pedagogy and good public speaking are not how you know Evil, Evil just so happens to independently rediscover that good pedagogy and good public speaking are excellent ways of convincing people of what otherwise is laughable and/or indefensible. But "All people using good pedagogy and good public speaking techniques are Evil/Wrong" is a pretty terrible lesson to take from that.
After you filter out the usual signs of enthusiasm, what remains as signs of (bad) emotions are just obviously bad things that we already have bad names for. Ad-Hominem for one. You don't have to be emotional to use it either.
(2) Separately but relatedly to (1), people use Russell Conjugation with emotions all the time. You're "Crying" or "Bitching" about X, but I'm "bringing Y to the attention" of people. You have "hysterical fear" from X, or are X-phobic, but I merely have a "rational disdain" towards Y. The Mellow Heuristic naively assumes that words for emotions are the emotions themselves, it can be fooled as easily as renaming "Anger" to "Irritation" or renaming "Disgust" to "Repulsion". That's not a rare skill, every corporate manager and HR personnel have learned to master it. I had a job where instead of the manager saying "We're firing you" (bad, aggressive, emotional), he says "We can't commit to extending your contract after ${date}" (calm, cool-headed, not emotional). What difference does it actually make? Not much, but according to the Mellow Heuristic it's a Night-And-Day distinction. (insert a meme about "I Sleep" vs. "Real Shit" here)
(3) Separately but relatedly to (1), how much, time- and space- wise, emotion is "emotional"? Can I continuously goad an opponent into lashing out by - say - repeatedly mis-representing their views and/or repeatedly implying sexual jokes about his mother, then edit and post the one 3-minutes segment they lashed out in on my YouTube under the title "${opponent name} RAGES OUT AT ME" and sit back and relax while the Mellow Heuristic does its magic? Can I pick my opponent from among a dispossessed and/or poor subset (e.g. a pro-Palestine advocate who is actually a refugee from Gaza, or - if you like - a 1930s-era pro-Jew advocate who is actually a refugee from Nazi Germany) and then watch as the naturally angry and emotional (because poverty) opponent fall on the wrong side of the heuristic?
(4) Assuming the debate and/or communication is happening over text, as a lot of debates and communications are nowadays - how are you going to reliably detect emotions at all?
(5) All the usual points about some debates/arguments being extremely emotionally asymmetric, where one side does indeed have a very good reason to be angry/emotional (in a bad way), which other people have made so I'm not going to repeat. But again, in an echo of my points (2) and (3), this asymmetry can in some sense always be manufactured if you know what you're doing: I know the exact words to use and the exact framing to frame things with in order to goad a Pro-Israel commenter - especially one who lives in Israel or have family there - into lashing out, and if the Pro-Israel commenter is smart he/she also knows plenty of things to say which can make me lash out worse than a volcano (if I'm not aware that this is exactly his/her intention, and counter it accordingly). As a matter of fact, **I** know those things too, which is a partial defense against falling for them when the bad faith Pro-Israel commenters use them.
It's Bad On Purpose To Make You Fall On The Bad Side Of The Mellow Heuristic.
(6) In the Debate Heuristic, why is it always assumed that verbal swinging is the one true way to arrive at truth? Mathematical Proofs aren't decided like that, Science isn't settled like that, Computer Programs aren't judged like that, vast swaths of human knowledge and expertise isn't expressible in Natural Language, let alone spoken Natural Language in a debate format. Do you want an argument about Quantum Computing to be settled by Scott Aronson on one hand talking in Natural Language in a debate format with one of his random crank emailers?
(7) Separately but relatedly to (6), Debates select for plenty of qualities other than being right, such as having plenty of time and money, being comfortable talking in front of an audience, and being of a generally equal status to your debate opponents (same rough amount of perceived attractiveness, education, money, ...). In particular, Debates select for people who feel safe enough to express their opinions in a debate: that's very non-trivial, Atheists living in the Middle East don't tend to debate the religious, for obvious reasons.
This point can prevent a debate even downstream of an obvious sacred cow, let's say I'm Vegetarian, atheist, but I also want to pretend I'm a Muslim, the very obvious problem with this is that Islam explicitly and repeatedly tells Muslims to slaughter animals. Vegetarianism isn't - at face value - particularly connected to whether there is a God or not, but because the Islamic God made it particularly clear that Vegetarians are cringe, every Vegetarian must either be ready to declare they are atheist (and fight the whole resulting mini-war) or debate with one hand tied behind their back.
(8) Debates are only as good as your opponent, your audience, and your debate moderators, a debate about Heliocentrism moderated by 15th century Church Fathers and the audience being ordinary people of the time who can't multiply numbers because Latin numerals are hard isn't going to arrive anywhere meaningful anytime soon, no matter how "rational" and "calm" it is.
It seems to me that you're nitpicking, which is fine but just know that's the vibe. I like the debating game so lets go. I'll focus on the debate heuristic since I'm more interested in that one:
> (6) In the Debate Heuristic, why is it always assumed that verbal swinging is the one true way to arrive at truth?
I call it the debate *heuristic* and not the debate *one true way* for a reason. Obviously there are situations (e.g. engineering) where you can just check who's right because their solutions work in reality.
>(7) Separately but relatedly to (6), Debates select for plenty of qualities other than being right, such as having plenty of time and money
Sure. It's a heuristic. Still I can't think of any major case where it has failed. Atheists in theocracies are a pretty good example of the heuristic: the theocracy bans debate while the atheists seem to want it, so heuristically the theocracy is wrong.
>(8) Debates are only as good as your opponent, your audience, and your debate moderators
Sure. Debates aren't perfect and will never be. It doesn't affect my argument.
Eh, does it count as nitpicking when you post a (very flawed) heuristic and explicitly ask for failure modes, and I post many many failure modes? I don't think it should.
> Obviously there are situations (e.g. engineering) where you can just check who's right because their solutions work in reality.
But this is still not a bulletproof way. Consider a new programming language, nothing has been written in it yet, and that doesn't prevent it from being a legitimately superior language to all the ones with millions of lines of code.
The confounder is always present, whenever you have a heuristic for shortcutting to a truth, there is always plenty of situations where it shortcuts against the more truthful positions. I'm not claiming that you don't know this, I'm saying it anyway because your original post is (or phrased as) too impressed with a very faulty heuristic so as to give the impression that it works unusually well.
> Atheists in theocracies are a pretty good example of the heuristic: the theocracy bans debate while the atheists seem to want it, so heuristically the theocracy is wrong.
Right, that's how you choose to interpret it, but the theocracy begs to differ. The "Theocracy" isn't really one unified thing, it's a distributed mass of people who are all very angry you don't want to admit their God is right. No one is particularly in charge of this, they all independently want you dead or just to shut up. From the Theocracy's point of view, it didn't even incite against you, you're just so utterly and pitifully wrong that people are independently wishing you were dead so you can finally shut up.
Consider a pilot or an astronomer who wants to debate Flat Earth is right, but is afraid of the professional consequences, which would translate to severe loss of income. Consider a biologist who wants to debate Evolution is wrong. Your interpretation of the Debate Heuristic would seem to claim that they're right, after all no one is giving them an opportunity to debate.
> Debates aren't perfect and will never be. It doesn't affect my argument.
I mean yeah it does, because 90% of everything is shit. 90% of people haven't done their homework. The vast vast majorities of people everywhere believe laughable religious stories. Debates, especially when posted on social media, attracts those majorities and make whatever party telling them what they want to hear "win".
Your argument is blaming those who don't want to debate, and I'm telling you that this isn't reasonable when they're almost certainly going to lose no matter their arguments or the truth value of their claims because vast majorities of people "emotionally" (but in a crowd sense) hate them. That definitely seems relevant to your argument.
I still feel like you're typing words to win an argument and not really engaging with the idea. But whatever.
>because your original post is (or phrased as) too impressed with a very faulty heuristic so as to give the impression that it works unusually well.
Please give examples of actual real world situations where the heuristic fails (as I asked for in the original post), not artificial thought experiments about atheist Iranians that doesn't hold up anyway.
>Right, that's how you choose to interpret it, but the theocracy begs to differ.
No, the theocracy does not differ. They are very explicit that they don't want any debate. They pass laws to against apostasy. When someone tries to arrange a debate, they shut it down. If you ask a leader of the theocracy if debates should be allowed, he will say "no".
>Consider a pilot or an astronomer who wants to debate Flat Earth is right, but is afraid of the professional consequences, which would translate to severe loss of income.
People used to die for the truth, but I guess we're down to this. Yes, in this case, I would see that no-one wan't to defend flat earth in a debate and I would conclude that flat earth is false. Is that a problem?
>Consider a biologist who wants to debate Evolution is wrong.
That biologist would likely earn more money on the creationists side, but whatever. There's already a lively creationism vs. evolution debate so the loss of this brave soul isn't back-breaking.
>Your argument is blaming those who don't want to debate, and I'm telling you that this isn't reasonable when they're almost certainly going to lose no matter their arguments or the truth value of their claims because vast majorities of people "emotionally" (but in a crowd sense) hate them.
Well, I don't care if they win or lose debate, I just care that they debate. If one side claim that they cannot meaningfully debate because the vitroll from the other side makes it impossible or unsafe, it's usually quite easy to see if they are correct (if so: win goes to them) or lying (if so: win goes to the other side).
For some reason, a meta-demonstration of point (4) in my first comment about how it's generally impossible to determine tone from text has just accidentally occurred, and you seem to infer a hostile tone in my posts that isn't really there. I will assume this is a mistake, and I reiterate that I'm not attacking you or trying to "win" some imaginary fight in my brain on your expense, but I'm legitimately arguing against your heuristic because I think it's a terrible and quite naive/wrong/out-of-touch heuristic that can only be believed by someone if their views are socially dominant (at least inside a bubble).
