At this point, nearly every industrialized country has total fertility rates below replacement levels. The US is doing better than many 1.7 births per woman. The situation is much worse elsewhere, with both Italy and Japan at 1.3, and South Korea at a disasterous 0.9. All of this is a problem because it tends to make the population top-heavy, with relatively few working-age adults supporting a relatively large pool of retired seniors.
Anyone care to make some predictions on what we will see countries doing to fight this trend?
I think it's a no-brainer that we will see a lot of money thrown at this problem. Pre-school child care will probably become highly subsidized. Quebec, Canada, for instance has a program where child care costs parents only CAN$9.10 per day. I also wouldn't be surprised to see subsidized housing for young families, although I don't remember seeing it yet. Medical fertility interventions like IVF might also be subsidized.
I also expect immigration to be permitted, and even encouraged, in many places. In some cases that may be temporary imports of labor though guest worker programs, but in other cases it will involve permanent residents.
Finally, I expect to see retirement ages pushed up. Retirement at 65 will probably become something of the past.
But what else might we see? And will any of this work?
China's TFR is 1.2, so they have it worse than most of the West. I wouldn't be surprised if they started restricting emigration within the next generation or so, when the problem really starts to bite.
Anyone looking to cover this problem with immigration really needs to be a fan of Africans, since that's where fertility tends to be the highest right now. There are also a few places in Asia (like Kyrgyzstan) and South America (Bolivia) with high TFR, but they are small.
Africans can't fix the problem, because large scale, unselected african immigration can never have a positive fiscal impact. America needs more Americans - that is, people with the same distribution of characteristics as the American population or better. Unselected African immigrants will, in aggregate, only ever be a fiscal drain, even ignoring the myriad negative externalities they will almost inevitably bring.
We could legalize housing, and undo many of the other little things that each make parenting just a tiny bit more expensive and annoying. ("Car Seats Are Contraception," that sort of thing.)
Get rid of the expectation of higher education so people can get started on their careers and families four years earlier. Already seeing a little bit of that.
Coming at the problem from the other end, throw money into anti-aging research and then tell all the oldsters to get back to work.
> What do you mean "get rid of" [expectation of education] as if you're talking about a government policy that can be repealed?
Some jobs have some kind of education as a legal requirement. Makes sense for a surgeon, but much less sense for a hairdresser. The specific rules vary from place to place, but generally, formal education is usually required for many kinds of jobs. Software development is a huge *exception* in this aspect.
This also makes it more difficult to change profession, once you decide that the choice you made when you were 18 perhaps does not fit your current personality and situation. For example, once I seriously considered that maybe it would be better for me to walk away from software development, and become a plumber or a carpenter instead. No more meetings and Jira tickets, flexible working hours, doing something useful and relatively well paid using my hands while perhaps thinking about some open-source project I would do in my free time. How difficult could it be? I mean, there are YouTube videos for everything, I could start by doing things cheaply for the most desperate customers and gradually level up... Ha-ha, nope. Instead, it would be hundreds of hours of formal training (not even available in my city, so I would have to relocate or commute a lot), then a few years of practice working for someone else until I am finally allowed to work independently... nope, I am too old for that. (For the contrast, consider a former plumber who wants to become a software developer instead. If he has the skills, he could literally start the job tomorrow.)
The problem in Japan and South Korea is that while they let women get educated and work, they make it difficult for women with children to work outside the home. A lot of young women take a look at those options and say yes to the job and no to the kids.
My last suggestion would also fix the Social Security problem. And George R. R. Martin might even live long enough to finish Game of Thrones (admittedly this one's a reach.) Though on the downside we'll never be rid of Trump and Biden.
There is, of course, one solution that is almost sure to work that nobody wants to consider or even mention. The root of the problem is that many women are pursuing careers, and are either too busy or are simply unwilling to have children (to be more precise, enough children to exceed replacement rate). This was obviously not a problem in the past.
Unfortunately, it seems that allowing women agency is not sustainable. But would any country actually be willing to reverse all of this social progress for the "greater good"? If the GOP does end up taking full control of the US, I could see them doing it. They're already being pretty gung-ho about the whole abortion issue. But I don't see it happening in any functional democracy. Though, all these western democracies do seem to be on the verge of collapse anyways...
but that's not really a solution unless you say how you would achieve it.
'have more babies' is not a solution unless you say how you would actually get people to do that.
perhaps I can read between the lines, and guess that the proposed solution is to roll back equal rights, but if that's the case than I can toss it out, since that is not a feasible solution.
> Unfortunately, it seems that allowing women agency is not sustainable
and
> If the GOP does end up taking full control of the US, I could see them doing it. They're already being pretty gung-ho about the whole abortion issue.
… being my clues.
I don’t think it was meant as a solution, more of a lament at the perceived direction of the GOP agenda.
Another clue is anomie’s user name suggesting an anticipated breakdown of moral and ethical standards.
The tone seemed ironic so I didn’t give it a literal reading and that’s why I alluded to a Margaret Atwood dystopia in my comment below
...That doesn't even do anything to solve the problem of declining population. Also, old people can vote, and some of them have a lot of money and power. And also there's the obvious fact that everyone becomes old eventually, and thus have an active stake in this. Even ending democracy might not be enough to get rid of support for seniors.
At least with the gender issue, most of the male population would be happy to enforce the patriarchy themselves.
There's a list of things I'd *like* to see them do. But I'm guessing the current industrialized-nation governments are not going to do anything effective, just pile on more of the same stuff that hasn't worked so far and probably never will.
Until a number of factors including but not limited to a top-heavy population pyramid lead to economic catastrophe. Which I suspect will increase TFR by reducing the *relative* cost of child-raising and removing some of the tempting alternatives.
Germany or Sweden seem to do much more when it comes to subsidizing families/children, yet families have less children than in the US for example. Is does't seem to be a lever we can use.
I would say the best chance of actually changing this trend is economic growth / technological change, in the way that we all work far less in the future (and therefore have more time). Another big impact could obviously come from artificial wombs, where women would no longer have to face any trade-offs. Life-extending medicine could also have an impact on demographics (because less people would die over a certain period of time).
Random thought: Christian Bale was drastically miscast as Patrick Bateman, he's too good-looking.
Patrick Bateman is a man who spends a lot of effort on his looks, but I don't think he's working with particularly good raw material, so he doesn't wind up looking like a movie star, just like an over-groomed average looking dude. I think that the deep sense of insecurity that Bateman has is not really compatible with natural good looks. Maybe he should look a bit more like Pete Campbell from Mad Men; not bad looking but not exactly lighting up the room with his smile.
He feels to me like an 1980s version of one of those guys who tries way too hard on Linkedin, but since it's the 1980s and there's no Linkedin he just murders people instead.
It works for me. I don't think I have personal experience with Bateman's particular type of psychopathy, but my impression is that it doesn't depend on looks. Whatever it is about him that reads as "insecurity" is more like a gaping internal void that can never be filled; no amount of success or status will ever be enough.
I get to look at the semi famous face of Vincent Kartheiser - Pete Cambell - every time I stop for a beer at the corner bar. He shills for the joint in a photo because he was born across the river in Minneapolis. I think they might have paid him a few bucks too. Looking at his Wikipedia page I see he dropped out of school at 15 to ‘make money.’
They also have photos of a couple of baseball hall of farmers because they played high school ball at the Catholic school across the street.
No photos of Christian Bale though. Just a sign that says ‘No WiFi. Get drunk and talk to each other.’
I thought the exact opposite: He was too well cast. A great actor is by definition a form of psychopath, a charming camouflaged thing. The outcome was a cartoon of a cartoon-- one too many layers deep.
Childhood and Education Roundup #5 by Zvi Mowshowitz: A wide-ranging discussion of various topics related to childhood and education, including bullying, truancy, active shooter drills, censorship, woke kindergarten, tracking, homeschooling, the impact of smartphones on children's mental health, and more.
1) The article cites a study that finds bullying has lifelong negative effects, including lower subjective well-being, increased mortality risk, and reduced job prospects in adulthood. However, Zvi expresses concern that the study's controls may be inadequate, as bullying is often a function of the victim's social status and response. How can researchers effectively control for these factors to isolate the causal impact of bullying itself?
2) Zvi discusses the case of "Woke Kindergarten," a controversial program implemented in a San Francisco school district that included materials with questions about abolishing work, landlords, Israel, and borders. The article also mentions that test scores in the district fell, with less than 4% of students proficient in math and under 12% at grade level in English. While the article does not directly attribute this decline to the "Woke Kindergarten" program, what does this case suggest about the challenges of implementing politically charged curricula in early childhood education, and how can schools ensure that educational content is both age-appropriate and academically rigorous?
3) The article presents data showing a substantial increase in homeschooling rates in the United States following the COVID-19 pandemic, with many families continuing to homeschool even after schools reopened. Zvi interprets this as a strong endorsement of homeschooling by families who tried it. What factors might contribute to this sustained shift toward homeschooling, and what implications could this have for the future of public education?
4) Citing survey data and time-use studies, Zvi argues that excessive smartphone use among children and adolescents is associated with reduced sleep, decreased in-person socializing, and worsening mental health outcomes. He critiques claims that the evidence is inconclusive, arguing that even the possibility of such significant negative impacts warrants serious concern. How can parents, educators, and policymakers navigate the trade-offs between the benefits and risks of youth smartphone use in an evidence-based manner?
5) The article discusses the potential benefits of student tracking and ability grouping, citing a study that found the introduction of flexible teacher pay in Wisconsin led to improved student outcomes by incentivizing the recruitment and retention of high-quality teachers. However, Zvi notes that tracking remains controversial, with some critics arguing that it exacerbates educational inequities. How can schools design tracking systems that maximize student learning while ensuring all students have access to rigorous, high-quality instruction?
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.
A possibly very stupid questions: Isn't Popper today more or less unimportant for social sciences like psychology? As you might know, every Psy student is taught about Popper: His critical rationalism is the key to our field. We don't validate theories, we falsify them. And for good reason: no matter how many white swans we find, we can never know, if all swans are white. If we find only one black swan, however, we can say with certainty that not all swans are white. Now, in the actual science, we find neither white nor black swans - at least not with a high degree of certainty. Small sample-sizes, failed replications, tests based on probability, internal or external validity, etc. make it questionable, what color the swans really have. And this discussion, the discussion about the real color, seem to be much more important than arguing that a black swan would be of a higher quality than a white one. What do you guys think?
Teaching "about" something doesn't make people actually good at it. Sometimes people answer the questions correctly in test, and then don't apply them in real life anyway. (I think there were experiments showing that courses on ethics or critical thinking do not make people actually more ethical or more critical thinkers.) Perhaps this could be improved by designing the course differently, with an emphasis on examples from everyday life, both professional and free time... rather than just "this is what Popper thought on the topic". I am not sure.
Probably more importantly, I do not think that Popper correctly describes what scientists (even in STEM) actually do. I think he proves too much... at least the version of him that most people on internet use, which probably lacks most of the original nuance.
Basically, Popper (as used by most people) seems completely one-sided. He argues against any feelings of certainty, ever; his approach is pure negativity. On one hand, sure, you should never be literally 100% certain about something; there is always a possibility of new evidence that will disprove things you thought were true. But he takes it too far, as if there is nothing positive a scientist could ever say about a theory, beyond "it hasn't been falsified yet". From that perspective, a theory that is supported by thousands experiments is no more certain than a crazy hypothesis I made up just now and no one had an opportunity to test it yet. Neither has been falsified yet... and according to (the popular interpretation of) Popper, that is all anyone can ever say about a scientific theory.
But we all know that this is *not* how actual scientists behave. They take certain things, such as gravity or evolution or relativity, as basically true. They may be open to re-examine them critically, if something new and surprising happens. But normally, they just treat them as true. Whenever a journalist reports that the speed of light has been experimentally exceeded (that used to happen quite often a few years ago), a scientist simply ignores that, because he knows that's pretty impossible... and usually a few weeks later it turns out that it was instead a mistake at some calculation. To act otherwise would be a waste of time. For most practical purposes, scientists act as if relativity has been validated.
A crackpot whose life mission is to prove that "relativity isn't true" will quote Popper every day.
Scientists should be open to the possibility that a new fact can make them reconsider the existing theories. They should even actively be looking for possible disconfirmations of the existing theories... of course, not all of them all the time; after the theory has been here for a while, most of the time they should just use it as a tool to derive new useful results. It is okay to take "all swans are warm-blooded" as a fact (unless something extraordinary happens).
The problem instead is that in fields such as psychology, the proper degree of certainty in existing theories should be much lower than in physics. Because there is less experimental evidence, few replications, small sample sizes, often people not even considering alternative explanations of the observed data, etc. Those are the actual problems. Falsifiability is a red herring, in my opinion. It is a one-sided weapon against all feelings of certainty, whether deserved or not. The problem is jumping to conclusions too soon, not making conclusions as such.
I completely agree! Popper is totally overused. His basic point (there could always be a black swan) is good and important, but in the scientific reality coming to a good valuation of a theory and deciding, how good an empirical study actually was (was that swan really white/black?) is much more relevant. Popper should be named in an introduction to the field, not as a user manual.
Is it actually true that 'sanctuary cities' policies against cooperation with ICE mean that they protect people suspected even of heinous crimes like raping children?
Do people have strategies for getting a good night's sleep for the nights they really need to? While I have sleep issues usually, they get especially bad when I have something big coming up/on my mind, which means I e.g. go to most interviews fairly exhausted and perform more poorly than I would otherwise. This is on my mind because I just had an interview on literally zero hours of sleep.
I'd like some technique/failsafe to try in situations like this to ensure I get a good sleep. I've tried a lot of the more standard advice like staying off screens and using melatonin which mostly hasn't worked but I'd be interested in hearing things that worked for other people in my situation. I'm fine with medication, but only if it actually leads to me feeling refreshed/alert in the morning and doesn't only knock me out for a while. If it helps for giving me advice, I tend to have issues both with falling asleep and with staying asleep, although my issues with falling asleep become especially acute before a big day.
1. Read something that's just kinda boring. For a while, Moby Dick was my go-to. I love the prose, but it's a style of writing that's hard to get in sync with in this day and age. Forcing myself to keep reading it was a good way to exhaust my brain.
2. Watch something kinda boring on my phone. This goes against most advice but it works for me (sometimes). Right now a good go-to is the Halo adaptation on Paramount. I like it just enough to keep watching but sometimes I find myself waiting for something actually interesting to happen and that's when I get sleepy.
3. The real trick, the one that usually works. I tell myself - and I actually believe it - that if I can't sleep, then just lying still with my eyes closed and thinking calm thoughts is a good substitute for sleep. I just try to do that as long as possible, and tell myself that it doesn't actually matter if I fall asleep if I can keep doing that instead. Almost invariably, I fall asleep.
I do something similar to #3: I lay perfectly still with my eyes close and don't move except for breathing and swallowing. I've never gone longer than 15 minutes before falling asleep no matter how awake i am.
It sounds so dumb, but it works. It's also way harder than it seems. You don't notice how many small movements you do all the time until you try to not do them. There is also a meditation/mindfulness piece to it: you'll get little itches and things all over and all you can do is focus on them and hope they go away. It often seems like your body will create this little irritations almost to "check if you are awake" - they will happen more frequently the closer you get to sleep.
I'll warn that I first learned of this as a technique to encourage lucid dreaming, which many people dont want. Its never produced lucid dreaming for me, though I have had lucid dreams by chance.
As far as reading goes, advanced math tends to work well as well. Or anything that requires mental effort.
The problem I've found with this is that you can be really sleepy while reading, and then instantly become non-sleepy once you stop reading and get into bed.
As for the third, that's a neat trick. I doubt I'd be able to delude myself into making it work, but it's a cool idea.
I've been pretty satisfied with CBD. As I've gotten older it's been harder to get through the night without waking up. Eating 5 Mg of CBD (in a gummy) before I go to bed have improved my sleep patterns considerably. However, not all the brands of CBD gummies I've tried have been equally effective.
Sadly enough, for my most recent interview, I had also slept poorly the previous evening. Usually that is enough for me to sleep better the next evening, but this time it wasn't.
I'd recommend the opposite. If there's a chance you are going to miss a night's sleep - have as much in your sleep bank as possible in the week leading up. Knowing that also takes the pressure to fall asleep on the big night off a bit which sounds useful as a sleep strategy in itself in this case.
I've tried this, with mixed results. The most regular outcome is that I do sleep better on the second night, but not by enough. My body wants 8-9 hours, if I did nothing I might get 4-5, and by reducing my sleep the night before I end up with 6-7. So two nights in a row with 6ish hours instead of 8 and 4 - mixed results at best.
I don't have anything that works all the time, but a number of things that increase the probability of a good night's sleep: Most powerful on eis 30 mins or so of cardio in any form done earlier in the day, cardio that's intense enough to get me really sweaty. Another powerful one is to get in the habit of using the bed only for sleep & sex. If you read, watch movies, talk on the phone, browse online while in bed you associate bed with relaxed wakefulness. Relaxed wakefulness is just want you don't want if you're lying in bed trying to go to sleep, right? So do all those winding down things like movies and internet browsing in a chair or sitting on a couch. If you're bothered by noise, use earplugs (I recommend the Macks silicone ones) and a white noise machine. When it comes to drugs I find that benedryl 25 mg or so works well, and does not give me a hangover. Benzodiazepines work extremely well for many people -- but watch out, because you can develop a tolerance, so don't use the stuff more than once a week.
One thing that works for me is long academic discussion podcasts like The Dissenter or Mindscape. Stuff that’s interesting enough that I would want to listen even if I wasn’t trying to sleep, but not so important to me that I’ll object if I doze off in the middle of it.
There's a technique I learned from an online post that works decently well for me.
First, and this is probably well known to you, don't try to relax. Because trying to relax is just going to keep you awake. Instead, try to focus on seeing with your eyes closed. Keep your eyes closed but otherwise make an effortful try to see something in the blackness. It will seem slippery and weird at first, but keep trying. Eventually you'll catch a glimpse of something: dark shapes moving in the blackness. If you try to look at them too hard they'll slip away, but that's okay. Keep looking.
Eventually you'll start seeing dream imagery. These will be vivid images, but you aren't actually seeing them with your eyes. Keep focused on trying to see them, on examining the images that come up. At this point you'll be on the edge of sleep, dipping into unconsciousness. You might bob up and down on this border for a while, but when you bob up into consciousness try to stay focused on seeing. Watching for the next dream image.
Eventually you fall asleep.
It is not a perfect "works every time" technique, but when I can't sleep it's my go to and it is fairly effective. I used it last night, which was a pretty rough night for me, and I'd say it took about 15-20 minutes to work. Your mind will want to wander, but just keep herding your attention back to watching for images.
> It will seem slippery and weird at first, but keep trying. Eventually you'll catch a glimpse of something: dark shapes moving in the blackness. If you try to look at them too hard they'll slip away, but that's okay. Keep looking.
Not going to lie, some nights my subconscious will generate a stream of frightening images. I learned how to deal with that from listening to an interview with a guy who does guided psychedelic psychotherapy. He said that most “bad trips” happen because you start to experience something disturbing and then you mentally flinch away from it. But trying to run away from a frightening thing your own mind conjured up is as pointless as trying not to think a thought: as long as you’re trying, you’re thinking about it. So the key is to not flinch away, to look it straight on and then go through it. If you do you may find something better on the other side. I have found that this works with the sleep technique as well, though it can be difficult.
This is my go-to technique, either learned from you or another ACX or DSL poster sometime last year/two years ago(?) This alone has potentially made lurking around this whole community a net positive for my cumulative amount of sleep.
One other advantage: it has made it much easier for me to fall asleep even if my environment is not totally dark. With a little bit of ambient light, it is easier to attend to the phantom images I see when my eyes are closed.
We definitely got it from the same place, though I can’t find the source offhand. It was a link to a blog with a long post about it, someone must have put it in the comments a few years ago.
Have you experimented with sleep podcasts at all? I particularly like The French Whisperer. He has a ton of content free on Spotify. Works both for falling asleep at bedtime and if I wake up in the middle of the night. YMMV of course but maybe worth trying.
Moderate exercise in the early evening, enough that I feel tired, but not enough that I'll be sore in the morning. Maybe followed by a warm shower, even if I also plan to shower in the morning.
Doing some things like dishes, cleaning, and sorting, which require a small amount of effort, and have clear end-conditions, so I feel like I've accomplished goals and am done for the day. Not things like studying or long-term projects which leave me feeling like there's always more to do.
Tiny amounts of alcohol, mostly smelled and slowly consumed, not enough to produce any real effect, but enough to trigger some of the pleasant associations in my mind.
Pleasure reading with a physical book, of something I enjoy that I've read before, in low warm light. I have a dawn simulator that also works in reverse, as a dusk simulator. But I can also turn the overhead dimmers all the way down, and turn on a side-lamp that has an old 40-watt incandescent bulb.
It's probably very individual. I get a good sleep after an exhausting workout, but my wife can't fall asleep after one. Sometimes white noise really helps, but not always. Same for reading in bed.
One thing I'd strongly advise against for this purpose is alcohol.
This is not new, and also not really 'or something'. From the text you shared:
"Germany’s constitution does allow for parties that “seek to undermine or abolish the free democratic basic order” to be banned, but the hurdle to do so is extremely high. The country’s Constitutional Court has done it only twice — with the Socialist Reich Party, a successor to the Nazi party, in 1952, and the Communist Party of Germany in 1956."
I don't know if 'militant democracy' is the established translation (of 'wehrhafte Demokratie'). 'Fortified' (or: able to defend itsself) sounds to me like it'd represent the original concept better, though maybe it doesn't sound better in english ;).
Okay, and AfD cannot be remotely described as seeking to do this, which means that efforts to abolish it are not in any conceivable sense actually concerned with "saving democracy". So uh, yeah, the "or something" was actually very generous. Because really, these efforts are being conducted by anti-democratic lunatics.
Nothing in your comments here so far has indicated that you're well familiar with the AfD, with the inner-German debate on banning the party or with the respective procedures. Please feel free to add relevant information on any of those.
As you can read in the article you posted, while 'lunatics' may any time demand anything "the hurdle to do so ((ban the party)) is extremely high", and the process is taken quite seriously. In the past 20 years, efforts to ban another extremist-right-wing party failed two times, for very different reasons.
As far as the AfD is concerned, in three of the German states their state-wide party organisations are classified as 'definitely right-wing extremist'. This is in contradiction with your verdict of 'cannot be remotely described as seeking to do this'.
There was an interesting essay I read a few months back about how the mechanism for keeping actual dangerous far-right parties out of power in Germany was for the milquetoast establishment center-right party to move right _just_ enough to steal whatever issue they were harping on, and that worked beautifully for decades. It only fell apart once it was somehow decided that certain positions, immigration restriction in particular, were beyond the pale, and instead they would just suppress the far-right parties and somehow the voters who wanted those policies would just fade away. We're seeing that fail now, as it always does.
... is not a very clear term. The far-right was strenghtened when the center-right party being in government decided to let in several hundred thousands of refugees mostly from Syria. The original and most influential decision was taken, when refugees who were already in Europe were both mistreated and being actively pushed westwards by the Hungarian prime minister.
I think there is something to it, though the way this is described sounds more like a narrative / good story, than the actual events. A couple of far-right parties tried since re-unification, but could never establish themselves. The current far-right party started as a mix of right-wing/libertarian/very-far-right persons and over the years, the latter won the internal fights (although there are still *some* differences among regions). The party also gained enormous momentum, when we had many refugees enter the country in 2015/2016, under the government of a conservative chancellor.
What would have been or would currently be the right strategy against the now popular far-right party, is a matter of much debate. What is not in doubt is however, that
a) this party is much stronger in the eastern states of the country and
b) the multiple crises of the past years (Covid-19, war in Ukraine, related energy crisis and inflation) have also contributed to a growing number of people overall dissatisfied with 'the state' or 'the democratic/ mainstream parties'.
In Slovakia, in recent elections, the ruling party realized that the war in Ukraine will be a divisive topic, so before the election it split into two parts-- one strongly pro-Russian and anti-Ukraine, the other strongly pro-Western and anti-Ukraine -- both got a lot of votes, and after the election they de facto merged again.
> Robert Fico is widely seen as pro-Russian, and his government has stopped militarily supporting Ukraine, saying he "will not send one bullet" to Ukraine. Fico has been opposing sanctions against Russia, with his standpoint on Ukraine being compared to that of Viktor Orbán. In an RTVS interview, Fico questioned Ukraine's sovereignty and independence, claiming that Ukraine is just a US puppet, sparking outrage in both Slovakia and Ukraine. He has also stated that Slovakia will veto Ukraine's NATO membership, and has pushed for a peace deal, even if Ukraine suffers territorial losses. His words regarding Ukraine have been described as "heartless", "vulgar" and "disgraceful".
Pellegrini described himself as pro-EU and pro-NATO. I don't have a good link, because it was a very recent thing and only aimed at voters in Slovakia before the election. I assume he will probably not mention it again (until maybe right before the next election).
And, as you can see on the linked Wikipedia page, today they happily rule the country together.
Honestly? I'm not even upset. That's brilliant. Regardless of how much I disagreed with their position I'd be honored to be led by people that devious.
I don't think they actually have a position, other than "steal as much money as possible". They certainly do say a lot of things, but practically everything is like this, saying whatever their polls suggest most people want to hear (which is typically some form of "social democracy", except this time this one question was too polarizing to have a single best answer) and then doing their own thing regardless.
The same thing will happen about Ukraine -- as long as EU or NATO offers some money they can steal in return for sending some weapons to Ukraine, they will. Otherwise, they will not. It's as simple as that. The story they will tell their voters... either they won't mention it at all, or they will say that someone else would have sent the weapons anyway so at least it meant more jobs for our people. Slovakia is a small country, so on any issue they have the excuse that they were forced to do so by the big bad Europe, but at least they were clever enough to derive some benefit for our people.
I also admire the skills (and I am deeply disappointed that the opposition is sorely lacking them) on the technical level. But the money is really missing in the economy, things are slowly falling apart, to do anything important you need to bribe someone connected to the governing party, and young people are leaving the country.