> Please give examples of actual real world situations where the heuristic fails
I thought that people already gave you plenty of this in other comments, that's why I didn't bother with more examples in my first comment and focused on a more abstract takedown. If you want a novel example, consider Revolutions. Revolutionaries aren't good debaters, and Revolution happens because debate failed to move the country forward. This doesn't need to imply any sort of Free Speech repression by the way. In some bad regimes it's perfectly okay to criticize the leaders till the cows come home, and the regime loyalists will then take their sweet sweet time to debate you. All the while, the status quo (the actual regime) is going to move forward with actual material decisions that have devastating practical consequences for you anyway, no matter who won the debate.
> not artificial thought experiments about atheist Iranians that doesn't hold up anyway.
Not all theocracies work like Iran, and you implicitly assuming this is a subtle fault in your mental model of religious societies.
> People used to die for the truth, but I guess we're down to this.
I mean, this is fine, but why won't you call it instead "The Truth Jesus Heuristic" then? People generally don't want to die for the truth (or die for anything really), yes, and assuming that people who don't want to die for the truth are automatically the wrong side in the debate would lead you to ridiculous conclusions.
How many of your beliefs are *you* willing to die for anyway? Willing to lose your job for? Willing to be made fun of and be the butt of jokes for the rest of your life for?
> Is that a problem?
Sure it is, because that would lead you to assume that since no one wants to debate God doesn't exist in comparatively "tolerant" religious societies that will "merely" fire and ostracize you for being an atheist, therefore those people are wrong and God does in fact exist.
Again, you take a "Freedom of Speech doesn't mean Freedom from Consequences" view that I find - quite honestly - really naive and obviously wrong. Yes, absolutely, the Creationist or Flat Earther who fears the loss of income is in an exactly analogous situation of millions of atheists everywhere, and that doesn't mean Creationism or Flat Earth is correct (unlike atheism, which *is* correct). Therefore, your heuristic is quite wrong and almost worse than useless outside of very narrow niches.
> Well, I don't care if they win or lose debate, I just care that they debate.
But why would *they* care about what you care? Let's I'm a revolutionary in some faraway country, I have an option where I'm 20% likely to defeat the regime by doing <some non-debate activity>, or an option of debate where I'm perhaps 1% likely to defeat the regime through pure words but 100% likely to get the admiration of outsiders who know nothing about the country or its history and social structure and have 0 chance of ever helping me, what option do I pick?
It's only you who would bet on the wrong side and lose (assuming you care about the truth) if you follow your heuristic, but people in the midst of socio-political or economical struggles with massive life-long consequences generally don't have the option of debating, or debating well, or debating convincingly, they lose nothing by ignoring your heuristic.
>Revolutionaries aren't good debaters
Not relevant to my point (and probably false as well). Once again, it's "Assume that the side willing to debate is right", not "Assume that the side who is good at debate is right".
>Revolution happens because debate failed to move the country forward.
Not relevant to my point.
>In some bad regimes it's perfectly okay to criticize the leaders till the cows come home, and the regime loyalists will then take their sweet sweet time to debate you.
I guess my heuristic can't be deployed then.
>Not all theocracies work like Iran, and you implicitly assuming this is a subtle fault in your mental model of religious societies.
Sigh. But sure, no hostile tone here. Moving on. Please enlighten me on the theocracies that promoted open debate while the atheists refused to engage.
>People generally don't want to die for the truth (or die for anything really), yes, and assuming that people who don't want to die for the truth are automatically the wrong side in the debate would lead you to ridiculous conclusions.
My heuristic assumes that the people who do the killing are on the wrong side. I don't understand how you can keep missing this. You keep trying to invent bizarre theoretical scenarios in which the correct side is simultaneously unwilling to debate due to threats while also these threats are so subtle that no observer can detect them. That never happens IRL. Threats are obvious: else they don't work.
>Sure it is, because that would lead you to assume that since no one wants to debate God doesn't exist in comparatively "tolerant" religious societies that will "merely" fire and ostracize you for being an atheist, therefore those people are wrong and God does in fact exist.
Same error as above. Why on Earth would I think that the people who fire and ostracize people who debate are willing to debate?
>But why would *they* care about what you care?
Why doesn't penicillin cure cancer? Completely irrelevant.
>but people in the midst of socio-political or economical struggles with massive life-long consequences generally don't have the option of debating, or debating well, or debating convincingly, they lose nothing by ignoring your heuristic.
Even if the poor faraway revolutionaries or whatever are too busy to debate (and I don't fault them for that), there's usually some western fanclub and I can observe their debate-willingness. But if the faraway revolutionaries and their western fanbase refuses to debate even though they are well compensated for it then I think it reflects badly on them. But once again, we are talking pure theorethics here.
A good common example of a place this breaks down now is evolution vs creationism--I think it is more common for creationists than evolutionists to want to debate, but the evidence for evolution is really very strong.
This demonstrates more of a higher level point, which is that all these debates are more often false binaries than not. Many serious successful people these days think both sides of the evolution vs creation debate are laughably wrong, because they think it obvious we are a simulation.
I think there are plenty of evolutionists who are happy to debate. So the heuristic isn't needed here: I can just watch the debate and see which side has the strongest arguments (and especially which side is able to make testable predictions).
Can both sides even agree on the rules of the game? I wouldn't debate a creationist, because I would assume that the rules of the game are set in their favor.
Imagine that the creationist gives 20 examples of "this could not have evolved", and the evolutionist explains 19 of them, and says "well, we do not know yet how this one thing could have evolved" about the last 1. I suspect that most people would summarize this as "the creationist won the debate". Because it does not matter how much the evolutionist can explain, but how much they cannot. (You can't really prove evolution, you can only falsify it, right?)
In other words, the evolutionist needs to be omniscient in order to win the debate. The creationist only needs to give enough examples to hit one of the evolutionist's blind spots. As I do not consider myself omniscient, I would avoid the debate. (Unless perhaps the creationist would agree to provide all their examples of "irreducible complexity" before the debate, and agree not to add new ones on the spot after I did my homework explaining the provided ones.)
I’d say, in general (as in the cases of women’s suffrage and slavery above) the heuristic fails when the point at issue is a genuinely outrageous status quo. (“Genuinely” is, I realise, doing a lot of work here.)
This seems like a metric that's only valuable if you can't follow the argument itself, in which case you shouldn't be picking a side.
Sadly reality forces you to pick sides all the time even if you haven't spent years studying each and every issue.
It doesn't. People around you might try to make you pick a side, but they also tell you the side they want you to pick. In the vacuum where you're using this metric, "don't get involved" is the correct choice.
>In the vacuum where you're using this metric, "don't get involved" is the correct choice.
Agreed!
I don't agree with OP's heuristics, but I'm also of the opinion that this type of "Swiss neutrality" isn't really possible. First, it's against instinct, you naturally tend to judge anything that comes before your eyes.
Secondly, neutrality is just favoring the status quo, on things that require actions. "Not doing anything" ? That in and of itself a thing that you just did, a thing which advantages one side and disadvantages another.
>Secondly, neutrality is just favoring the status quo, on things that require actions. "Not doing anything" ? That in and of itself a thing that you just did, a thing which advantages one side and disadvantages another.
Agreed in most cases. I think there are exceptions. Consider the recent https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-rootclaim post and comments.
I don't think that either conclusion, lab leak or zoonosis, particularly favors the status quo. Even if either conclusion were proven absolutely definitively in the case of Covid, it wouldn't change the fact that we already knew that lab leaks can happen and have killed people, and we already knew cross-species infections can happen and have killed people. Neither conclusion, even if definitive, would alter the risk landscape by much.
My own conclusion from that debate was - yeah, zoonosis looks a bit more probable than lab leak, (so, in that sense, I'm close to Swiss neutral) but the more frustrating lesson for me was that, even with both sides presenting their evidence and documenting their reasoning in detail:
>The six estimates span twenty-three orders of magnitude. Even if we remove Peter (who’s kind of trolling), the remaining estimates span a range of ~7 OOMs. And even if we remove Saar (limiting the analysis to neutral non-participants), we’re still left with a factor-of-50 difference.
>50x sounds good compared to 23 OOMs. But it only sounds good because everyone except Saar leaned heavily towards zoonosis. If raters were closer to even, it would become problematic: even a factor of 50x is enough to change 80-20 lab leak to 80-20 natural.
which sounds like a disaster for systematically evaluating the odds of a factual, non-value-laden, question with systematic presentation of detailed evidence, and (unlike AI questions) no issues of trying to estimate the odds of novel technological developments.
"Every choice is picking a side" is just linguistic nitpicking. My decision to take a nap this afternoon is not "supporting the status quo", and a definition that says it is should be thrown out. "Those who are not with us are against us" is a self-destructive ideology that will make you far more enemies than you would otherwise have.
You should not be trying to overthrow the status quo based on vibes. You need a decisive reason to do it. It's there because people wanted it there, and on percentage you win far more often leaving it alone than fighting it.
Your decision to take a nap this afternoon is not supporting the status quo because you deliberately chose this example to be so in order to make the statement ridiculous, but your decision (e.g.) to not protest in support or against the Iraq war was a support of the status quo, your decision to not protest in support or against the Gaza war is a support of the status quo, and so on for all topic that people are arguing/fighting about.
>"Those who are not with us are against us" is a self-destructive ideology that will make you far more enemies than you would otherwise have.
The statement you're objecting to doesn't necessarily have to be interpreted like this, that's a naive interpretation.
> You should not be trying to overthrow the status quo based on vibes. You need a decisive reason to do it.
Mmm yes, and? When did I say I am against this? I'm of the opinion that "Swiss neutrality" is not possible, therefore you should read about and follow as much arguments as possible, so that you can actually take whatever decisions you can (if possible) based on informed opinion, not "vibes".