Okay, I guess I was too flippant, that does suck. In the US we're so starved for even remotely functional leadership that any foreign leader capable of speaking in complete sentences looks like Metternich to us.
I guess I can't really blame new posters for self-promotion when the top of the page reads, "Post about anything you want."
I searched out that old "twice per year comment" about two weeks ago, intending to link it (and the general policy*) on the next Hidden Thread, hoping it might help other long-time readers who want to police the comments. (You're doing God's work Shaked Koplewitz)
I have to say, I really like the "symbolically banned for one day for interacting with trolls" policy. I wish that were enforced more consistently, even though I might eat a few myself. But Scott is probably doing the right thing by spending more time with his family, and less time policing trolls on his corner of the Internet.
My big fear in the move to Substack was that working for pay would cause Scott to experience the Over-justification effect. So I try not to complain if he avoids unpleasant chores.
From past experience here: a huge proportion of people skip over any header text of an "Open Thread", including unusual rules that apply to that thread.
I think we just need a general rule, something like don't plug your blog more than twice per year. Then the group here would need to remind posters who violate it, because Scott was never good at staying on top of that or on top of reports of incivility, even before he became the father of twins.
Elementary school age children in the passenger seat of cars with advanced airbags (that is: airbags with a weight sensor that are supposed to deactivate for small passengers): is there a real risk here?
It's easy to find breathless warnings that allowing your child into the front seat before they are thirteen is dangerous, but I was unable to find much in the way of actual data. A few studies from the 90s back when the problem with airbags and children was first being investigated, but nothing about modern cars.
I havent seen any about airbags, though i read a blog post a while ago about how car seats for kids above like 5 don't really reduce injuries (can't find it now, sorry). I'd like to see some data on front seats and airbags too.
Perhaps a pressure sensor in the lower half of the front passenger seat would solve the problem, combined with the weight sensor in the seat itself. Either that, or make the kids carry a hundredweight sack of potatos on their lap! :-)
I just feel we should extent the same to the natives of Palestine who also did not welcome refugees from europe and in hindsight were probably correct to do so.
It's really the soaring height of scum and villainy to pick a politics that you don't like, a downtrodden people who advocate for and/or support it, and then smugly ask "And how is X working out for Y?", before sauntering off cockily.
What's funny is how utterly symmetric and ideology-neutral this is, it's one of the most low-effort celebration of evil that someone could possibly do.
Glenn, as a Pro-Palestinian on your side I'm not pleased with a lot of the phrasings you use in this and other post. Let Me Explain Why (^TM).
Nearly 4 months ago I wrote in reply to a certain Pro-Palestinian commenter who was (and substantially more than you) quite aggressive and displayed very uncharitable behavior [1], in order to advise him/her on how to gradually back off from some of this behavior, this commenter was banned about 3 weeks later. I'm not saying I'm pleased he/she was banned or that I'm hopeful that you will get banned, I'm just saying that, had they listened to even a subset of my advice, they would probably not have been banned, and there would be another Pro-Palestinian voice here, which is ultimately a good thing for Palestine and Palestinians, however indirect and minor the effect of posting walls of text on a textbox hosted on a shitty server is.
Being banned on ACX is **hard**, I was banned twice here before under different (unrelated to Palestine/Israel) usernames and believe me when I tell you, I had to **sink** to deep lows to trigger the Benevolent Libertarian in charge of the comment section. The 2 comments I was banned for are some of the cringiest things I wrote since middle school love poems, and one of them still makes me feel guilty at night as it was full of very mean and flagrant insults. When Scott was banning me for this comment that would get you insta-banned by auto-bots anywhere else on the Internet, he said he was "on the fence" on the actual comment, and only banned me due to an **additional** comment that I wrote in reply to someone who reported the original. I'm just saying this as encouragement, you know. This is basically witch land [2]; you have to be an active demon to be persecuted. A persistent, unrepentant, proud demon. Don't be like this.
The link I posted has 7 pieces of advice in a huge wall of text, I hope you will read it.
I specifically want to comment on your use of the term "Zionist". Zionist is, by and large, an exonym, and is a name mostly used derogatorily to refer to people who do not call themselves by this name. I'm not saying that there aren't unrepentant and proud Neo-Zionists in the modern day who dick around and ramble on how important it's to "redeem" Eretz Israel and establish a Jewish supremacy from Gaza to the Galilee and beyond, they do exist. I'm just saying that the word "Zionist" is a rhetorical trick where you group those scum with less evil people who *merely* think that Israel should stick to its current border but also fully support the war in Gaza, and **then** group all of those with much better people who think that Israel **is** evil and that it **is** treating Palestinians badly and engaged in an unjust war but that it shouldn't be disbanded or destroyed because that would imply certain things about its Jewish population.
In short, "Zionist" is a so-called "Suitcase Word", a term coined by Marvin Minsky to denote confusing words that mean plenty of very different things, they are confusing because they trick the reader into thinking things that are true of a certain subset of the things denoted by the Suitcase Word and then generalizing those things to all the denoted set.
So, to all the advice listed in [1], here's an 8th (or Shemona, in Hebrew):
(8) Eschew the word "Zionist". More generally, eschew words that your opponents don't use among themselves to call themselves. If it's necessary to call someone a name they don't call themselves, make it clear that it's you calling them this word "Xs are what I call 'Y's, let me explain", don't use an exonym uncontroversially as if it's established facts.
I'm fine with skipping the term Zionist, though I did qualify it as "genocidal Zionist." I agree there are more mild Zionists I happen to know them. But it seems when an issue becomes ethnically/tribally related the lizard brain pops in and the guy who is your co-worker turns into a crazed supremacist. Most of the moderate Jews I know in real life and online seem to just reflexively defend Israelis no matter how progressively worse the atrocity is. I call it the deny, downplay, then distract method. It's not always done in this order.
"There is plenty of things to be said against Israel, browsing goddamn Haaretz will give you a lot of ideas, that's how bad Israel is. "
LMAO yes haha. Haaretz isnt perfect by any means but they've done a lot of good.
" conversely, that's how awesome and selfless some Israelis are, to publicly criticize their state and their people"
I agree and I admire them for overcoming the tribalistic impulse although this is an small percentage of the population. I think I'm a lot more moderate on the ethno-nationalism than I was before. Ethnic/tribal conflict seems to be a pretty consistent theme in human history and its unfortunately backed up by dna evidence. There is a phenomenon known as Y chromosomal replacement where one tribes' men annihilate the other tribes. There are other instances of just complete massacres. At the same time, if we are to transcend our lizard brain and be more than marauding tribalists we have to treat laws and norms around human rights consistently, not just shit on them when its convenient, or for our more impressive/pity-worthy ethnic groups. I was a little bit pro Israel before I turned fully against it so I guess I should be a lot more charitable than I am.
Since you are right about the atrocities being undeniable at this point, I think there are maybe a few claims they still make that need to be addressed and maybe this is the one that gets to me the most so it will be my Final Comment whenever I get around to refining it. I see advocates use this excuses a lot online as a way to dodge criticism. The screeching atrocity deniers are so far gone it is not worth engaging with them.
But the tactic I am talking about is to assign Hamas and Palestinians a quadrillion malintent points, and Israels a quadrillion excuses so no matter what an IDF is doing to a 6 year old Gazan girl, Hamas is just always worse by default "because they would do worse if they could and how dare you suggest otherwise". If Israelis don't deny what they're accused of, they'll downplay it "its a rare instant, hamas is worse" or they will just distract you from the issue like carateca here, who clearly does not want incidents being discussed and would rather attempt to rile you up and I supposed I fell into this individuals little trap and wont be doing so.
I don't think we disagree about anything on the actual matter-of-fact bottom-line which is that Israel is a genocidal state engaged in merciless and unprecedented murder of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians. We probably **do** disagree a lot on how culpable each individual Israeli are (my view: Not very much if they're a non-IDF person living inside the green line) and how diaspora Jews should react and believe regarding the war (my view: too complex and half-baked to summarize in a pair of parentheses), and we probably disagree a lot and lots of things related to Religion, Politics, etc.... Regardless, "Israel is killing lots of Palestinians and a lot of rabid Pro-Israel commenters are justifying it" is not a particularly contentious point between the two of us.
My long pair (or triple if you count the December 2023 link) of posts is purely an objection on **how** you present your views, not the actual content of your views.
Imagine you and I are both Christian pastors/preachers, in actual fact I'm an Atheist ex-Muslim but that's why I said "imagine". Both of us are tasked with telling people about the fire and brimstones that Yahweh - the Jews' God that billions of non-Jews are inexplicably worshipping - is going to rain down on them if they don't repent. Imagine that:
- You had the idea of actually finding someone who died of first-degree fire, and presenting their charred coal-black body to the congregation as an object lesson in what would happen to them
- I had the idea of merely touching a burning match with my finger, and then telling the congregation to do the same and contemplate the fire and brimstone that Yahweh will bring on us if we disobey.
If this was true, I might then object to your way of presentation NOT because I'm not a Christian, and NOT because I don't think that the ancient Levantine God is indeed going to rain down fire and brimstone on people who disobey Him, but because it's a really over-the-top brutal way of getting your points across. It's a bad idea to make an example out of a dead body, it's a bad idea to display a horribly mutilated human then argue and make a point (the people who saw the horribly mutilated human will be shocked into non-articulacy and no amount of reasoning or argument will reach through). All in all, it's just a really bad idea of making the point.
That was a bit of an unfair and over-the-top example, but I hope you get what I meant by my posts.
In certain Hollywood productions there is a cliche where someone who lost a loved one in a war tells another loved one who is fighting a possibly different war "I don't want to lose you too", cue the crying and sniveling and perhaps some sexual kissing. This cliche is very cringe and trite and Hollywood in general is very cringe and facile, posting on ACX is not a war even if you're posting about an actual war and being banned from ACX is not Death.
Regardless, I want to be that someone (minus the sexual kissing): I don't want another Pro-Palestinian commenter to be banned. Your job is... honestly not that fucking hard. There is plenty of things to be said against Israel, browsing goddamn Haaretz will give you a lot of ideas, that's how bad Israel is. (and conversely, that's how awesome and selfless some Israelis are, to publicly criticize their state and their people for all the countless millions to see and for the all the internet to remember, because that's the right thing to do.)
There is a trap that is very easy to fall for when you're angry about an injustice, that trap is to mistake discharging your anger for correcting the injustice. What I mean is: Suppose you saw an Israeli soldier do... whatever the fuck they have been doing in Gaza for the past 5 months, their TikToks speak louder than anything I will write. You get very angry at this clear injustice, who could blame you? What unfeeling piece of rock would not? But then you feel that you have to do something, and Israel is some X thousand kilometers away and it's very unlikely you can get to this particular soldier or his boss or his boss' boss and it's very unlikely you can do something to them when you're unarmed and not an Israeli, so you go to a random Jewish guy in your neighborhood - X thousand kilometers away from Israel - and yell some racist thing in his face, or comment a mean thing under a YouTube video featuring a random Israeli.
What happened here? What happened is that you mistook your own anger as the injustice itself, the injustice that you witnessed in Gaza hadn't changed a single bit by your actions, the only thing that changed is that you are now less angry because you insulted or threatened someone that you perceive as similar to the one who committed the injustice. Those are not the same thing. That's your own ego talking, it's not about Palestine or Palestinians or helpless people, it's about you.
That's enough wall of text for now, I hope you will read it and get something out of it, Cheers.
I'm not even in this conversation, but I am also unfamiliar with the term "cue in". If you have a few free minutes, would you please explain it? Seriously, as someone with a bit of a linguistics background, I'm curious about what it means and where it came from. I'm familiar with the usage "to cue someone in", but this is completely new to me.
Not a native English speaker, but English has a famous habit of freely transporting words from one linguistic category to another, right? The most famous instance of this is verbing non-verbs: "I will google this", "They should email us", etc... The reverse is also true, searching for "nouning verbs" on google (or **googling** it, hehe) yields the fancy name for this, Nominalization. Among the famous examples listed are "Throw" and "Smile".
"The cue in" is just an instance of this, "cue in" is a phrasal verb. It's a bit more unusual to noun phrasal verbs, but I found a lot of examples after a bit of searching and following dictionary suggestions:
1- A giveback: An agreement between employees and employers to surrender benefits in return for other beneifts
2- A payback: Revenge
3- A pushover: Someone or something who is easy to "push over", to coerce or persuade to do what you want without much difficulty. This one is so famous that the verb itself is relatively obscure relative to its nominalization.
4- A getaway: An escape
5- A handover: Infamously [over]used in corporate contexts, meaning when someone hands over jurisdiction and/or responsibility for something to someone else, typically (in corporate contexts) when the person doing the handover is about to quit or be fired. Googling "The Handover" yields as the first result the Wikipedia page about the handover of Hong Kong from UK to continental China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handover_of_Hong_Kong.
Judging from 5 examples, the only mistake that Glenn seems to have made is that he didn't append the 2 words together to make the nominalization. It should have been "The cuein" not "The cue in", but that would have made it incomprehensible.
In response to the comment that you deleted: yes. I did in fact have a perfectly civil conversation with Glenn on one subject, even though we disagree on another subject.
Really do report me, it will mean attention to you're comments I've reported and I would like this. You are the case in point commenter who defaults to denying, downplaying, or just flat out distracting from anyone who criticizes Israel. It is a pathetic method of sabotaging debate and reeks of insecurity which is natural I guess. You are not different from other atrocity deniers. I actually think you are more rabid and nasty than online communists who defend stalin and pol pot.
As someone who has come around to the view race is real, but who also believes human rights is also real, this is showing me the former is going to be trumping the latter worldwide. Because the descendants of the Holocaust decided to open that door.
There's two groups whose opinions on the current conflict need to be absolutely and totally disregarded: Muslims and Jews. I don't want to read anything written by one of them on this subject, there's too much ingroup bias.
Found something not by Muslims. Although a better approach would be try to listen to literally everyone and discern the truth from that, muslims, jews, christians especially palestinian christians, etc.
"The Zionists slaughtered children in their hospital beds, dumped them in pits outside and drove over them with bulldozers. Many kids bodies were found with their drips still attached."
I mean not exactly the worst approach I guess but most independent observers sooner or later observe the IDF are unhinged killers. I know I was I guess more on the pro Israeli side (a little) before learning a lot more, listening to both, and and turning more and more pro Palestinian the more I listened to either.
Question for Americans: how important is housing space to you?
I am quite aware that Europe is considerably poorer than the US, a topic that comes up frequently in US-Europe discussion, other through Americans triumphantly explaining this fact to Europoors. There are quite a few indicators that can be used to show this, from incomes to wealth levels to various owned appliances.
However, one of the most common things to come up is something that seems less important than all those: Americans consider Europeans to live in pitifully cramped houses with little space. Take this tweet (https://twitter.com/scottlincicome/status/1779635261661417518) and its reactions, for instance.
I, personally, live with my wife and two kids in an apartment that's a bit smaller than the average size of housing for Finland. If I had the choice I'd take those few extra square meters and put them in the kitchen, since I like to cook and a bit more space for appliances and shelves would be nice. Other than that, I don't really have a problem with the size: there's four rooms and a kitchen, enough for the kids to have their own rooms and for me to work quietly in the bedroom when I'm working from home.
When living in America for a few months in 2008, I visited ordinary American houses, and it was of course evident already then that the house sizes are indeed bigger than here. However, this particular difference aroused no envy in me; I mostly remember thinking that it's just more room to vacuum and mop. There are, of course, people who bitch about how houses are too small, but they are mostly concerned with the amount of rooms, i.e. "Why are they building all these two-bedroom places where you can't fit a family?", rather than the square meters, as such.
Is it one of those things where if you are used to comparatively compact houses, the bigger houses don't really seem that different, but if you are used to bigger housing, the compact houses and apartments immediately come off as hopelessly cramped?
I think there's something buried in the American mythos/dream, going back in Anglo-American history to before the Revolution, where we want space to do our own thing. With enough space, we can have privacy, we can do what we want without other people telling us "no", we can get away from "all that bullshit". The response to people getting in your face, telling you what to do, is to go somewhere else, somewhere on your own, and be free. This even applied to runaway slaves - the solution was to gather up the people you loved, and get the hell out of there.
I suppose it gets laid at the feet of the "germs" part of "Guns, Germs, and Steel".
It's kind of important to me that my house has a dedicated home office, a library, and a guest bedroom. The extra storage space and the big kitchen are also nice, as is having enough room for two indoor cats to do their thing. And the two-car garage is turning into a workshop; I can still fit one car into it if I need to, but I basically don't.
I could downsize my life to fit into a smaller space, but the things I'd be giving up are things I would miss. Being a Rich American(tm), I don't have to and I'm fine with that.
Large houses are nice. Having a spare bedroom for guests and bouts of flu, an office space for working from home, a large kitchen with a big stove, a workout space, and a garage for the two cars (no public transport and two working adults) is… I can’t complain?
If you were a billionaire, would you have a larger house? I know I would. When you remove financial constraints, people tend to choose much larger houses. They don't choose arbitrarily large houses (nobody lives in a house the size of an airport terminal even if they can easily afford it) but they tend to choose houses that are several times the size of a normal person's house.
Conclusion: larger houses are better, and any argument to the contrary is just poverty cope.
A few years ago we sold a flat in central London and bought a rambling great eight bedroom house in Devon, with a large garden. Although it is hard and time-consuming to keep on top of the cleaning indoors, and weeding and maintaining the garden, a big advantage of larger houses generally IMHO is that, all things being equal, the occupants of one have more exercise just making their way here and there round and about the house than people in more compact dwellings. It all adds up, if you think about it.
As some evidence (perhaps) for that contention, consider to the British Royal family, whose various members have reached very old ages in recent and even not so recent times, Queen Victoria for example, despite having more than a dozen children (I think). Then there was the late Queen Mother, 101, and nearly 100 for the late Duke of Edinburgh, and late 90s for the late QE2. Besides having the best medical care of course, I suggest that at least in part it is simply the extra exercise they gained trotting around in their vast dwellings, and the grounds outside!
It is true that some monarchs of recent times, such as Edward VII and George V died quite young. But that may have been due more to over-indulging in food and tobacco products (certainly in Edward's case) or just bad luck I guess, like King Charles having cancer.
No I wouldn’t and didn’t. Because I could afford a much bigger house - but there’s just the two of us. Wouldn’t mind a pool though - but I live in Ireland.
All else being equal, larger houses are better (with qualifications).
But all else is not equal. Larger houses (or houses at all as opposed to apartments) lead to lower population density, and that comes with its own drawbacks.
I prefer to live in an apartment in a walkable city with good public transport, instead of living in a house while being car dependent. And that's not poverty cope, that's just understanding trade-offs.
It would be great if we could maintain higher conversational and discussion standards than accusing (?) people with different perspective of "X cope" rather than steelmanning their position properly.
Man, talk about generalizing from one example. Have you considered that people have different preferences? During one vacation back when I was a kid, we rented this really big three-story house for absurdly cheap because the owners liked my dad for some reason. We all ended up hating it by the end. There's just so much god damn space that had no point in being there. It was like... the opposite of claustrophobic, whatever that's called.
Hypothesis: the median American has fewer available out-of-the-house spaces (especially if you only consider those that could reasonably be walked to) than the median European, such that space *in* the home is more important to Americans.
It's relatively common for Americans to have a roomba or other robot that will vacuum and mop for them. So that often isn't perceived as a major issue.
I've begun to suspect I'm somewhere in the autism spectrum. I've never been able to pick up on the subtle fluctuations in emotion/vibes that normies instinctively pick up on, and a friend told me recently he feels like I'm behind a wall (I've been reading neurotypicals can't pick up on the emotions of autistics), and also, reading and interacting with other autistics is like my whole life suddenly makes a lot of sense (I also got 26 out of 30 in an online test). I mean it's either that or I have enormous subconscious emotional repression (how would I be able to tell the difference?).
At any rate, I suspect there is a higher amount of people on the spectrum here than elsewhere on the internet, and I was wondering if there is anything they would like to say about thriving as an autistic in the social/romantic domain, which I hear, can be done.
One thing that helped me was that, when I was a little kid (1st grade ish), for one summer my parents had me attend some sort of junior theater class. I got a lot of practice there in emoting, and over the years, it helped.
It's like: there's me on the inside, and then a surface on the outside, which is my face and body language. Normals have a connection between them, so that what they feel on the inside is shown on the outside, but I don't. However, I can consciously work on dredging up feelings while making the appropriate facial expressions, and eventually they start working together, like the whole "hand-eye coordination" thing.
And so the next step is that my face shows my feelings, kinda like normal people. But after that, I can also brute force empathic mirroring, by using my imagination. If I can find the sadness in someone's sad story, even if I don't care, or find the humor in someone's joke, even if I find it boring or distasteful, I can project back the right emotion and make an appropriate response. (Tabletop roleplaying and LARPs can be good practice for this.) And the thing is, at some point it stops being a conscious artifice, and becomes real empathy. I interact with people, and see in them things I like, and respond to that automatically. The emotions are there, the patterns are built in, even if I have to thump the engine a few times before it catches.
It's tricky with romance. First, because in the times when I've been head-over-heels, my head is somewhere else and so it stops working, leading me to be less good at flirting with the people I most want to flirt with. Second, because the mirroring means that I wind up reflecting back other peoples' interest, and like I said the feelings are real: other people being interested in me is not the primary criterion for whether I should be interested in them. Plus, I've noticed that I tend to have a lot of emotional inertia, whereas most other people seem more changeable. And third, building on the previous, because while flirting can be very fun, it's only appropriate if both of you are on the same page: it's unethical to lead someone on and engage their emotions, if your emotions are not similarly engaged.
> But after that, I can also brute force empathic mirroring, by using my imagination. If I can find the sadness in someone's sad story, even if I don't care, or find the humor in someone's joke, even if I find it boring or distasteful, I can project back the right emotion and make an appropriate response. (Tabletop roleplaying and LARPs can be good practice for this.) And the thing is, at some point it stops being a conscious artifice, and becomes real empathy. I interact with people, and see in them things I like, and respond to that automatically.
Holy crap, oh man, did this ever describe my experience - but not as a product of ASD.
Someone in the classified thread speculated that some of my personal quirks could be a product of ASD, but I don't think so. I don't have most of the notable ASD traits, and never did. The ones I identify with tend to be borderline cold-reader-ish ("Do you get obsessive about stuff you like?" etc). I just took an ASD quiz linked above and was on the low end of "you have a few traits."
No, I suspect my identification with your internal experience generates from a whole other "disorder," one having to do with a deficit of involuntary (eg, "normal") empathy. I hesitate to use the "p" or "s" words here, because they specifically describe an *antisocial* behavior which I don't engage in - but "brute forcing empathy via imagination" was indeed something I had to consciously do in my young adulthood until it became the mostly automatic process that it is today...assuming I've judged someone to be worth of it, and almost everyone is indeed worthy of it.
Yeah, I've wondered about that in myself. Twice it's happened that I've been woken up in the middle of the night, and the "nice" part of me wasn't online. It was just a cold reptilian thing that wanted to fix the problem and get back to sleep, and would say whatever was necessary for that, while the "nice" part of me was way back somewhere, screaming "oh, no, this will wreck everything!" I had to do some serious damage control the following mornings, but both relationships did survive.
FWIW, I think it's possible for people without our particular internal setup to learn it, at least for certain situations or classes of people. That's what I tend to call the "s" word. And I've run into one of the, well, other "n" word, let's say, and it seemed in retrospect that what was inside was alternately a roaring black void, or something like a 2.5-year old. (I'm not good with child ages, but I have some friends with a 3.5-year old, and 2.5 seems about right from that one example.)
I often hesitate to refer to that article because only one tiny part of it resonates, but the *capacity* to opt in / out of empathy at all and perhaps even moreso a willingness to admit to it, seems to freak people out regardless of how pro-social the opt in / out behavior looks in practice.
I absolutely agree that prosocial behavior can be developed absent "normal" empathy. My chief values are fairness / justice, a result of decent parenting plus a love of storytelling (where fairness and justice are generally the guiding principle of the universe).
So in practice, I "opt in" to empathy in order to be maximally "fair" to people while I'm making a judgment about how to think/feel/interact with them. I have enough experience with both fictional and biographical stories to know that people's behaviors are usually informed by things which might not be apparent to an observer, so in order to be "fair," I am almost infinitely more ungrudging and patient and forgiving of certain kinds of unpleasant behavior than a "normie" who reflexively feels entitled to unexamined anger when they perceive an intrusion or slight. I am always ready to be "wrong" about someone "harmless" that I merely dislike.
My empathy only shuts off in response to unambiguously predatory victimizing behavior. And even then it's never reactive anger, the way it would be for a normie, but rather a sense of righteous pragmatism about wanting the threat stopped.
And, like, sorrynotsorry, but I think this framework results in a way more prosocial way of being than the normie empathetic reactivity.
But I can absolutely see how not having the framework (or some other framework of guiding principles) can send the empathic opt in / out in some truly monstrous directions.
> It's like: there's me on the inside, and then a surface on the outside, which is my face and body language. Normals have a connection between them, so that what they feel on the inside is shown on the outside, but I don't.
Haha, similar here. No matter what happens inside, good or bad, by default my face remains neutral. I need to consciously give it a little push to also show the emotion on the outside. (Or, with people who know me, I just express the emotion verbally, sometimes using a scale from 0 to 10 to express the strength of the emotion.)
Sometimes people compliment me for staying calm in situations where internally I feel I am falling apart. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. It's only my face staying calm, but my thinking is impaired by stress.
Huh, my face tends to run on autopilot these days, unless I get into a particularly grim mood. I sometimes wish I could add a little interrupt switch in, since it would make my life a bit easier if I didn't show what was going through my mind. I console myself that I like the enforced honesty, but it might be sour grapes. :-)
I wonder whether it would make sense to imagine normies as autists whose obsession happens to be humans... instead of trains or similar things. Just like an autist interested in trains will tell you thousand details about them, and would immediately notice that a picture of a train contains a wrong kind of wheel, a normie can tell you thousand details about celebrities, the birthdays of everyone around them, and will immediately notice a new haircut.