In practice, sometimes you're too powerless and an issue is too remote that "Swiss neutrality" is indeed well-approximated, approximated but never entirely true, as there is nothing that your info stream makes known that isn't the topic of debate **somewhere**, and globalization makes it harder to argue that your actions don't have consequences *somewhere*, by however amount.
> It's there because people wanted it there
No, not at all. The status quo is there because dead people wanted it, dead people that had desires and beliefs that doesn't necessarily align with those of the actual people that the status quo affects right now. It's also there because the occasional (m/b)illionaire wanted it, because a state imposed it by violence, or by pure Brownian motion. It's definitely not there because some mysterious coherent "Will" of some people chose it.
Every heuristic has an error rate. I think that those have a reasonably high one, but probably low enough to be useful in the absence of other information.
Isn't this literally the "calm Hitler" meme?
https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/578682-adolf-hitler
Basically, but IRL Hitler wasn't very calm or interested in calm rational debate. I don't know everything about the political climate in Germany in 1930 but my impression is that the Nazis did a lot of emoting and debate-refusing.
Maybe if Hitler had been calm and prepared to debate rationally, he wouldn't had been a Nazi?
But isn't this just because he had power? He had submarines and the Luftwaffe under his command, why the duck would he debate you when he can simply order Junker ju-87s to rain hell down on your head? In an alternative reality maybe Hitler *could* have won the third Reich purely by debate charisma, I know Mein Kampf's writing is atrocious according to those who have read it, but that's because it was his first piece of writing, he was what, 20-something at the time? He had plenty of time and legitimate grievances to hone his writing and debate skills in order to convince you that Jews *are* to blame for Germany's defeat in 1918. Not that he has to do this himself, there are plenty of philosophers and writers and storytellers and academics who can wield Language like a devastating weapon.
This has modern analogs in real life, if Jeff Bezos/Elon Musk/Biden disagree with one of their employees, this isn't settled by debate, this is settled by firing the employee in question or at the very least simply ignoring them and going ahead with the leader's opinions anyway. This mostly doesn't happen because a smart CEO/president knows to not have opinions on the subject matter of the experts under him (or, if the CEO *is* an expert, he doesn't ask another expert at all), but it occasionally happens. Even in the hypothetical situation where you are indeed locked in a debate with Jeff Bezos, Jeff Bezos can utterly demolish you with nothing else but paying lots of philosophers and PR people to phrase his position in the most flattering, galaxy-brained vocabulary, and by always retreating to his wealth ("good argument, but I can't help but notice that it haven't brought you a single million") when you have a good point, which convinces way more people than you would think.
You seem to misunderstand my heuristic: It's not "Assume whoever wins the debate is right" or "Assume whomever strongest right". But you seem to misunderstand everything I write so whatever.
I do think I understand your heuristic correctly, it's "Assume whoever refuses to debate to be wrong", isn't it? Do correct me if I'm wrong.
My examples are instances where it's very rational and intelligent to refuse to debate: refusing to debate millionaires and refusing to debate your boss. Your heuristic would lead you in those cases to assume "Hahaha dumb afraid-of-debate opinion-havers", whereas in reality there is a very good reason to refuse to debate and *you* would probably refuse to debate in the same circumstances too, no matter how much you think you're right. It's in this sense that I think your standard is (a) not sincere (b) unfair.
Is Grey Tribe always keen to engage in debate? Is there some way of demonstrating this beyond just vibes?
One issue with "willingness to debate" as a criteria is that it's fairly easy to *define* a reasonable debate in a way that tacitly assumes the foundations of your side's worldview.
So, take creationism and postmodernism. These are, we can agree, ridiculous ideologies. And yet their ridiculousness relies on accepting certain foundational assumptions like the objectivity of the scientific method. But no *true* creationist or postmodernist will accept those things.
So, you either say "we're willing to debate you, where debate means staying within the bounds of scientific objectivity". Which is to them no different from communists being willing to debate you, where debate means staying within the bounds of marxist-leninist doctrine.
Or you try to debate from absolute first principles, without assuming anything. And that, it seems to me, relies on *solving* some centuries-old long-standing problems in philosophy.
You start from first principles (and getting anywhere takes years, if you even can). Or you start from assumptions, and the other side can always claim the debate was rigged from the start.
Tl; dr the meaning of "debate" is doing the work here, and I see no easy way around this.
Grey tribers/autists/nerds/malebrains/whatever-you-want-to-call-it seem to enjoy debates. "A rationalist is someone who disagree with Yudkowsky", as the old saying goes. I don't know if there's a demonstration to your liking, I'm sure you can poll people on "how much do you enjoy listening to political debates?", "do you ever argue online?" and such and you will get huge over-representation in the demographic I describe.
I don't think your objection is an actual problem in practice. Usually debates don't happen because one side is openly against debate, not because they can't agree to the bounds of the debate. (And there are plenty of creationists who are willing to debate within the bounds of scientific objectivity (even though they often strain against it). The entire point of Intelligent Design is to give the impression of staying within the bounds of scientific objectivity.)
On the first point, I don't have any particular reason to think this is false, but a few assorted facts make me a bit unsure. Less Wrong banned political discussion as "mind-killing" and Scott seems to have very conspicuously avoided talking about many political issues in a clear way in recent years. Silicon Valley has been falling over themselves to censor content in the last few years. And many "nerd" environments were among the absolute first places to be taken over by speech-stifling woke ideology.
If you say those are really the fault of Blue Tribe, that just makes me question how meaningful the Blue-Grey distinction really is. How much of a tribe are you when large amounts of your tertitory are under the firm control of another tribe?
On the second point, my feeling is that this *is* a primary reason for a lot of debate refusals. A lot of wokists and feminists don't want to debate someone who won't accept what they regard as "their basic humanity". This is defined in practice as agreeing with all of their controversial beliefs as a matter of assumption. But, while some of them are definitely just power-hungry and trying to avoid scrutiny, many do seem to actually believe that, say, not acceping the necessity of defunding the police *means* not accepting that black people have rights. We regard this as an insane and toxic attitude, but how do you break through this dogmatic belief-structure?
And if you say we simply don't accept any initial assumptions that aren't subject to debate...well, this isn't true because we want the existence of objective truth, the validity of science, the reality of an external world separate from our own minds and so on, to be accepted without having to be proved. Some religious apologists would say that *these* assumptions are unreasonable (as we think the woke ones are), and that you shouldn't be allowed to just assume an objective ordered universe, you should have to prove this a priori.
Coherent debate isn't really possible without some assumptions. These assumptions could range through "accept the scientific method", "accept that anything a black person calls racist, is by definition racist", and "accept that Great Leader Stalin is correct about literally anyhing". I have my own opinions on where that line should be drawn; you have yours. Maybe they're very close (though I think a lot of things rationalists accept largely as unquestioned assumptions, such as the existence of the external world, are in fact unsolved problems in philosophy).
But all I'm really saying is that when people disagree on where that line should be, and they nearly always do, resolving that is very far from a trivial question.
Josh Barro referred to some of that as "stolen base politics"
https://www.joshbarro.com/p/against-stolen-base-politics
Could you elaborate on that connection? Are you saying that grey tribe lets blue tribe take over their spaces because of their fear of red tribe? Or are you saying something else?
What you are referring to as the blue tribe engages in what Barro refers to as stolen base politics. The idea that you don't actually have to compete with opponents, you declare their opposition illegitimate so people don't have an actual choice but to support your side. Freddie de Boer similarly claims that others on the left engage in "working the refs" even though there are no refs: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/there-is-no-such-thing-as-justice
Of course, while there aren't refs to win your election for you, there is management/HR in the organizations where many such people work. And thus "In the 21st century, the main question in American social life is not “how do we make that happen?” but “how do we get management to take our side?”" https://scholars-stage.org/on-cultures-that-build/
As the others above. This is just another name for tone policing, which has long been regarded as a fallacy. It's calculated to work in favour of those who are already in a position of power, who can always dismiss people arguing stridently for their rights as "hysterical". Fairly basic conservative strategy.
I want to explain why I think that, although there is such a thing as a Tone Fallacy, most of the time mentioning it is not contructive and is fallacious itself.
Basically it's often used to promote bad arguments, and even people arguing in good faith don't realise they're doing this.
Consider four hypothetical (and linguistically anachronistic) suffragette statements:
1. "Well personally I think women should be able to vote, but I totally respect different opinions" -- nice tone, terrible argument
2. "Let's reason respectfully about this. Here are ten reasons why giving women the vote follows naturally from the principles of democracy we all claim to accept." -- nice tone, good argument
3. "Let me make this crystal clear. I *demand* the right to vote, and that is *not fucking up for debate!" -- nasty tone, terrible argument
4. "I'm so fucking sick of dealing with you morons. Over and over it's been explained to you why women's suffrage follows from the principles of democracy [citation], and you fuckers never respond, you just appeal to your butthurt neckbeard misogyny. Fuck you all." -- nasty tone, good argument
A few points.
First, if you make a statement like 3 and are told to calm down or grow up, don't assume the objection is to your emotion rather than the fact that your statement was *only* emotion, and contained no argument (or anything resembling an argument) whatsoever.
Second, a tone objection is only a fallacy if used against statement 4. From a logical perspective, statements 2 and 4 deserve full respect, and statements 1 and 3 deserve complete dismissal and contempt. The latter don't make the position they advocate wrong, but they do suggest the person making them has never thought about the issue in any depth and has no business being involved in a public discussion of it.