Autists can be shocked by strong sensory inputs, normies can be shocked by explicit discussion of things, or by thoughts that their social group would disapprove of. (Note that the social group does not necessarily refer to the mainstream. A normie rebel is triggered by thoughts that their fellow normie rebels would disapprove of.)
You need to start paying more attention to humans, no matter how boring that sounds. They *are* important, so the time invested here will pay off. But ultimately, you will never learn the same amount of information about humans (or trains) as someone who is naturally obsessed with them, so you need to focus on the most important parts. And maybe find normies who are more tolerant of someone who does not share their obsession.
Autistic women are often less visible than autistic men, for reasons that are not obvious to me. Maybe there is something about male/female brains which makes the expression of autism different. Or maybe it is different social expectations, which makes different parts of autism more or less visible. For example, in romantic relations, men are expected to approach women. So the autistic men typically screw up by "approaching in a clumsy way" and sometimes it gets reported in newspapers. Meanwhile autistic women typically screw up by "not noticing that they are approached", which means a lost opportunity for them, but does not get reported by newspapers, because from outside it seems like the normie way of rejection (i.e. not responding to subtle signals).
So.... I am out of the dating market for more than a decade, but my recommendation for a heterosexual male on a spectrum would be like this: Find an interesting girl (someone who has hobbies other than celebrity gossip). Say hello. Talk to her about her hobbies. If she refuses to talk to you, find another one. Find a moment with her alone (e.g. invite her for a walk or for a coffee/tea). At the end, tell her that you really like her and would like to spend more time with her... no pressure, it's okay when she tells you whether she likes you the next time you meet; goodbye. The next time, at the end, ask "so, this means we are dating?". (In the meanwhile, learn how to do massage and how to dance, those are basically cheat codes for progress from "no contact" to "full body on body contact" without being awkward.)
Though I've never been officially diagnosed, I'm pretty Aspergery. I had shitty social skills growing up (and some on ACX may say I still do). I'm very bad at reading facial expressions and social queues. And because we are bad at reading people — i.e. we're not picking anything up from their facial expressions and social queues — we pay attention to things that may provide us with more interest. That makes normies uneasy if you don't look like you're paying attention to them. Even though I'm bad at reading people I learned a few tricks along the way to disguise my neuro-atypicality — so normies will take me for a normie (which is half the battle). And this is advice for a cis straight males. YMMV if you're female or gay.
They are:
1. Look at people's eyes when you speak to them. Normies take that as being interested in them. Even if you're not interested in them it puts them at their ease. There are some caveats, though, and you'll need some practice to navigate them.
1a. Males may take eye contact as a threat if you hold it too long. So, if you're being introduced to somebody new and it's a male, only make eye contact while shaking their hand or fist-bumping them (as is more common in these post-COVID times). After the intro you should discontinue eye contact but look in their general direction while they're talking to you. Nodding your head will help put them at ease, even if you're thinking about something else and not paying attention to them (because, let's face it, a lot normies are pretty boring to talk to).
1b. Hold the eye contact longer with females. Don't forget to smile. Hold their gaze for a couple of seconds after you greet them. If you're attracted to them, make a point to reattach yourself to the gaze every so often during the conversation. And remember to smile whenever you catch their gaze again. If they brush their hair back with their hand, they're likely interested in you. I have no frigging clue why that is, but I had to be taught that. Normies seem to pick it up naturally. Human courtship rituals are weird. I cannot say I fully understand them. After the initial greeting ritual, when it comes time to look away DO NOT look down! — because women are likely to think you're looking at their breasts even though you aren't.
2. Remember to smile occasionally during your conversations with people. Not a big grin, but learn to curl your lips upward slightly. I found that very difficult to do. I had to practice in the mirror to not overdo it or underdo it. But after I learned to half-smile properly, I realized I could identify when other people were doing it — which gave me some more insight into the other person's internal psychological state.
3. Train yourself to keep your posture upright. Don't slouch. Normies read people who have upright postures as being confident. Even if you're not confident you want look like you're confident.
4. How's your sense of humor? Making people laugh is very important. I can't tell a joke worth shit, because I don't have a normie's ability to pace the joke (which requires a successful joke-teller to be sensitive to the vibes that other people are putting out). But I am quite good with logical absurdities. If you want an example of humor that's full of logical absurdities listen to Jerry Seinfeld's material. Don't steal his material though, because other people have probably already heard it.
5. Ask people about trivialities. As you get to know them, you'll get to know that people each have unique concerns and obsessions. If they're into gardening, ask them how their garden is doing. Try to look like you're sympathetic to their problems (even if you have no clue as to why they're getting upset about something).
5a. This is very important for dealing with female humans. They seem to be very sensitive to slights from their own sex (and they seem to be much more socially competitive than male humans). Nod a lot. And learn to make sympathetic noises and comments.
5b. Males are generally easier to socialize with because they tend to be less socially competitive than females — at least at the inter-individual level. However, males seem to be more socially competitive at the group level. You're either part of "the team" or you're not. If you are on the team, all sorts of slights and faux pas are ignored. If you're not on the team, well, you're likely not to be invited to the next BBQ or out to happy hour. Try not to talk politics, because that tends to trigger more primal emotional responses, and that will bring out the competitive team instincts in the males. Best to learn something about sports (yawn!). Make a point of knowing what the favored local sports team of the tribe is, so you can at least ask what they think their tribe's team chances are.
There's a lot to digest. Good luck. Hope I didn't piss off the normies with my advice.
Got 24/36, but after extensive cheating: the "multiple choice" thing of eliminating two or three options, and taking a protracted "System 2"-type approach to choosing answers. There may be a couple (possibly but not very likely slightly more) of pictures where I could guess the answer instinctively. There were also some answers where I remained confused after being shown what the right answer was: e.g., a woman being interested or having desire is not something I can make sense of as reflected in the eyes, even after seeing the picture and being told the answer.
Everybody feels like they're guessing. The version of the directions I read said "if you're not sure, just go with your feeling." I felt that way when I took it too. Not quite like I was taking wild guesses, but more like, well, these eyes look irritated to me, but I may just be talking myself into that so I'll have an answer, but I guess I'll go with it. I think some of the accurate responses come from parts of us we don't have introspective access to -- like when somebody asks you how it is you angle your key jiggle & it a certain way to make your finicky lock open, and you can't tell them -- only your hands know. Same with reading faces.
About half of my responses were just me looking at the words and clicking the right one without any conscious thought. The other ones, I'd be staring at the eyes, and have no clue, and I'd do the multiple-choice-test thing where I rule out one or maybe two answers, and randomly pick from the remaining answers. I guess I did a bit better than chance, so probably my proportions are off, or I still had some unconscious instinct pulling me toward the right answers.
Oh you did way better than chance. 27 or maybe it's 28 is average, so you're in the average range. I think everybody has a feeling of guessing a lot of the time, at least everybody I know who took the test. I only missed 2, and I was astounded that it was only 2, because I'd felt reasonably confident on at most 1/3 of them. If you feel that way on the SAT or a multiple choice test in a course you can be sure you're going to get a bad score, you know? I find this test fascinating because almost everybody feels very uncertain, yet most of those uncertain people I've given it to come out average or above.
13 out of 36. Many of them were just wild-ass guesses on my part. Actually, I've taken a similar test before and I scored less than random (go figure!).
Recently, some friends set me up with a nice lady. We went out a couple of times, and I was attracted to her. On our second date, I told her that I was on the spectrum and if she were interested in me she'd just have to outright tell me because I was crappy at reading signals. And I didn't say this, but I didn't want any #metoo misunderstandings (I've made a few embarrassing unwanted passes in my day — not because I was a predator but because I misunderstood the signals — and I have too much self-respect to cause women to be uncomfortable). Anyway, she didn't believe me, "but you're so sociable and funny!" That seemed encouraging, so I asked her out on a third date.
When I was younger, I'd go out on three dates with women I was interested in, and if it didn't click physically, I'd just stop calling them (because I figured further attentions from me would be unwelcome). We went out on a third date, but no kiss goodnight — but she talked about a restaurant that she wanted to try. Okay, I thought. I'd try a fourth date with her. Nothing happened on the fourth date. I dropped her off at her house. She didn't invite me in for a coffee. I figured, "Oh well, nothing ventured, nothing gained," and I wrote her off. Then she called me a couple of times and asked when we'd get together again. And she said, "I love you." Because I've learned to be cautious with my emotions, I've trained myself to dampen my feelings if I'm not getting anything back from women. Though I found her attractive early in our dating cycle, by the fourth date I figured it wasn't going anywhere, so I had fallen out of limerence with her. For some stupid reason, I went out on a fifth date with her! She was all very snuggly in the Uber to and from the restaurant, and she was very touchy-feely all through the evening. But I no longer had the spark. I was uncomfortable the whole evening. I didn't even make a token effort to kiss her good night. I didn't call her again. I'm sure she may have been puzzled and possibly hurt, but now I felt that I was being pushed into a relationship that I no longer was comfortable with. Normies are frigging crazy.
Wow, Beowulf, I don't know what to make of that. You do come across sociable and funny. And if you were that deep into Aspie-land I'd expect your sociability and humor to both be a little off, sort of overdone or underdone or, wait, how does that joke work? But none of that is the case. And I can't think of times when your responses to people here have seemed odd -- and they would if you were bad at reading people's affect and intention, unless you're better at reading people when you have their thoughts in writing, and can read between the lines. And if you're performing *below*( chance on tests like this one, that suggests that you know more than you think you know, right? Like you know the right answers some of the time, but refuse to go with them. (Though on here you performed better than chance.). Or could it be that you have prosopagnosia, and difficulty reading faces comes along for the ride with that?
Anyway, it's fine. There's something quite odd about me too. Not every oddity has a name, you know? Was wondering today what my oddity was. Looked up schizoid -- close, but no cigar.
"unless you're better at reading people when you have their thoughts in writing, and can read between the lines."
I would have thought that was obvious. Words are designed to facilitate clear and unambiguous communication, because often "Darmok and Jelad at Tanagra" has to give way to "Hand me the spanner, please - no, not the crescent wrench, the 9/16th inch spanner". And sometimes we, the normies in particular, *want* ambiguity, so we've got ways to use language for that. But ultimately, the speaker is trying to be understood and they're using a tool that's designed to facilitate clear and unambiguous communication, in a language that both parties are fluent in.
That limits the scope for misunderstanding, in a way that "communication" where 70% of the information is conveyed by intonation and microexpression and body language doesn't. Particularly when one party isn't fluent in body language.
BTW, that test was very helpful in that it gave me immediate feedback about which were the correct emotions. The other tests I've taken were paper tests, and they didn't give me any real-time feedback. Although there were some eye-expressions that I had no frigging clue about, a significant number of my mistakes were due to overthinking. If I had gone with my first choice, I would have scored significantly higher. This is an important clue to understand what's going on in my brain. Thanks!
I've bookmarked the link. I'll wait a week or so (to let the memory of the faces blur) and retake it again — but I'll go with my first choices. I bet I'll score a lot better. But damn! I wish I had this test back when I was an adolescent. If this is really all about not going with my gut feelings, I could have trained myself to be more sensitive to them, and I think I would have had an easier life (because a lot of the stress and failures in my life were due to my not having a good theory of mind when dealing with my professors, thesis advisor, bosses, and girlfriends). I'm tearing up now and it's getting hard to see what I'm typing! Shit.
My thing in dating situations is that I can tell when they like me, and I would like them too except that I have a bad bad feeling that it's not me they like but some construction in their mind, which they built using some parts of me as legos. And I distrust and resent them for having done that, so I don't really like them, but I maybe act like I do because I know my doubts about their view of me are sort of silly so it seems unfair to let them rule my behavior. Good luck finding a way out of that one.
I did notice sometimes where romantic interests had an idea of me in their head, which only loosely corresponded to reality. I never really managed to put that together with how I felt when infatuated, in any way that gave me anything useful to work with. It more felt like something where we all had to push through it, from both directions, over time, and eventually our models of each other would converge on reality.
If my vibe is that I'm behind a wall, is that something I'm bad at? What about all the other stuff? But sticking to the wall, I mean, I don't feel like I'm holding anything back in my interactions with this guy, so what am I supposed to do about that?
Not autistic myself, but have many psychotherapy patients who are. Two have partners who are also autistic, and those relationships seem to be solid and long-lasting. In both cases the people found each other not on dating apps but in college. Downside of having an autistic partner is that both parties are inclined to be avoidant of the new, and of socializing, so there's a danger of their lives contracting to hanging out indoors with the simpatico other.
Request for content: I originally found this "AI Parable" when someone asked for the same thing quite some time ago in the ACX, no idea if the same people still frequent but thought I would give it a shot.
There was some short story on some blog(?) somewhere where the premise was "everything is completely crazy and makes no sense, lots of random chaos in a world similar to ours but somewhat cyberpunk/dystopian". The closing line was something to the effect of "The machine had been talking, and I was the first to hear it speak." Or something like that. The premise was that the insanity and chaos was the work of an AI that was intentionally causing it in order to confuse people so that it could break human pattern matching and assume control/demoralize them or something similar.