Third, even though in theory 3 and 1 deserve equal contempt, in practice many people (including me) will be willing to somewhat forgive 1's bad (or non-existent) reasoning, and even help them out and make their argument for them to advance discussion, something we certainly won't be doing for 3. So it might seem to speakers of 3 that they're being denied respect because of their nasty tone, when in actuality they and 1-speakers have not earned any respect at all, since they've made no attemped arguments...but some of us will give 1-speakers respect anyway as an act of niceness or charity, since they were nice themselves.
Fourth, my experience is that 4-statements are not very common, probably because when a speaker is putting all their energy into their emotion, there's not much left for reasoning. So although in theory Tone Objections are appropriate half the time(in response to 3) and inappropriate half the time (in response to 4), in practice they're probably appropriate the vast majority of the time. And again, not because of the presence of emotion, but because of the absence of anything *but* emotion.
So... Yeah, I get your classification, and your examples are good. But there are a couple of problems here.
1) You're assuming that the people judging the nastiness and quality of the arguments are in fact competent to do that. One thing that can be seen in lots of historical examples is that the people who were in power (men who already possessed the right to vote in the suffragette example) were in fact no smarter than the people making the arguments. And in fact often engaged in egregious motivated reasoning to claim that an argument was bad; and in fact often engaged in egregious setting of arbitrary standards in order to enable themselves to classify argument X as nasty.
2) There's a conservative bias built right into the structure of your reactions. You say you'd entertain a polite bad argument much more than a nasty bad argument (completely understandable on a human level, of course). Seeing as we know all too well that most arguments are bad, that pretty much means that you're going to spend most of your time entertaining the ideas of people who butter you up. That's not really a way of seeking the truth; it's a way of building patronage-based relations with a veneer of debate on top.
3) You ignore the differential impacts of the issue on those who already have and those who have not. The goal of the "don't tone police" heuristic is to ensure that a majority who is blissfully ignorant of the plight of the minority doesn't ignore them because they get so stroppy, when their rights/livelihoods/lives are at stake. To avoid the "Beatings will continue until your manners improve" syndrome.
But there's something lurking behind all this that needs addressing, which is the fundamental dishonesty of the positions that say "X should not have various rights". The real problem around the women's movement, the gay rights movement, the black rights movement, etc. was never the tone of the arguments made by the victims. The problem was that the system they were protesting was corrupt. There never were *good* arguments for denying the rights of women.
Heuristics like "don't tone police" are restrictions which people who hold authority should impose upon themselves. They are a reminder to ourselves to keep listening to the arguments of others, even when they grate on our ears. They are supposed to help us stop ourselves falling into the self-satisfied assumptions that we are right, and that we don't have to listen to X arguments, because we have judged them, and found those arguments wanting.
Thought about this way, it doesn't respond very well to Caplan's heuristic (which I still don't see much value in, but that's a different question). He's talking about looking at arguments as a third party. I think the "don't tone police" reminder is most effective as a rule for debate participants.
Interesting, thanks.
>One thing that can be seen in lots of historical examples is that the people who were in power (men who already possessed the right to vote in the suffragette example) were in fact no smarter than the people making the arguments. And in fact often engaged in egregious motivated reasoning to claim that an argument was bad [...]
And, let's not forget, often did not themselves deign to engage in anything resembling thoughtful debate. "Stop fussing and get your pretty self back into the kitchen" isn't an argument no matter how kindly the tone.
This is a reasonable comment with some good points. But since elsewhere in this thread you've openly said you're not bothering to read my responses to you because they're "too long", I'm really not sure if it's worth engaging with you.
Well, I'm going to try one more time, if only for the sake of observers. I don't know how long it's going to be, and I'm not going to simplify things for the sake of low-effort and low-attention readers. If that's a problem for you, I suggest you might be happier on TikTok.
(If, however, you could decide that participating in a text-based discussion on an intelligent forum requires actually putting in the effort to *read* other people's posts, then maybe we can have a productive discussion.)
1. This is a valid point. The main problem I have with it is that it Proves Too Much (https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/13/proving-too-much/). Once you start saying we can't state some fact (in this case, "your tone is nasty") because people can't be trusted not to use motivated reasoning to falsely state that fact when it suits them...well, you've effectively ruled out ever acknowledging any fact that has the slightest possible subjectivity. Importantly, this exact argument can be used to dismiss anyone arguing for "their rights" or even anyone claiming that some policy is hurting them: people have an incentive to claim that anything they want is their right, and to claim that anything they don't like (no matter how trivial the reason) is "hurting" them.
So, although I mentioned in a reply to MedievalCat that "deciding within what bounds to hold a debate" is a difficult question with no clear answer...I think it's clear we need to be able to acknowledge *some* widely-held standards for discussion, even if it's theoretically possible that some people will misuse these standards for an unfair advantage. For people at all familiar with our general culture, things like "using as many expletives and personal attacks as possible" are clearly not within those standards.
If you disagree, you'd need to bite the bullet and accept that "anyone who argues for position X will be murdered by my brown shirts" is as much a legitimate argument as any, and shouldn't be disallowed. Or that someone speaking in a language they just made up has to be listened to, and it's other people's fault for not understanding them.
Short version: your position, if followed consistently, makes all basis for coherent discussion impossible.
2. I disagree that "most arguments are bad" is true, in the sense that I'm using the word "argument". The statements 1 and 3 above are not just "bad" in the sense that I don't find them persuasive; they're bad in the sense that they don't even attempt an argument at all! I don't think it's remotely difficult or controversial to draw a line between "we should do X because I want it" and "we should do X for reasons *beyond* my wanting it", where the latter can be any attempted appeal to the good of society, objective moral principles, widely-accepted social values, or weighing up different people's needs. Anything, really, beyond the purely selfish desires of the person speaking.
So my definition of a good argument is pretty broad here. The fact that so many "arguments" still fall short of it only shows how little effort most people put into thinking about anything.
3. This, I think, gets to the crux of the divide between opponents and supporters of free and respectful debate. To the opponents (who either want to restrict debate, or want to remove any requirements that it be rational and/or respectful), there's an "obvious assymetry" between the people whose rights are being restricted and the people who want to restrict those rights. To the supporters like me, it never seems to have occured to the opponents that which group's rights are being violated, and whether something is a right in the first place, *is the entire basis of the dispute* in most cases.
I challenge you to give me a single example of a currently debated issue (in the west at least) where one side says that their rights are being violated by the status quo, and the other side *agrees* with that statement, but supports the status quo anyway. If you think the second side is doing that, I think you haven't understood their arguments. Nobody says "we think your rights *should* be restricted". They dispute that the thing being claimed as a "right" is in fact a right at all. Or they assert that recognising this right would cause more harm, to more vulnerable people (e.g. children, in many culture war debates), than it would mitigate. How do we resolve these disagreements? My preferred method is with calm, reasoned discussion and debate. What's your alternative? Because giving special consideration for the people "whose rights are at stake" is just assuming one side of the very thing under dispute! And this can just as easily be used to favour the opposite side to the one you hold on any given issue.
"But there's something lurking behind all this that needs addressing, which is the fundamental dishonesty of the positions that say "X should not have various rights". The real problem around the women's movement, the gay rights movement, the black rights movement, etc. was never the tone of the arguments made by the victims. The problem was that the system they were protesting was corrupt. There never were *good* arguments for denying the rights of women."
There are...so many things wrong with this, it's hard to know where to start.
First, I've already explained in another comment why women's suffrage was about 10,000 times more complex than "denying the rights of women". Oh, that's right, you didn't read it because it was too long. Well, here's the short version: you're wrong. If you prefer short and stupid to educated discussion, we can do that I guess.
Second, as I explained above whether something is a right is usually precisely what's in dispute. Tell me, do you intend to accept *all* of the following as inalienable rights? A right to an abortion, a right to life from conception, a right to carry a gun, a right to pollute, a right to health care, a right to clean air, a right to live in the place your ancestors 200 years ago did, a right to live in the place your ancestors 2000 years ago did. If you can figure out a way to simultaneously accept all those rights, as well as anything anyone else ever claims as a right, you're welcome to try. If not, maybe consider accepting that debate over "people's rights" is necessary, because the answer to controversial social questions is not, believe it or not, simple and easy and obvious.
Third, even if you only want me to agree that something really obvious from the past, like slavery or nazism, was indefensible and that that should not be up for debate...while I'll certainly accept "indefensible", I won't accept "not up for debate". The reason goes to the heart of why I'm a free speech absolutist.
Even if I wasn't committed to the intrinsic value of freedom of speech (to the extent that banning nazis would make us, at least in the realm of freedom, fundamentally no better than them), and even if I could be absolutely certain that a ban on nazism would never be applied against anything other than *actual nazism* (despite that having been disproven several million times over in the last decade alone)...I would still oppose it, because of what happened to Martin Luther in 1519.
In a public debate against John Eck, he was tricked into "agreeing" with the heretic John Hus, who had been burned in the previous century. In didn't matter whether his point of agreement was the same as what Hus was burned for: the mere fact that he shared an opinion with a declared "heretic" was socially and legally catastrophic. This is the sort of dishonest, intimidating "debate" tactic that you enable by declaring anything beyond debate.
You also disallow some of the most philosophically effective arguments on otherwise intractable issues. For one example, Peter Singer argues for abortion and suffering-infant-euthanasia, not by the standard method of arguing about what qualifies as a human life, but by conceding that anything alive and of the human species is a human life but then denying that taking human life is always wrong. This was such an effective argument that it single-handedly turned me pro-choice for seven years. For another example, one of the most effective arguments against race-conscious thinking on the left is to simply ask its proponents "why, if you don't accept colour-blind individualism, is racism even wrong?"
By treating even really obvious things like "taking human life is wrong" and "racism is wrong" as unacceptable to consider, you make much insightful debate impossible. You stop people, all of whom agree those things in their normal form are wrong, from exploring the reasons for their wrongness, and the boundaries of that wrongness, and thereby gaining new insight into much more complex issues. You likely force everyone into the same tired, unresolvable debates of "yes it's a human life!", "no it's not!", "x is racist!", "x is not racist!", and so on.