I thought it was really well done, and there have been several times I'd liked to have shared it but of course I didn't bother to bookmark it and now it is lost to me. Figured I'd throw out a line just in case anyone has an idea what the heck I'm talking about!
Can someone link to some well-written piece that argues that yes, AI WILL take our jobs? Like doctors, lawyers, programmers and so on. From what I see most people argue to the contrary.
I think the question is not whether AI will take our job, but which one. ChatGPT-4 will not. If you ask people, most of them will assume that the currently most advance AI is as good as it ever gets, so of course they will say no. They will keep saying so, until one day they get replaced.
Important things that AI currently cannot do:
* read your company intranet
* participate in meetings, communicate with colleagues
* be legally responsible for screwing up
Connecting the AI to company internet and making sure that sensitive information will not leak is a technical problem that will be solved at one moment. Afterwards, as a software developer, I expect that soon most of my job will consist of sitting at meetings and checking what the AI did. I will be the person to yell at in the 1% of cases when the AI screws up.
Note that "taking our jobs" does not necessarily have to mean that companies will fire their existing employees. (Though yes, in the extreme case, it would mean exactly that.) It can also mean that companies stop hiring new people, especially ones freshly out of college. And what previously did 3 people, now will do 1 person supervising 3 AI agents. The salaries may even slightly increase temporarily, especially for people who can juggle more AI agents at the same time than the others. (In other words, out of 3 people, 2 may lose their jobs, and the remaining 1 may get a 50% raise.) So the reports may be inconsistent even as the loss of jobs happens.
Rich people may be willing to pay extra for human service, just because it feels instinctively better to be communicate with a human, or to be served by a human. This applies to doctors more than it does to programmers. The AI is unlikely to replace e.g. a homeopath.
Fwiw, connecting AI to company intranet is already possible (Copilot for Microsoft 365). Whether you trust Microsoft's promises that data won't leak is another matter.
I suppose in future we will expect this, and maybe have two company wikis, one that the AI can read and one that it can not.
The company source code in my experience would be mostly useless for a competitor, except as a general learning resource for software developers. A lot of code is handling company-specific processes and integrated with other software the company uses; a competitor would have to rewrite all of that, so it would probably be less work to make their own solution from scratch. A possible danger could be asking the AI to find possible exploits.
I'd like to read one too. Just googled around, mostly found clickbait and spokesman for various high-status professions saying Naw, AI will be our bitch. You know where there probably is something? One of the good Substack blogs about AI and society. But I don't think google searches return the titles of individual Substack posts. Maybe somebody here can suggest one. Actually, I can suggest a blog I like, though nobody here but me seems to follow it or take it seriously: Garbage Day, by Ryan Broderick. He's a young guy who sort of grew up on the internet, and knows all about memes and other internet phenoms that don't mean anything to me. But he's also quite smart and knows how to do all kinds of search inside of social media. Had a post a while ago where he traced the sources of some new and weird fad on Facebook - - I think it was photos of gross food, things like a plate of frozen raw egg -- and was able to tell who most of came from, and what the benefit to them was of posting this stuff. His overall view of AI is that we're fucked. Oh, remembered something else he said that I thought was smart, that I hadn't seen elsewhere. He was talking about how it's looking like search engines may soon yield AI summaries, rather than sites the content appears on, and pointed out that many people and businesses that post useful content do it as a way to advertise, or to increase their public visibility. For instance today looked at some text posts and videos explaining how to do a certain thing in Photoshop. Most of them were on sites selling related services -- become a paying member of our site, and you'll have access to our entire library of Photoshop how-tos, that sort of thing. If Photoshop queries do not drive people to their site, but instead bring an AI who sucks up their content along with that of other sites and summarizes it for the searcher, why would these sites continue to put up free useful content? The internet will come to contain fewer sources of direct info. Maybe in the future AI's will be summarizing whatever they cherry pick from summaries by earlier AI's. Reminds me of what I read about dust mites: they prefer fresh food, such as human skin flakes, but on the absence of that can eat their own feces and extract some nourishment for up to 3 cycles of feces consumption.
Well, the arguements to the contrary are not always about practical capabilities of AI. Here's Zvi arguing that AI should be replacing jobs, but it won't because those jobs will just be replaced with bullshit ones. https://thezvi.substack.com/p/escape-velocity-from-bullshit-jobs
Who among us doesn't believe, or know in their bones, that our government at all levels, local, state and federal, fails on a regular basis. Overpromised and underdelivered. Big idea and great promises, the consequences of which they bury as they carry on. We pay a price for this, even for their small blunders. Also, don't ride a motorcycle in Michigan, or most other states for that matter. Among the dead in deer and vehicle accidents, the cyclist is over represented better than 2 to 1. Here's my writeup: https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/my-attempt-at-fairmindedness-soundly
"Who among us doesn't believe, or know in their bones, that our government at all levels, local, state and federal, fails on a regular basis."
I know this. I've known this for forty years or so, and I've been thinking about it off and on for forty years or so, and I've been talking to and reading the works of a lot of very smart people who have been thinking about it for longer still. At this point, almost every insight just downstream of "our government, at all levels, fails on a regular basis", and every proposed solution to the problem, is something I have heard many times before and dealt with as best I reasonably can.
Sometimes someone comes up with something new. But rarely is it going to be someone who thinks "Hey, did you notice that our government keeps failing us? I've got a substack where I talk about that!", is adequate reason for anyone like me to read their substack. You're going to need something more specific, and you should probably let people know what that is in your pitch.
My good fortune justfor thispost answered your comment below. This person apparently believes that more government is always the correct solution, for reasons I don't completely understand, but be that as it may. I understand I am not changing the world in any dramatic way, but I still think it's important to help people understand the government entity that created the deer problem is the one asked to manage the deer problem. There must be a connection there? 60,000 vehicle and deer accidents a year is unbelievable. And almost nothing is done about it because it would mean admitting that there management has created the problem.
"Have you considered that perhaps more government is not the answer?", does not lead me to believe that you are offering any insight that is at all novel here.
I think your statement is absurd. It sounds like libertarian cant to me — so, I'm sorry, but I'm not going to be suckered into reading your substack. Government as a bureaucratic entity can be tremendously successful. Look at how successful China is at taming the anarchistic Chinese social order through their social credit system. ;-)
As for functional benefits of governments, depending on the bureaucracy, government orgs can function as well or better than corporate bureaucracies — and I've worked for some very effed up corporate bureaucracies in my day! — but also I've worked for a few excellent ones. For instance, I just got involuntarily retired from a very effed-up bureaucratic corporation. It was a nightmare just to get them to direct-deposit my severance check (even though they had been direct depositing my other paychecks for the past five years). And I needed 2 months of COBRA to hold me over before I turned 65. That was all sorts of hassle (mostly because I couldn't find anyone who could answer my questions). But the month before I turned 65, I signed up for Medicare — no fuss or bother. They warned me it may take as long as 30 days to process my application. I signed up on Friday. Got my Medicare card the following Wednesday (!). Medicare Part D was a different story, though. Because private insurance companies handle that, they're competing for your business. Sales people outright lied to me. Getting the formularies was next to impossible from some of the providers. What a pain in the ass! The government part was efficient and painless though.
OTOH, do you really want governments to be too efficient? If you're a libertarian, I bet in your heart of hearts you don't. But I'm OK with the US government when it's been efficient. For instance, they've done a bang-up job rounding up and charging the January 6 coup rioters. More than 1,250 people have been charged with federal crimes. And more than half have either had their trial or pleaded out. Last I heard, the FBI is only still looking for 80 of the bastards. Damn! That's efficiency!
Absurd, eh? 60,000 deer and vehicle accidents in 2023, last year I could find the stats. This after millions of man hours 'managing' the deer herd. All the numbers in the article are real. And it's not a question of efficiency. You are hired to manage the deer herd, so the bigger the herd the greater the job security, the greater are the career prospects. I spent many years not believing that people respond to perverse incentives, but I can't argue against the idea any more. Glad you have your health care setup, at any rate.
Back when I lived in New England (35 years ago) hoof rats were becoming a real nuisance. My state's wildlife department hired professional hunters to cull the herds. Popular outrage was so intense that they dropped the plan. So the conflicting wills o' the people prevented anything from being done ("stop the deer from eating my garden, but don't kill them!") AFAIK, Uncle Malthus is still providing herd control and they're starving every winter. But I hear that cougars, bears, and possibly wolves have been spotted in my old neighborhood. Now its "OMG there was a cougar in my backyard! Please get rid of it, but don't kill it!"
(Tangentially, I remember a few decades ago when I was laughing at a story about people in some town (or suburb?) in the Rockies-area who were complaining about wolf sightings. I was laughing because the town was called "Wolf Creek".)
We can't ask government to run everything, to solve every problem, to manage every detail. We just open up the door to a never ending cascade of rules and regulations that have made life ridiculous. The administrative state is the issue, it's first and foremost goal is to enlarge the administrative state.
As opposed to what, the non administrative state? go back to feudal relationships?
Some fucked up form of corporatism, where you replicate all the problems of the state 1000 times inside 1000 little states that compete in markets externally but operate as dictatorships internally?
Face it; the reason the state is everywhere and everything to everyone is that all the competitors have been killed and eaten. Fitness is fitness.
Big changes coming to manifold. Probably at the end of this month, full details not yet announced. What we do know is they're trying to reduce the availability of mana, in particular by removing the loan system. This just confirms what I've been saying for a while now: giving out loans doesn't work. It's extremely expensive for them, and doesn't really increase the prediction accuracy of long-run questions, as people on both sides just keep shoveling mana into popular questions.
The only thing loans achieve are to overleverage everyone, with no risk-of-ruin for the users: If my predictions don't pan out, I can just walk away from my account. I don't owe manifold anything for having a negative balance, since mana isn't a real currency. And I do think we'll see more and more such bankruptcies as some of the larger markets start resolving.
I'm sure you have posted this elsewhere, but I think providing a link to your prior (correct) prediction that this obviously sucked would be incredibly impressive, especially if you happened to use the same wording as manifold's announcement. At least having it available to crow about when the change gets made is good.
People often say things like "I predicted this" and then, when you look at their past writings they had something really vague and you're extremely disappointed, which is why being on record is great.
For less careful users, this just means that a bunch of them wipe out way into the negative, and a small amount shoot up to balances in the millions. Since manifold doesn't charge users for negative mana, this means they'll be giving away a lot of mana.
For reference: starting from 1000 and reinvesting into the same market every day, a user will have a position in that market of 91K after a year, 314K after 2 years.
Does Slavoj Zizek have a speech impediment? Or is it an accent?
His S sounds are sort of slurpy, like he is making them with his teeth and tongue at the sides of his mouth rather than the front. You can hear it very clearly here:
I remember a science fiction short story which consisted of a conversation between two people far in the future about the planet from which Man originated.
They don't know which one it is, and can't figure it out, but they ask a computer, and the computer brings up a readout.
At which point they're both disappointed at how unexceptional it is.
This feels wrong to me; they should have been able to find it themselves, with virtually no effort. That readout is going to say things like:
orbital period: 1 year
daily cycle: 1 day
surface pressure: 1 atmosphere
surface gravity: 1 g
I also have my doubts about a setting where, even though Earth is still inhabited, and information about it is readily available if you know what to ask for, and the historical information is still recorded that it is the origin of humankind, it might nevertheless not be well-known to everyone. A more plausible version of the above readout might be:
Physical units change meaning while retaining their names all the time, the meter was once defined as some fraction of the distance between the north pole and Paris, this is substantially more mutable than the current definition of the meter, some fraction of the distance that a light travels in one second (the second, in turn, is defined as some multiple of the period of the electrons of some chemical element, or something like that.)
Old school units were based on standard objects, X is the unit of mass which is the amount of mass in this cylinder, Y is the unit of length that is the length of this rod. All those objects require maintenance and storage, it also requires widespread communication, communication that won't exist in a galaxy-wide humanity (to say nothing of the enforcement of those standards).
It's worth noting that over a sufficiently long timescale all of these parameters are subject to change. Orbital period is increasing, as is the length of the day, and surface pressure varies wildly depending on atmospheric conditions. The only thing that's relatively fixed is surface gravity and even that could be altered with some mega-engineering projects.
By the time that conversation happens it's so far into the future that humans have spread beyond the Milky Way, Sol has reached the end of its lifespan, and no one even has physical bodies anymore, let alone lives on Earth.
Given a big enough space empire, they might start using another planet's measurement systems. Or they might give in to rationality and the metric system, and stop basing units on accidents of geography. So you could end up with something like:
Orbital period: 1.21 imperial years
Daily cycle: 0.91 imperial days (9.1 imperial hours)
Minor spoilers for Asimov's Foundation series below.
This wasn't the entire point of the story, but a throwaway conversation between two characters near the end of Asimov's "The Last Question" comes pretty close. The two characters actually ask which is the original _galaxy_, then star, but the computer tells them the star has gone supernova long ago.
Also by Asimov, in one of the later Foundation books (probably "Foundation and Earth"), the main characters are searching for the (long-abandoned) earth and find it exactly because of these units (the year, at least) and the moon, but it turns out there was an independent actor deliberately obfuscating its location. (At this point in future history no one really knows where the year came from, and months are completely out of use.)
Funny how memories get distorted over time. I read the Foundation series many years ago, and I remember the search for Earth very differently:
The galactic empire mostly erased knowledge of Earth because they felt it undermined the capital planet's specialness, and it stays erased after the empire's fall. The protagonists manage to find a description of the solar system, but they don't believe it; too many unusual features in one place.
They find it by reinventing archeology. They investigate planets where human habitation was short-lived, and figure out how old the ruins are. Just as they'd hoped, ruins closer to Earth tend to be older. They zero in on a star named Alpha, which as far as they can tell means First. It's Alpha Centauri, and the locals there know where Earth is.
They go there, and are surprised to find the description they found was accurate. Sure enough, there are Saturn's rings, and Earth's huge moon that looks the same as the sun when you're on Earth. (Even if they had believed the description, they couldn't have just looked up which star system has those features; there's no database will all that information.) Also Earth's day and year are pretty close to the galactic calendar (the empire dropped leap years at some point), but, again, that's not how the find the place.
You might be thinking of "The Last Question" by Isaac Asimov.
That aside, your objection is that the characters in the story should be able to figure out which planet the Earth is, but... they _did_ do that: they basically asked ChatGPT, which is what people would do today.
Sticking around these parts isn't ideal for rhe most obvious of Passover related reasons. Particularly when the REALITY of what the Exodus was all about hits hardest when you're surrounded by the extensive extant evidence of the slavery-based society that Judaism was created to oppose.
Israel would be most comfortable for me physically but as I am in strong opposition to the reigning leadership I consider it spiritually discomfitting to throw my lot in with the nation in its current state.
So I'm thinking Sinai. Unfortunately, the Bible's take on the situation of the Jews who left Egypt is that there was a great series of miseries. They left the most comfortable society on earth (even for the working/enslaved classes) only to find themselves enjoined to TRUST that they'd be taken care of in a land without fresh water and with murderous raiders.
I would feel uncomfortable celebrating where they suffered.
"Elim" (where they enjoyed 12 wellsprings and 70 date trees, whatever that means) seems ideal, the area they lived for most of their desert stay seems second best, and the area around Mount Sinai is high up in the running too.
I'm open to other suggestions as well.
My own biblical geographical knowledge is acceptable but very very far from expert so if you know more about the most likely locations of these regions or have other suggestions I would be very pleased to hear from you!
Ancient Egypt had slavery but was not a slavery-based society. The pyramids were built by well paid workers. Jews and palestinians are partially descended from canaanites and they were never slaves in Egypt. Judaism was not created to oppose slavery.
Although my information is four decades old, when I returned to university as a middle-aged student my Near Eastern studies instructor declared the monument-builders were paid laborers, not slaves.
Slaves would have had to been provided food, housing, and medical care, etc., while paying laborers -- even in salt or grains -- kept daily survival the workers' own responsibility. So, while their subsistence level was still rough and marginal, they weren't slaves.
1. Slavery of the sort where the enslaved could be killed without repercussions has been rare. When I speak of slavery I am 100% including our own society as I published this morning. Any society where one man must clean another man's shoes else he suffer shameful, painful, and dangerous privations is a society built upon slavery. Moses, Amos, Isaiah and Jeremiah have not yet won. Judaism was indeed created in disgusted opposition to the slavery of Egypt, a slavery that is still with us. (What about the Torah's allowance of slavery, etc, etc. I'll be glad to discuss that in a videod conversation if you or anyone is interested but everything to do with this subject is too intricate and requires addressing too many presumed priors for it to be feasible in a comment.
As for your middle claim, see above. You seem to have presumed that I am speaking from a middle school level education or something. Anyhow, I was hoping for advice from someone who knows more than me on a particular subject, not to address misapprehensions of irrelevant aspects of the comment. The video conversation offer is available.
You're limited in options to Egypt, Gaza, and Israel if you want to be in a place related to Passover. If you don't want Sinai and Giza, consider the entire Red Sea coast, Hurghada is the cliché destination here but there are plenty others as well, Google Maps is the limit. The Red Sea is related to Passover because, uhmm, that's where the whole thing started, **if** we believe the Hebrew bible and the Quran that is, which I don't, but whatever. Of course, it's strongly implied in the storyline that the particular place on the coast where the sea was parted into 2 is somewhere on the stretch opposite to Sinai, Hurghada is a bit farther to the south than Sinai's triangle tip but not too far really. Suez is more northern.
If you want anything generically Jewish, consider Jordan. Lebanon and Syria geographically qualify but they're literal war zones, Abraham was born in modern day Iraq so make of that what you will.
I needn't state the obvious, which is to avoid mentioning that you're Israeli or Jewish to anyone speaking Arabic or English with Arabic accent. You probably already know this if you toured Cairo and Giza safely, but just to re-state the obvious: avoid the Israeli flag, avoid talking in Hebrew, including taking phone calls from someone speaking Hebrew or listening to Hebrew music or opening your phone browser to a Hebrew website while someone is sitting next to you. Avoid the kippah, the star of David, the mezuzah or the menorah. Really, imagine you're playing a game where you will lose a $10000000000000000 bet if someone guesses you're a Jew or from Israel, and act accordingly. The stakes are not really that high in Egypt, it's very unlikely you will get anything more severe than dirty looks, if even that, but I'm assuming you want to play it safe. Notice than anything you leave in your closed hotel room will be seen by the room service.
The only thing I have tonadd here is that I have already lived in Harran, and if you accept the iffy Turkish claim to Snliurfa as Ur, then in Ur as well.
Also, though these videos don't include my email address in their descriptions, I hope you will contact me via the other ones (and of course your YouTube comments would be welcome as well) because you and I are good examples of humanity winning over presumptions and while I've had some success in winning over individuals and small communities I've thus far failed entirely at reaching enough of the world to obviate the (genuinely kind and true) necessity of warnings such as yours.
I don't really think you should get to celebrate Passover while supporting Hamas, a movement whose core ideology supports murdering Jews. I'm generally for being inclusive but there are limits.
I got interested in this entire spat so I read the parent poster you're replying to, and I read and read and re-read, top to bottom, left to right. Not a single word mentions Hamas, Gaza, Palestinians, War, Famine, Genocide, 33K dead, or anything really. It's like this John Travolta meme where he keeps looking right and left searching for something that is not there. There is an edit label on the post but it's timestamped 11 hours, the same timestamped on the post so likely a typo fix, your comment is from 8 hours ago as of now, so the comment wasn't edited after you commented.
The only mention of Israel is:
> Israel would be most comfortable for me physically but as I am in strong opposition to the reigning leadership I consider it spiritually discomfiting [...]
Which, if counted as support for Hamas, would have the hilarious implication that the ***families of the hostages taken by Hamas*** are Hamas supporters, as most of them feel much more extreme versions of this.
This is one of those things like "Commie" and "Red" in 1950s America, right? "Khamas" and "Anti-Semite" are just the generic bad guy label that you accuse others of when you are very angry at them, quite similar - now that I think of it - to how some more extreme Pro-Palestinian commenters use "Zionist".
You are of course 100% correct. My assumption is that he read that sentence as referring to "Israel" writ large and cavalierly decided to take a public dump on someone based on that hasty conclusion because that after all is the sacred way of the internet.
I see you actually offered suggestions in a separate comment so I'll respond to that one there but I liked both of your comments.
You may not recall but we corresponded shortly after October 7th when everyone around here was all fiery. I don't recall the precise nature of my comment but I recall that it was long and based on the the as-yet-unproven assumption that you were a fine fellow whose seeming hook-line-and-sinker loathful approach to Jews and Israel spoke more to a misperception that you had based upon not interacting much with original sources rather than from some inbred antisemitic evil as many others were accusing you of.
I am extremely pleased to see that I judged you accurately! My presumptions of innocence are too often disproven so thank you for providing yourself as a counter example to bolster my faith in humankind.
If I may return the favor, I am super duper well aware of the dangers here but thus far, despite words getting out among a populace that generally believe (at least among the classes in which I move) that Jews are literally biologically different than others, condemned by Allah, and evil in accordance with the explanations offered by the familiar book Mein Kampf, I have been here for around a month and still live.
That isn't to say that I'll necessarily make it to the morrow. All it takes is running in to one incorrigible person or me being too tired to play saint until someone (or god forbid a group of someones! 😂) can get to know me well enough for their humanity to wrestle their priors into doubt, but thus has been my life for many years now (prior to Egypt having lived in an all black neighborhood in Brooklyn https://youtu.be/h-BOkIuOKCA ) and my experience has been that - face to face - humanity is reachable and society's tribal and personal paranoias and personal enmities can be overcome so that, perhaps even in a single wildfire wave of understanding we can be overcome by a new spirit and everything can change.
Hell, I even believe that the ruling class suffers from the system they preside over. See my Purim video (you'll dig it). https://youtu.be/yOFGF7PqzLY
If you would like to consider joining me (and I think you would 😉) get in touch via my email which is included in the description of most of my videos. Perhaps you and I can pull off some monster sized miracle before this month is passed.
Scott, I never do this, but this piece of shit just publicly accused me of supporting Hamas. Please give him a time out and if it helps any, I'll take a time out too.
P.S. In addition to ignorance being no excuse not to make a public accusation of that kind, he can't even claim ignorance, my two videos directly addressing the conflict are there beneath his lackadaisical epithet. I have ZERO doubt that I have saved mkre lives - and more Jewish lives - than that piece of shit has. A few nosy fellows who dislike the fact that SSCers choose to follow me each time I share a personal link on an open thread have found themselves unable to simply bypass the comment they dislike and have been vocally insisting I cease and desist. If it will socially aid putting this ugly weasel SK in his place you have my blessing to throw dirt in my direction as well. I can't abide a forum where somebody whose grandparents survived Auschwitz and who himself is AT THIS VERY MOMENT risking his life for the sake of his tribe (and others) should have to accept such a disgusting statement from an ignorant buffoon.
EDIT: If you have the patience to actually watch those videos and can realistically help me succeed at this I am ABSOLUTELY open to taking immediate action and literally going to Gaza for Passover.
Yes, I doubt that you have such abilities for they are rare and mighty but it doesn't hurt to ask.
I don't have any particular issues with your politics, but I genuinely don't understand why you'd think it's a good idea to go to a literal war zone run by a literally genocidal terrorist group whose primary target is literally you.
I know this has been asked many times across the internet over the years, but I figured there's at least a chance that this blog might be frequented by Netflix engineers who know something about this.
Why on earth does Netflix always only recommend the same 20 shows forever *most of which you have already watched*? Why do they recommend things you've already watched at all? Given this is the most obvious possible improvement to recommendations and trivial to implement, they must be doing it on purpose, but WHY?!?!
Some people have suggested that they recommend things you've already watched in order to cover up the lack of content, but even now they still have vastly more content than they show on the homepage, and while it may not be perfectly matched, anything would be better than just making the home page a static list of shows you've already watched. Doing this makes Netflix look *more* like a ghost town rather than less. So what gives?
The history is instructive. Maybe even an agentic systems takeaway way at the end, if you make it.
Back in 2006, Netflix launched the Netflix Prize, a competition inviting the public to improve their recommendation algorithm. At the time, people were waiting for DVDs to arrive, and if you got a dud, it was pretty disappointing because with round trips you wasted multiple days of your subscription with one less good movie from the service. The prize was famously won in 2009 by a team that improved the algorithm by 10%. This was a significant improvement for a recommendation engine that was already tuned by the company.
(Future Netflix prizes were canceled for fears of the Video Privacy Protection Act, which is a whole different story...)
And the recommendation engine was good. Sometimes it just agreed you'd like movies you knew you'd like, the genres with all the actors you like. But sometimes it would throw a curveball from a completely new genre, and if you took a chance it could be sublime, like having a friend with eclectic tastes who knew you better than you knew yourself.
One problem was... most people didn't like to rate things on 10 point scales. Or even 5 point scales. Or rate anything at all. So the ratings system became as simple as possible to avoid turning people off from rating completely, they kept trying to get more signal from less information.
And also the product changed. Streaming meant no more two days wait, so you can cater more to the mood of the person in the moment rather than trying to target some objectified ideal of the person's favorite movie.
Also people often highly rated things they didn't often watch. There were famous lists of the longest kept DVDs, with wrenching Academy Award winners just sitting on coffee tables for a month before returned. In general you might rate art films higher, but right now you just want to turn off your brain and watch something with explosions.
As people defected from ratings and wanted movies catering to specific moods, Netflix tried an era of hyperspecialized categories, to target those sub-sub-genres you liked or wanted to try. There were jokes about it, because you could filter on categories like "critically-acclaimed romantic dance movies" or "romantic crime movies based on classic literature" or "raunchy mad-scientist comedy" or "mistaken-identity movies for ages 5 to 7" (each of these had exactly one entry).
This worked a bit, and gave useful data to Netflix on what shows it might want to produce to fill some of these gaps.