One last thing:
"They are a reminder to ourselves to keep listening to the arguments of others, even when they grate on our ears"
Coming from someone who won't read responses to their posts that are longer than a few paragraphs (and has very likely not made it this far in this one), this is beyond ironic.
More generally, nothing I'm saying here is advocating not listening to people's arguments. It's advocating not letting people (who've never considered alternative viewpoints to their own) simply declare themselves right by assumption, and shut down or shout down disagreement or at least make productive discussion impossible by bringing in substance-free aggression in the place of actual arguments.
It thus has the exact opposite effect to the one you claim.
I mean... OK. I came back and read your punishingly long posts. I can refute:
1) Your other punishingly long post is all about the *bad* arguments for female suffrage. To which we say... wut? What are you talking about? Female suffrage was a good idea. It is a moral right. Any attempt to obfuscate that with "actually it's really complicated" is just vicious. No. Women should have the same political rights as men. If women sometimes did the arguing wrong, then that's more reason to listen to bad arguments more in future, because it turns out, some of them are right!
2) In this post, "your position", "the one you claim".... you don't seem to understand what I've suggested. So all of that is wrong.
Overall, the reason you're not connecting with me, is because I'm not in this conversation with "a position". I didn't come here knowing the answers and sneering at anyone who stupidly thinks different from me. I don't know the answers. I spotted a comment in the thread where I thought I had an interesting response to offer, and offered it. After some thought, I'm now less sure that the idea of "tone policing" is relevant to Bryan Caplan; but I still think "don't tone police" is a good rule to apply to oneself in an argument.
"I'm really not sure if it's worth engaging with you."
It's not! I'm not a real person. At least as far as you're concerned. The only value I have for you is if what I say makes a little bit of sense. You shouldn't care about me. You shouldn't try to guess whether I'm "worth engaging with". The man doesn't matter. Here at ACX, only the arguments count. I'll try to read yours later.
The belief that tone policing should be regarded as a fallacy, has also long been regarded as a fallacy. It's calculated to work in favor of obnoxious loudmouths, whose arguments are so weak that their only hope is to be so obnoxious that nobody wants to debate them and they can claim victory by default.
If you want to convince me of anything other than you are an obnoxious loudmouth, police your tone. And my response to obnoxious loudmouths is *not*, "make real political concessions and give them what they want so they'll shut up". I don't think I'm alone in this, and I think the people who feel this way are numerous and powerful enough to block whatever it is you're trying to accomplish.
The idea that tone policing is a fallacy seems to be coming from the same place as "shutting down roads with protests is good, because it will raise awareness". Mostly it raises awareness of how unlikable your movement is.
Yes, that's precisely why nobody has a good word to say about Martin Luther King, Jr.
How many roads did King shut down? The only example I can find is the march from Selma to Montgomery, which may possibly have blocked traffic while the marchers were, well, marching. The first march got stopped by state troopers on "Bloody Sunday" which was a boon for the movement: peaceful marchers being brutalized makes for great headlines and engenders sympathy. The second march went to the bridge, stopped to pray, and then went back where they came from. The final March, and the biggest one, had it's route approved in advance by the authorities and the marchers were offered police protection.
None of those marches seems like an apples to apples comparison to the kind of road shutdown protests that have become popular today which are not approved by civic authorities in advance, and rather than marchers making their way to the capital and disrupting traffic briefly on their way we have protestors stopping all traffic and sticking around. This seems far less likely to engender sympathy, and very likely to engender resentment by those stuck in traffic.
I don't mean to sound rude, but have you heard of King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail"? That's Birmingham, Alabama; and he didn't book that room like an Airbnb, he was put there after being arrested for parading without a permit during the Birmingham Campaign. That campaign took place two years before Selma, and isn't exactly obscure--you have perhaps heard of "Bull" Connor, or seen the footage of firehoses being turned on marchers? Both of the main marches in that campaign (which also included public sit-ins in the business district) were large enough to--and in fact did--effectively shut down the roads on which they took place, in no small part due to the logistics of the police throwing up blockades and clearing out white bystanders so that they could beat the shit out of black protesters without undue collateral damage, but also due to the number of marchers. Both were done without permits, which is to say that they were very much not "approved in advance by the authorities."
Now, I suspect you will have a hard time believing this, but it was actually pretty difficult for black civil rights organizations to secure approval in advance by civic authorities in the 1950s-60s South for their public demonstrations of dissatisfaction with being second class citizens. In fact, believe it or not, the local police were often downright hostile! Thus a fairly common strategic technique for civil rights organizers at the time was to ask permission, be denied as expected, and then do the thing anyway. The thing was often a march, and almost always resulted in the blocking of traffic for reasons you appear to understand, even when police weren't wailing on the marchers.
(IOW, it wasn't just Selma, and it wasn't just Selma and Birmingham, but I'm not going to google them all for you.)
As to the question of sympathy or resentment, I'm not sure it's as simple as you make it out to be. I don't have hard data here, but my observation over the years has been that people's reaction to disruptive protest often correlates to their preexisting sympathy for the cause. This can have odd, and downright comical, effects during Interesting Times like these. We had folks who had cheered on lawless protesters in Ferguson in the mid 2010s cheering on the police as they cleared out lawless antivaxers blocking entrances to vaccine clinics; and rightwingers who had spent the whole period from 2014 to 2020 calling for violent crackdowns (and vigilante vehicular assaults) on peaceful roadblocks suddenly deciding en masse, at midday on January 6, 2021, that riots were the language of the unheard after all, and that those arrested that day for trespassing, assaulting police officers, and disrupting the business of the United States Congress were political prisoners. Admittedly I may be concentrating too hard on people with distinct political tribal affiliations and not enough on the great "apolitical" swing-voting masses. Maybe the latter really do just get mad at anyone who disrupts their commute.
Sometimes they are being hysterical, though. I often get very heated over things important to me, and I have to calm down and make the argument reasonably, rather than YOU ARE GENOCIDING ME, LITERALLY GENOCIDING ME, BY WHAT YOU THINK!!!!
To quote a comment on Steve Sailer's blog a few years back: Activists trying to cancel you say "you are making me unsafe" for the same reason cops who are beating you up say "stop resisting."
"Fairly basic conservative strategy." And at what time has it ever been morally or factually incorrect?
Women's suffrage. Women's rights. Gay rights. Black rights. Etc., etc. This is not a difficult question. If you thought it was, you're missing some basic historical knowledge, or you misunderstood what I was saying.
It's indisputably the case that the hysterics of the suffragettes delayed women getting the vote and was thus bad for their movement and objectives. Second-wave feminism had a terrible image problem for similar reasons of stridency and virtually all of the changes wrought by it were also bad, so more conservatism would have been in order there in any case. Gay rights were dead in the water until AIDS and I don't think rhetoric had much to do with the ultimate outcome either way compared to the sympathy elicited by the disease, but it's clear after the fact that the Mattachine society was right and the Stonewall rioters wrong: assimilation and emphasising similarity is what has gotten homosexuals to a place of broad-based social acceptance, not angry shrieking (vide the transsexuals, who did not learn this lesson and have not been successful at screaming the median American into obedience in spite of what has to be considered a Herculean effort). Black rights were similarly far more effectively advanced by Martin Luther King (and even, I'd argue, Cosby) than by either the Black Panthers or BLM.
Huh. I would have thought that you were engaging in precisely the strategy that I described, except... you pointed out that everything you were saying is "indisputable". And that has really persuaded me!
That was sarcasm.
The way you describe angry activism as "shrieking" is just an example of tone policing, not an actual argument.
I'll make an actual argument for you, so that you know what one looks like:
For thousands of years before the early 20th century, women's political rights were completely ignored. Throughout much of that period, many women had been very reasonable indeed. However, they only got the vote after some of them made very unreasonable demands. That suggests to me that perhaps unreasonable "shrieking" was in fact a necessary part of social change.
Wait, my argument seems to be missing something... oh, yes! Everything I've said is indisputable! There. Now I know I've convinced you.
I want to add to the record that I find you coming off as incredibly obnoxious in this thead, despite your first few posts being reasonably phrased. Anonymous was not sarcastic or insulting, yet you responded with mocking sarcasm. Are you trying to escalate the tension? Are you trying to make some meta-point about the unimportance of being civil? I don't see why, since you're not, in your own words, protesting or "arguing for a cause that you really believe in". You're just discussing what makes an effective argument.
What are you trying to acomplish with this attitude? (That's an honest, not rhetorical, question.)
More substantively, I think your description of the background to women's suffrage is over-simplified to an extreme degree. You speak as though democratic western society existed for "thousands of years", and women tried many times asking for the vote, and were refused, and then eventually started aggressively protesting and were successful.
When it's more like...many pre-historic societies were matriarchal, with women as more dominant/valued. The rise of organised societies based on military might shifted most of the world to a patriarchal model. Ancient empires treated women particularly badly as the rule. Civilising forces like the rise of cities and the spread of monotheism helped make their position on the whole significantly better (e.g. by suppressing polygamy, prostitution, and infanticide in Christian Europe). Through the middle ages a tight caste structure prevailed with strictly differentiated rights and duties for noble men, noble women, serfs of either sex, priests, monks, nuns, free commoners, and members of the royal family. Women were obviously worse off (notwithstanding exemption from mandatory warfare), but that was just one of many complex and overlapping hierarchies. In early moderm times absolute monarchs became the norm, and several of those were queens, a minority but disproportiantely among the most-renowned (e.g. Elizabeth, Catherine, Maria-Theresa). Countries varied greatly in their acceptance of reigning queens and the rules governing succession. Most had no concept of "free men, with women as their property", so much as "*everyone* the property of the monarch".
Then the first democracies from the late 18th century. There was at most a single solid century of "democracy, but only for men" before the suffragettes. Of course, that was actually a period of constant volatility and chaotic struggles over the restriction or expansion of the franchise for various classes of men. In early 20th century Britain, about 40% of the male population was still disenfranchised. The sufragettes were thus effectively for "votes for rich women as well as rich men; the lower classes of both sexes are still excluded". In Australia, there was a grand total of *one year* between the establishment of a national democracy, and the extension of the vote to women. Only the United States had a long status quo of "universal suffrage for men, none for women", at least putting race issues and literacy tests aside.
The situation at the time of the suffrage movement was thus extremely complex, with numerous different groups with valid grievances and the potential for the satisfaction of one group's grievances to lead to the worsening of another group's. The actual arguments over suffrage were equally complex. Some were sexist, claiming women were by natural temperament unsuited to political decision making. Others (e.g. President Taft's) focused on the claim that most women weren't in practice interested in voting, and those who were were disproportionately drawn from the "less desirable classes". It isn't hard to see how some of the "pioneering" tactics of the suffragettes (screaming protest marches, smashing up shops and churches, chaining themselves to gates) were among the worst possible responses to these accusations.
Other arguments were that suffrage would give married men extra political power; the same sort of argument can be (and is, when the issue comes up) used against giving children the vote today. Not at all innately sexist, this argument relies only the assumption, that any feminist would agree with, that the majority of women at the time were socially under the control of their husbands.
On the other side, support for suffrage was sometimes associated the most non-feminist forces imaginable. Utah was one of the first states to give women the vote, as part of a demographic struggle to keep Mormons in control of the state. Texas and Wyoming would later, in the 1920s, use women's suffrage in the most cynical way possible: as a way of allowing corrupt governors who had been impeached and removed from office to continue to govern through their wives.
A different source of support for suffrage in the US was from capital-p Progressives. A group of reformist men who saw enfranchised women as a useful "tool" against corrupt entrenched interests, a different sort of power struggle associated with far-from-particularly-feminist Puritans, who were also generally in favour of strict bans on alcohol, abortion and "lewd" material. Others in the movement (e.g. Wilson) were staunch segregationists.
Of course, the actual overwhelmingly decisive deciding factor for suffrage..was the conscription of millions of men to be killed in the trenches, and the conscription of millions of women into forced labour to replace them...and the need for new ways of managing, and justifying, this horrific social upheaval.
(In the end, of course, female suffrage did not appear to have any major social effects at all, for at least a few decades. Neither the distortions of the political process its oppenents feared, nor the newly empowered female voting-bloc its supporters hoped for--no major change, notwithstanding the events in Texas and Wyoming mentioned above, despite apparently convincing arguments from both sides that social changes would result. The reasons for this are probably a confluence of social factors so complex, I'm not even sure if we understand them now, let alone could have predicted them in advance.)
But...(and I hope you see how annoying this kind of sarcasm is even if only used one)...*do continue* about how women's suffrage was an absolutely clear-cut, black-and-white issue of one single oppressed group simply standing up for their rights!
You're tone policing too, though, with "aw yeah if they ask you to lay out the facts then this is just basic conservative strategy so you know they're in the wrong without having to do a second more of looking at the question".
So would you prefer I "angry activism" at you about being a conservative, Phil? If you find yelling and screeching the convincing way to win your opinion, I can do that!
I described *one* thing as indisputable, the first point, because it's not under any sort of objective argument by historians of the matter.
The rest of your post is ironically (or is it just consistently?) too butthurt to be worth engaging with. An actual argument would, for starters, look like you grappling with the fact that women did not by and large *want* the privileges and obligations of men for most of history; upper-class women only started to feel they were getting the short end of the stick (and as such, demand immediate revision of a system they had previously seen as favoring them) in the 18th century, and in fact, in America women *still did not want the vote*, as a group, in the early 20th century! Only when assured that they would not have to suffer equality in the form of registering for the draft by the same act as registering to vote, as men did, did American women as a whole swing to majority approval of women's suffrage. If you could not somehow subsume these circumstances in your shrieking-based hypothesis you would have to abandon it, but instead you seem to have opted for militant unawareness of modern history.
Nitpick that I'd call this fallacy a Tone Argument (i.e. "you asserted x in a unreasonable tone, therefore x is false") wheras tone policing is really just telling people to speak in a reasonable tone, which is not fallacious at all.
Also, making this political claim would require some actual argument. On what basis do you assert that conservatives are the ones in power, and non-conservatives are "arguing for their rights". There's a whole littany of issues, including everything involving cancel culture, where it's pretty clear that the exact opposite is true at the moment.
That's a fair nitpick.
So if the status quo isn't especially favourable to the unemotional side, then the heuristic can apply?
Er, I dunno! I guess my objection wouldn't hold. I haven't really thought it through other than to note the similarity to an existing heuristic, which works in the opposite direction to the Caplan heuristic.
I kinda feel like the Caplan heuristic is nonsense, because as someone else in the thread notes, you can always find an example of someone on the side you don't like being "emotional". My feeling is that this heuristic is just an excuse to not listen to arguments.
But I agree that my argument, as stated, would cease to have force in the case that you suggested.
I'm going to guess your average Ukrainian is going to be more emotional about the War in Ukraine than your average Russian, but that won't stop me from believing that, in this war, Ukraine is in the right and Russia in the wrong.
You might guess that, but I've seen an awful lot of Ukrainians speaking in a tone of calm determination or calm resignation, and an awful lot of Russians who are practically frothing at the mouth as they call for bloody war against the "Nazis".
Not a historian, but women's suffrage and slavery abolition both had some really passionate advocates who made big emotional displays, and it's not hard for me to imagine that the detractors of those movements had little problem being dispassionate and calm about it. Similarly, people have set themselves on fire to protest ongoing wars and atrocities, that doesn't make the wards and atrocities good actually. Basically the heuristic may fail when there's enough at stake that strong emotion is appropriate in people who actually care about the issue.
I think the debate thing generally fails on things that have enough widespread social acceptance that having a debate is just giving a platform to a tiny crowd of wild cranks. Like, there are plenty of people who would love to have public debates with notable scientists and public officials and so forth about whether the earth is flat and whether aliens are real and whether the moon landing was faked and etc. It's pretty reasonable that people don't want to spend all their time debating those people, especially on a public stage.
There were pretty passionate people on the other side of women's suffrage and slavery too. I think Bryan's heuristic needs to be focused on the "best" debates that occur between the two sides, not the median activist. But maybe that's me steelmanning it too much.
There are plenty of people who debate and debunk flat earthers: I think they do a valuable service and I would be much more likely to be a flat earther if they didn't exist. But I agree that notable scientists shouldn't join the debate (unless they really want to, or for short but valuable input): some dedicated amateurs and youtube debate bros are more than enough to uphold reason. IRL it's mostly the flat earthers themselves (at least many of the more well known ones) who refuse to debate while the debunkers take on anyone and any argument. Which is according to my heuristic. EDIT: Obligatory link: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/trying-again-on-fideism
This raises a good point about toxoplasma. Both sides probably have thousands of proponents who either are or are not 'emotional' or 'eager to engage in calm rational debate'.
*Your impression* of which side those labels apply to usually has more to do with your filter bubble and media consumption habits than any true population average.
('you' meaning 'any given individual', not you)
Unless you're doing a lot of work to get a fair and balanced cross-section of the entire movement, to avoid selection bias on your impression of the state of play. But at the point where you're going to that much effort to compile accurate data for your heuristic, you may as well just evaluate the argument at the object-level instead!
I mean, I've done some work on the issues that matter to me but it's usually pretty obvious which side is prepared for calm rational debate. Calm debates are pretty rare, so finding a representative sample isn't hard. Usually you find a few big figures on one side who have done a lot of calm rational debates with insignificant proponents from the other side (so you can be pretty sure that their intentions are genuine), and these figures will complain about how no-one significant on the other side are willing to talk to them. And when you check the other sides they are either completely silent about the possibility of debate or openly dismissive of the idea.
Example: You don't need to look at many flat earth videos to notice how the most prominent debunkers do debates all the time and have standing invitations for the most prominent flat earthers, but that the prominent flat-earthers seldom debate anyone and never talk to the prominent debunkers.
And in some cases the heuristic doesn't since both sides have people who are willing to do calm rational debate (good examples: evolution vs. creationism, Israel vs. Palestine). But then I can just watch the debate and draw my conclusions from that. And the willingness of each side to debate is also informative.
Thinking about the intersection of AI and modern romance/relationships. How do young people get together in a world where AI makes jobs/work cruelly useless? https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/small-bag-big-sandwich
I wrote a post which covers (among other things) the scoring function for the prediction contest; I'm pretty sure I've got the important details right at least. https://pappubahry.substack.com/p/evaluating-my-2023-acx-forecasting
The two different scoring methods used both started by calculating the Metaculus Peer Score for each question answered by each contestant. The difference comes from when these are combined into a contestant's overall score:
- the scoring in the original winners post takes the average Peer Score for the questions answered by the contestant
- the second scoring method used divides the sum of a contestant's Peer Scores by 50 (the number of questions)
Effectively, the second scoring method, which is what Metaculus uses, gives you a score of zero (the average Peer Score) for a question you don't answer. The original scoring instead heavily incentivises only answering questions where you think you'll do (much) better than average. SmallSingapore's strategy of skipping questions where he had no prior information was therefore a key to his victory, along with doing extremely well on the questions that he did answer.
I think that the second method is better, and that in a contest to find who can predict well, you don't want to punish people who attempt difficult questions.
The rubric stated, "If you skip, we’ll give you an “average” score (that is, you lose the average amount of points that forecasters lost on that question, NOT we average out all forecasters and let you benefit from the wisdom of crowds)."
That seems clear to me that the second method will be used.
ETA: Looking at the first version of the blind score hash spreadsheet, we can see the "correct" method has been used for calculating these scores: if you sum the scores for each question and divide by 50, the answers match the stated totals, which differ from calculating the mean of those questions with answers (which luckily is what Excel's "average" function does). In particular, row 11 has a score of 0.36 using this second method, which agrees with the initially announced winning score.
The recent spreadsheets only have the scores, but since they agree with the previous ones, I believe that these are the "correct" scores, so you should take the distribution from the spreadsheets and ignore the previous chart.
Where a participant did answer all 50 questions, there scores will of course be the same under both methods. Incidentally, Metaculus failed to answer question 24 (presumably from a squeamishness about running an assassination market), so the stated score of 0.27 will be an average of 49 scores. Subject to possible rounding errors, their correct score should be 0.26.
This does mean that Ezra Karger's result (of 0.34) looks very impressive, since the next best score is 0.31.
Aha, thanks for finding what the rubric said! Yes, that is clear.
How suspicious should I be that Dave Barry posted this on April Fool's Day?
What if he swears he's not making this up?
Has anyone plotted the results (at contestant level) using Brier vs. MPS? How many contestants would be far off the diagonal and why? I imagine this is something that affects extremists with lots of 1% and 99% forecasts and not the folks who were in the top decile. (In my annual forecasting contest, the extremists rarely do well.)
Here's a CSV of scores that I haven't dug into deeply: https://pastebin.com/yd7eEenf (Participants with less than a quarter of the questions answered were omitted.)
The "_50" fields mean that unanswered questions get a score of 0 (Peer) or the average for that question (Brier). The "_n_ans" fields mean that the participant's sum of scores is divided by the number of questions answered.
But you might want to incentivise people to know better which questions they are likely to be good at. Knowing what you *don't* know might be as important in prediction as knowing what you do know.
My latest post on Sleeping Beauty problem explores the topic of betting
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cvCQgFFmELuyord7a/beauty-and-the-bets
I resolve some of the pervasive confusions about it, such as the idea that people should use either halfer or thirder probabilities depending on what is the betting scheme or that thirdism has any advantage in regards to betting.
There is also a riddle about betting in an alternative version of Sleeping Beauty. I'd appreciate if you read it very carefully and did your best to solve it, especially if you are a thirder, before you spoil the answer to yourself and then share whether you managed to answer it correctly.
Posting the riddle here separately, in case someone doesn't want to read the whole post but still wants to try themself at a tricky probability theory problem.
Here is the description of regular Sleeping Beauty experiment, in case you are not familiar:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleeping_Beauty_problem
And now the Technicolor Sleeping Beauty:
Sleeping Beauty experiment, but every day the room that the Beauty is in changes its color from Red to Blue or vise versa. The initial color of the Room is determined randomly with equal probability for Red and Blue
So, suppose you participate in a Technicolor Sleeping Beauty. While awakened in the experiment you are proposed to bet on Tails but in such way that you can make only one bet per experiment. If tyou have two awakenings and you've agreed to bet on both of them, only the last one counts.
The odds for a bet are between 1:1 and 1:2. Usually, making such bet would be a bad idea unless you think the coin in this experiment has come Tails with 2/3 probability. In regular Sleeping Beauty the optimal strategy is to always refuse the bet.
What is the optimal decision in Technicolor Sleeping Beauty? Should you always refuse the be as well? Why? Why not?
I've made an open source browser plugin to remove AI recommendations from Instagram, and otherwise let you customise the interface to be less addictive (e.g. remove Explore tab).
Would love some feedback - bugs, features people want.
Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/instalamb/pbongghmpamnclmnmildleojmpdkgipl
Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/instalamb/
There are similar plugins already for Twitter and YouTube and Facebook, but I couldn't find an Instagram one!
Wow, I never realised the Explore tab existed so I guess this is not for me
Regarding the Hungry Brain/metabolic set point stuff: from memory, the idea is that we have a weight that our bodies consider to be the right weight - our "set point". It will adjust our energy expenditure and hunger in order to return to that set point. But something in our modern western diets or lifestyles pushes that set point up, making many of us stubbornly overweight.
My question is: has dairy been considered as a contributor or cause of this set point shifting? Some reasons it seems plausible:
1. Dairy is mostly only a thing in western diets, which is where most of the obesity is.
2. It would seem to make sense for milk consumption to signal to our bodies that it's time to gain weight - that is what babies are supposed to do after all.
3. Anecdotally I have noticed strong links between the amount of dairy I'm consuming and my ability to motivate myself to lose weight.
Obviously dairy is a factor in weight gain just for its caloric content, but my question is might it also increase this set point?
(Although, it seems dairy consumption has been decreasing in recent decades, so maybe not?
https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2014/june/trends-in-u-s-per-capita-consumption-of-dairy-products-1970-2012/#:~:text=While%20consumption%20of%20some%20dairy,to%20275.9%20pounds%20in%202012
)
> 2. It would seem to make sense for milk consumption to signal to our bodies that it's time to gain weight - that is what babies are supposed to do after all.
What would be the mechanism for this?
Hormones? Microbiome stuff? I don't know exactly, but breastmilk has all sorts of weird positive effects. It regulates babies sleep for example, and prevents diseases. Perhaps more relevantly, breastfed babies have significantly less obesity when they grow up:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4301835/#:~:text=The%20length%20of%20breastfeeding%20period,the%20risk%20of%20childhood%20obesity.
Which seems like it could indicate that it might have some effect on regulating our set point. I don't know whether cows milk has the same effect.
The Masai appear to be fine?
Counter argument: Western Europeans have been consuming milk and cheese for centuries, but the obesity epidemic is a matter of the last few decades.
My assumption would be that availability and therefore consumption would have shot up with industrialization, and that would increase the effect. But I don't have any data saying it has (and it seems from my link that consumption has gone down a bit since the 70s).
I would imagine there are two factors in play: something that raises our set point to make us want to consume more calories, and an increase in the availability of calories. Maybe milk raises our set point, but it didn't make us fat until we also started eating crisps and sitting at desks all day?
The ex150 diet that was linked in a linkpost a few months ago is mostly heavy whipping cream, and it seems to be working really well at pushing the setpoint down for him. https://www.exfatloss.com/p/losing-43lbs-in-144-days-on-ex150-diet
Perhaps unrelated, but I heard that ice cream is good for you. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/05/ice-cream-bad-for-you-health-study/673487/ (paywalled)
Milk contains a high concentration of animal protein and that triggers mechanisms that results in the production of growth hormones.
From my favorite book on nutrition „The Diet Compas“ by Bas Kast
„ „Let’s begin our critical look at milk with a little context — what we already know about animal protein. Without overstating it too much, we could describe the cow’s milk we usually drink as a kind of animal-protein turbo-concentrate. By analogy with fruit juice, it’s like giving yourself an intravenous infusion of amino acids. The amino acids shoot into the bloodstream and promptly activate all the growth switches we have met so far: insulin, IGF-1, and mTOR (a basic requirement for the activation of our cellular ‘construction“ „manager’ is plenty of freely available amino acids in the cell).5
In other words, milk is a growth drink. Indeed, it’s the ultimate growth drink. That isn’t a bad thing in itself: for a baby that needs to grow quickly, breastmilk is certainly the ideal drink. We require no other nourishment for many months of our lives.
The unusual thing about us humans compared to all other animals is that we continue to consume this baby-growing drink into adulthood. But there’s another curiosity, too: what we pour into our glass is not human breastmilk, but the milk of another animal species. That’s not just unusual, it’s also relevant, because cow’s milk contains almost three times as much protein as human breastmilk (around 3.4 grams vs 1.2 grams per 100 millilitres), and four times as much calcium. This is one of the reasons why a human baby requires a full 180 days to double his or her weight, while a calf manages it in just 40 days. So when we drink cow’s milk as adults, we are consuming an ultra-growth drink during a phase of our lives when we are no longer really growing. […]
A team of Swedish researchers set out to get to the bottom of the connection between drinking milk and early death — without funding from the milk industry. The investigation of more than 100,000 Swedes was published in 2017 in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, one of the most influential nutrition-science publications in the world. Their analysis showed that avid milk drinkers had a 32 per cent higher risk of mortality compared to people who don’t consume much milk (roughly speaking, they compared people who drank 2.5 glasses of milk a day to those who drank one glass or less per month). But the study also revealed a noticeable exception to this: when consumption of fermented milk products was examined, the situation was reversed. People who consumed more yoghurt or cheese were found to live longer!“
I don't think most adults drink milk or if they do they all seem to want to drink skim milk which seems mostly water.
People do eat a lot of ice cream - seems like the ice cream eaters would be the ones in real jeopardy.
If the animal protein in milk were a significant factor in causing obesity, wouldn't things like meat have an even larger effect by a very large margin?
I believe it is not only the overall protein content but also the composition.
Nevertheless animal proteins, especially beef and pork, have a pretty significant effect on obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular health. The concrete mechanisms are afaik not fully understood yet but the statistics in large long term behavioral studies points strongly towards this direction. See:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27479196/
https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4141
Milk is known in the bodybuilding community as a bit of a life hack for gaining weight/muscle as an easy way to consume lots of calories quickly (just google GOMAD). Don’t see any evidence though to support is having an special effects beyond that.
I just started a monthly substack post bringing together the best long form content I have stumbled across in my internet travels. It is called "The Long Forum" and features a mix of podcasts, lectures and long form articles. Little islands of human curated internet are our only hope to push back against the tide of algorithmically optimised dreck.
https://haldanebdoyle.substack.com/p/the-long-forum-march-2024
With regards to twin studies and such. As I understand, much of the human microbiome is inherited from the mother at birth. Might it not constitute a factor that is somewhat between "genetics" and "shared environment"? On the one hand, it acts like the former, following adopted children to their new homes. On the other, it's not routinely tested for, i.e. "genetic assays" look only at the DNA of human somatic cells, so that it escapes any recognition as a factor, and in addition it's not fixed but potentially variable over time and in relation to the environment.
Twin studies will treat is as shared environment, since it's the same for identical as for non-identical twins.
If it's indeed shared and if the twins are not separated. Anyhow my point is that perhaps it should be treated differently, at least theoretically (I don't suppose that with current technology it is feasible).
It's not feasible. Obviously it has the potential to confound things and overestimate the extent to which people think environmental interventions can equalize outcomes, just like the effect of womb environment.
Have you seen https://www.wired.com/story/deaths-of-effective-altruism/ ? I'll be interested to see your take, if/when you have one.
He commented about it on the SSC subreddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1brg5t3/the_deaths_of_effective_altruism/kx91f5k/
Thank you!
What do people...uh... say at the SSC meetups?
When I attended the Hong Kong meetup announced for last fall, I had fun arguing with a philosophy professor who also showed up. Other people seemed to talk about Sam Bankman-Fried.
There was one guy who showed up because his child followed SSC (as opposed to the more typical case of people showing up because they followed it themselves), and he chided me for talking to the philosophy guy about a topic that was not of general interest.
Similar to what they say here. More personal introductions.
When I attend my local RatGroup we mostly work on our pet projects to improve the local community. There's also chess (which is the greatest board game of all time), and usually some light philosophical debate (found out recently that the guy who runs it is into a eudaimonistic conception of utilitarianism, so we discussed that for a bit).
Just start up a conversation about something that interests you that's been discussed in the last few months? Statistics, geopolitics, literature, video games, whatever.
Probably it's safest to avoid waging the culture war, though, and the Gaza actual-war seems like another thing to avoid. But I've seen conversations turn out well if they stay in the technical weeds and don't invoke ideology.
Biannual classifieds?
Yeah, sorry, I keep forgetting.
BAPISM as a music movement:
Until recently I didn't really understand the success of BAPISM. Sure BAP was pretty funny but this didn't explain his insane cult following among even seemingly normie GOP staffers. Was it just a matter of admiration for the sheer force of will required to write a screed as long and narcissistic as Bronze Age Mindset was? Was it the ability to enjoy racist/sexist... memes in a context where you could always pretend you were laughing at it's absurdity, a kind of literary 'I like Borscht, do you like Borscht'? Both probably. But recently I started playing with turning his most insane rants into music, and now I understand it entirely, they work perfectly as hard rock pieces:
https://twitter.com/futuristright/status/1774162209176006745
(Of course being only human, I was damn right going to capitalize on this discovery)
"I saw once a jaguar in zoo, behind a glass, so that all the bugs in hueman form could gawk at it and humiliate it. This animal felt a noble and persistent sadness, being observed everywhere by the obsequious monkeys, not even monkeys, that were taunting it with stares. He could tell—I saw this! He could tell he was living in a simulated environment and that he had no power to move or live. His sadness crushed me and I will always remember this animal. I never want to see life in this condition!
I wonder how many writers are in effect really song-writers, and whether this might be the main way they'll be thought of in the future."
Added Note: For those not aware of it, this is a pretty decent intro article to the BAP phenomenon: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/09/bronze-age-pervert-costin-alamariu/674762/
Having someone on the far-right be so concerned for the wellbeing of animools is very refreshing
Weird question, but why aren't we bombing bats?
Lab leakers and natural spread proponents agree that COVID originally came from bats. SARS originally came from bats. Ebola originally came from bats. Probably bats will produce a new pandemic every few decades. But they're all clustered together in a few big caves. Can't we just bomb them? Or gas them? Or barricade the caves so they can't get out, and they starve? We don't need to bomb all the bats, just the ones in Yunnan with all the weird diseases who keep causing the pandemics. We don't even need to get every last one of them, just decimate the population to the point where it's too small to produce new viruses very often.
This will probably make environmentalists sad, but there are many worse things we are doing to the environment for much less compelling reasons. Why is nobody talking about this?
I would prioritize eliminating high concentration animal confinement facilities such as factory farms and animal labs and their affiliates such as meat markets. get one's own house in order before decimating other creatures.
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/20/10/14-0696_article
This was tried in Kitaka Mine in Uganda after the 2007-2008 outbreak of Marburg hemorrhagic fever. The bat colony in the mine was almost completely eliminated.
In 2012, another Marburg outbreak occurred in a nearby town. An investigation found the bats had repopulated the mine, albeit at much reduced numbers (1-5% of original population)
Testing at the mine found 13.3% of the bats were actively infected with Marburg virus, which was a higher percentage than found in earlier studies prior to the extermination attempt. Genetic analysis indicated that those bats were thesource of infection.
There are many animals that transmit diseases to humans, not just bats. But bats tend to live near humans (just like pigs or birds) so are more likely to transmit the viruses. In your recent COVID post you noted raccoon dogs as one example of an animal that can transmit viruses to humans; but they aren't as common as bats so transmissions are more rare!
Bats are amazing creatures that are a huge benefit to our ecosystems. We should want MORE bats, not fewer.
Super-weird question, I know - but why don't we stop eating bat soup? Is this really harder to do, than to destroy species? Is it too big an "ask" compared to your proposal?
I think I could sum up the major reason in the phrase "Unintended downstream effects". At this point I don't think it's controversial to say that eliminating a species or a local population of a species can have drastic effects on the ecosystems it used to inhabit. The removal of sea otters from much of the West Coast devastated kelp forests in much of their former range by allowing a explosion in the populations of sea urchins. Similar stories for wolves and deer in many parts of the world. Also, bats serve has food sources for a number of other species. Removing them would cause a shift in trophic relations that is difficult to predict.
Now, I'm not a bat ecologist but a quick glance at the literature says that, amongst other things, bats are major predators of insects and likely do a lot to keep insect populations in check. Importantly, that appears to include mosquitoes in at least some populations, meaning that bats likely help reduce the spread of mosquito-borne diseases. So it's not even clear at first glance that eliminating bats would cause a reduction in the disease burden to human populations.
My first thought is not unintended downstream effects. It's that the bats are an intermediary phenomenon, and if you try to eliminate a problem by attacking one of those, what you tend to find is that another intermediary appears to do the same job.
Diseases want to infect people. If they can't do it via bats, they'll do it by other vectors.
Every time some politician proposes bombing the Bat Cave, the Wayne Foundation funds a PR campaign that drives them out of office.
Excellent
Historically most attempts of forcefully exterminating a species have had negative second order effects, and have proven more difficult than they're worth haven't they? Off the top of my head, I can think of the extinction of wolves in the Midwest US leading to exploding deer populations and the erosion of rivers, the CCP declaring war on sparrows for eating seeds, and leading to an explosion in insect population, thus leading to much more difficult pest control during the cultural revolution, and the Australians comically chasing emus around with machine guns, wasting previous tax dollars (though I don't actually know if that was government funded, come to think of it). My understanding is that bats are one of the keystone species that eat mosquitos, so I wouldn't be surprised if declaring war on them wouldn't have similarly negative consequences. They're also kinda cute if kept at a distance, which probably shouldn't enter into the calculus here, but I do hesitate to remove the richness of the natural world for future generations.
I think other than for emotional reasons to eradication of wolves was mostly worth it from a human perspective, the populations haven’t barely bounced back and already there is a a lot of friction.
I just checked the date. Ah, -Carry on, those bats won't bomb themselves.
Consider the risk that some hippie will dedicate his life to saving the species and install himself in a nearby cave to protect the bats. There, he might have a chance encounter with a political prisoner/scientist, shortly before she establishes contact with an alien civilization and invites them to invade us. Inspired by her bold misanthropy, the hippie may then dedicate the next few decades to serving us up on a platter to our conquerors.
Decades of Batman comics have taught me this plan will be spectacularly foiled at the last second.
There are too few bats, and too many Chinese people. Ted K is secretly running the world government from beyond the grave, Seldon-style.
Ted Kaczynski or Ted Kennedy?
I see you've fallen for the conspiracy theory that they're two different people!
Bats eat bugs and we hate bugs more than bats.
Then, too, while I know that we are never, ever, getting back together - I mean "running out of fossils fuels or running out of $$ to get the hardest-to-get of it" ever, ever - but still: is it super-rational that you'd want to pre-emptively eliminate a significant source of fertilizer just in case there's a tiny chance that fossil fuels won't always grow our crops?
Like, diminishing our options - is that a rationalist preference because it makes decisions simpler or something?
Wasn't the production of fertilizer from bat guano both mostly based on harvesting historic buildup rather than anything short-term renewable, and superseded by modern chemical methods of production anyway?
That might well be the case as to the long buildup, but I believe "modern chemical means" are entirely reliant on fossil fuels even when the the fertilizers themselves are not so derived.
Forest and brushland fires sometimes cause a lot of damage to homes. Maybe we should bomb the power lines that typically spark them, or bomb the people for moving deep into the forest, or bomb the roads which enable people to throw cigarettes out the window.
There's a lot to unpack here. Let's do it over a bottle of tequila, traditionally brought to you by bats.
Nature abhors an empty niche. Remove Chesterton's Fence, two years later there are thousands of little fences there. You could try to get some kind of invasive bat species in there instead, I'm sure the resulting viral evolution would be interesting.
The DEFUSE proposal was literally to vaccinate all the bats, as if that wouldn't create a bunch of new viruses.
If anything is gonna cause a revolution in China, anything that sounds too much like "let's do the sparrow thing again" will do it.
Just make sure to keep Chesterton's bat flying.