Then someone realized internally that with streaming, the ideal metric wasn't watching a show that changed your life, it was just time on site. If you want to max time on site, you find filler content. Opiates not psychedelics. You don't find a series of profound life changing films or spectacles that people need to go digest and think about before even attempting another film because they know somehow nothing will ever come close. You want empty calories. Something cozy and familiar, so Netflix can become like a fireplace in your living room, always there, always on, always watching your decisions and learning about how to encourage you to keep it on.
So the recommendation engine stopped trying to be a recommendation engine. It is now providing a plausible default for somebody who just wants to put something on and doesn't care too much what. It's not trying to help you find the next great film you will love, it's just trying to be a digital comfort blanket and send you something familiar, on repeat, forever. And if that is not really your passion then you might not really be the target audience anymore.
The system started out targeting the sublime, making people watch a movie they would really remember for the next week as they waited for the next one. Eventually it started targeting satisficing, just keeping people plugged in. The general numbers go up, but I think at the expense of moments of profundity, revelation, and self-discovery.
If you want an overwrought analogy to AI, maybe it's a cautionary tale that illustrates that you don't need to maximize for paperclips to destroy human value. Even if you just shift slightly what aspect of human welfare you're prioritizing, you can end up with a radically different trap and arguably much worse outcome.
Huh. It almost sounds like the mailing delay was the key there. We went from thinking ahead about what we want, and prioritizing based on limited resources, to feeding whatever mood we happened to be in.
The guy who does the recommendation algorithm for Netflix has the world’s cushiest job. And it’s a $300k job at least, I mean it’s Data scientist type stuff.
It might be frustrating though - he has this genius algorithm but his code has to sort first by newest releases, or promoted releases and then and only then can he apply his algorithm, if and only the hard coded recommendations don’t exceed 10. But that never happens.
A lot of people do rewatch shows, and a lot of people just put on Netflix as white noise while they're doing some task or falling asleep. And while they could easily separate the "watch again" section from the new recommendations, I guess it's easier for the customer to navigate it you don't.
So in addition to the reasons mentioned by others, maybe it's also something people legitimately want.
There is a recurring discussion on Hacker News on the topic "when I buy [a refrigerator] from Amazon, why do they then continually recommend that I buy more?" (where [a refrigerator] could be any large, expensive object of which it is obvious that you're not going to need a second one).
In one case, there was a response from an Amazon engineer who didn't work on the recommendations team, who said "I've asked them about this in the past and they always swear up and down that a previous purchase is the strongest signal of likelihood to buy one of these objects. I've looked into a few different examples that caught my eye and in every case I was able to show that the pattern was spurious (for example, that these "repeat purchases" were actually returns, in which the customer was sent two [refrigerators] but only paid for one), but it's not worth the effort of correcting the team product-by-product".
> anything would be better than just making the home page a static list of shows you've already watched. Doing this makes Netflix look *more* like a ghost town rather than less. So what gives?
I'm not sure I agree with that; my primary objection, when I look at what Netflix has to offer, is that none of it is even remotely attractive. It's hugely embarrassing to them. Displaying shows that I've already watched neatly sidesteps the issue that they've lost all the licenses for content that someone might actually want to watch; the average quality of that display is going to appear high. Any time I try to look for something new to watch, that's when I get a strong sense that Netflix has died.
The explanation I've heard for appliances is that sometimes you buy one and you don't like it so you get a different one. The odds of this happening aren't particularly high, but they're higher than the odds of you buying the appliance in a random month.
I think they’ve generally gotten a pretty good standard of new shows. Obviously they won’t have the Disney stuff anymore, or the newest movies. To be fair to the company they realised that quite a few years ago.
But I'm observing that it isn't the case for physical purchases, and yet the recommendations team treats it like it is, because they're looking at some behavior that isn't relevant to their goals for reasons that don't show up in the data summaries they work from.
This can easily also be true for Netflix.
For example, I find it easy to imagine that two people share a Netflix account and one of them watches a show, likes it, and recommends that the other one should watch it too. Netflix has a tool specifically to combat this problem, distinct personal accounts within a family account, but not everybody's going to bother with that.
My guess is that the team that wrote the module that recommends shows is different from the team that wrote the module that tracks what shows you've watched. Perhaps there's some intermediate phase where they look at your viewing history, try to reduce your complex human personality into a few buckets and bits, and then pass that along.
Alternatively, maybe people actually do re-watch shows a lot, and the recommendation engine is doing its job well? I know some people like to have the TV playing in the background.
Maybe those shows are owned by Netflix, so it's like putting the store brand toilet paper in a prominent spot?
Hm. They want you signing up, and maintaining a subscription. But actually watching anything is going to be a cost for them, both in use of technical resources, and in royalty payments. I'm assuming they're ignoring the technical resource side of the costs, but it's amusing to speculate that they aren't. ;-)
What is the opposite of "leaving money on the table"? "Taking money off the table" might make sense, but I'm looking for something along the lines of, "driving too hard of a bargain such that a deal doesn't even happen in the first place".
As some of you may know, I recently founded the company Open Asteroid Impact (openasteroidimpact.org) on April 1st. Some people complained that there was too much text. While a bit on the late side, we now have a video! It's an interview that covers our company's strategy, safety plan, DEI policies, windfall clause, and more!
Clearly the guy just didn't think I was funny, and sought to make his displeasure known. It's a bit ruder than what I'm used to but hey. That's one of the costs of being on the public internet.
Believe it or not, Downtown Redwood City will actually be top 10% "fun" in the Bay Area. There's a few walkable bars and I love Sandwich Spot. You'll soon find yourself travelling to SF or downtown Palo Alto though... For more natural amenities, you'll be pretty close to the beach in Half Moon Bay and a few hours from skiing in the Sierra Nevada mountains
Make fun of the dopes who bought property in Foster City, since they'll be underwater any day now.
But seriously, what's fun in Redwood City may be the wrong question. Redwood City is part of a continuous strip of suburbs reaching from Millbrae to Santa Clara. It might make more sense to ask what's fun to do in central Silicon Valley.
Well, Redwood City has a DMV office, which is more than most of those suburbs can say. I had to go there once to renew my driver's license, which is one of the most fun things I've done in Redwood City.
Woah, there. I hope during your wild adventures in the big city, you stopped to refuel at Redwood City's many fine dining establishments, like Panda Express, Taco Bell, and Burger King.
Hi everyone, I am currently writing about psychiatric advanced directives, particularly for bipolar disorder or other types of disorders that may involve involuntary treatment; if you have any experience with these kinds of advanced directives, either in issuing them as a patient, or enacting them as a practitioner, and you're open to talk about them, please contact me, I'd like to feature original sources rather than just look at all the metastudies about this. My gmail is hiphination.
And we later ended up comparing epidemic models where Saar/Yuri proposed a late September introduction with half the doubling rate, as compared to my proposed late November introduction at the market.
It would be an interesting debate to go over various models with sufficient detail to compare Pekar's 2021 and 2022 models, evaluate the impact of the first ascertained case on start date, build confidence intervals on case numbers at various dates, decide on a range of values for epidemic growth rate parameters, and so on. But that is certainly not the debate that we did have.
The long-awaited final version of the Independent review of gender identity services for children and young people (aka the Cass Report) was released this week. It's a ginormous meta-study and it makes recommendations for the UK's NHS about what the optimal healthcare approaches for treating children with gender dysphoria should be. In her intro, Dr Hilary Cass writes: "This Review is not about defining what it means to be trans, nor is it about undermining the validity of trans identities, challenging the right of people to express themselves, or rolling back on people’s rights to healthcare."
The report is written in a low-affect style that may disguise the seriousness of its salient points. But it's clear from reading it that a lot of what some people in the debate declare is settled science is not settled at all — for instance, treatments such as puberty blockers are being prescribed with little good data about their long-term effects. I haven't heard if any similar comprehensive review like this is being done in the US. Cass makes various recommendations, the most important of which (to my mind) are to get better long-term data on intervention outcomes.
This BMJ editorial doesn't mince words, though...
"The evidence base for interventions in gender medicine is threadbare, whichever research question you wish to consider—from social transition to hormone treatment.
"For example, of more than 100 studies examining the role of puberty blockers and hormone treatment for gender transition only two were of passable quality. To be clear, intervention studies—particularly of drug and surgical interventions—should include an appropriate control group, ideally be randomised, ensure concealment of treatment allocation (although open label studies are sometimes acceptable), and be designed to evaluate relevant outcomes with adequate follow-up.
"One emerging criticism of the Cass review is that it set the methodological bar too high for research to be included in its analysis and discarded too many studies on the basis of quality. In fact, the reality is different: studies in gender medicine fall woefully short in terms of methodological rigour; the methodological bar for gender medicine studies was set too low, generating research findings that are therefore hard to interpret. The methodological quality of research matters because a drug efficacy study in humans with an inappropriate or no control group is a potential breach of research ethics. Offering treatments without an adequate understanding of benefits and harms is unethical. All of this matters even more when the treatments are not trivial; puberty blockers and hormone therapies are major, life altering interventions...."
I wish to make a general point about clinical trials in medicine.
In general it is very reasonable to expect that before any drug is widely prescribed, we have strong safety data that it will not cause harm.
This is the case even for conditions that are life threatening, which can be controversial. For example in the 1990s there were promising drugs for HIV/AIDS coming through the clinical trials pipeline that most people couldn't access, causing widespread frustration with the FDA which spilled over into protests.
The same is true for cancer - this is the space that I work in. I recommend friend-of-ASX Jake Seliger's blog for anyone who wants to hear how incredibly difficult it is to get access to experimental drugs even for young, well-informed, well-connected, terminal cancer patients. It's even more difficult for everyone else. It is the case, for example, that a competent adult terminal cancer patient will not be able to get access to an experimental drug, even if they are willing to sign a bevy of legal consent forms, if they have a condition that may predispose them to have a serious side effect.
It is not readily apparent why the evidential threshold should be so much lower for medications in transgender medicine.
A key difference is that none of the standard drugs used for medical transition are newly developed for that purpose. All of them are secondary uses for drugs developed and approved to treat other conditions. In general, there is much, much less scrutiny applied to new uses for already-approved medications than for initial approval of new medications.
While this is true in general, giving these drugs to kids in development is a whole different ballgame. There are plenty of medications that are safe for adults but not kids - even common ones like aspirin and doxycycline.
Puberty blockers were specifically created to give to developing kids (the original purpose was to treat precocious puberty), so I don't think that objection applies here.
You’re saying the exact opposite of the earlier commenter and I regret to inform you that she is correct. They’re drugs that are widely used for other conditions, such as androgen suppression in prostate cancer, that have been repurposed. In any case, the argument of “this drug was created specifically for this purpose” does not absolve us for the need to make sure the drug is safe! We do this routinely for drugs created specifically for other indications.
There are at least three different GnRH analogues medications that can be used to delay puberty. Leuprorelin and Triptorelin indeed appear to have been developed to treat hormone-sensitive cancers. But Nafarelin was developed to treat precocious puberty.
And that doesn't contradict what I said earlier: "precocious puberty" refers to when puberty starts much earlier than normal, and as such is a medical condition that cisgendered people get.
Anti-androgens used for adult trans women (e.g. spiro, cypro, and bica) were developed for other purposes (high blood pressure, hormonal birth control, and prostate cancer, respectively, if I recall correctly), but I think they're generally reserved for adults and older teenagers.
Sometimes, it;s basicallly impossible to do a plecebo controlled study/
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy has this issue, because you actually know if youve had therapy. This doesnt mean that we should ban CBT on principle as being impossible to evaluate. (Though, some care in interpreting trials may be in order)
Similarly, you cant plecebo control hormones, because the subject is aware of the effects/
There is also some discussion on different types of placebo effect that could be had...
a. some people randomly get better with many medical conditions. need to show tteatment is better than people getting better anyway
b. experimenter pleasing. patients are, effectivly, coerced inro saying the tteatment worked when it didnt. need to reduce the piossibility of this form of coercion
c. some kind of theory that the immune system uses information about your mental state, and believing you are being treated somehow kicks the immune system into overdrive. nb. there asre reasons to suspect this would be evolutionary advantageous
Rougly, theory is that mammals have to budget calorie expediture between running away from pedators and fighting off infection. An adaptation that throws more energy into the immune system when your not otherwise needing to expend calories on not dying would be evolutionary advantageous.
And large placebo effects with antideprssants might be a different mechanism.
it courred to me a while ago you could just tell yourself youve taken an antidepressant wihtout actually needing to get them preescribed. I mean, if the effect is almost entirely placebo, sugar pills are great.
How can you in principle conduct longterm double blind study of a treatment that has very obvious and well known effects several months in? I suppose, you can still make it double blind on paper, while in actuality everyone knows perfectly well whether they are in a control group or not, but what's even the point then?
On a related note, puberty blockers have been in use for decades for precocious puberty. How were the studies conducted back then? Were they double blind somehow? Do we accept their quality? Can we extrapolate the results of these studies for the new application? If no, why not?
It really seems that whatever long term side effects puberty blockers might have they should have already been discovered during their research and continuous use for treatment of precocious puberty. Theoretically, there may be some class of side effects which, for some reason, is not expressed specifically in patients with precocious puberty but the expected disutility of it appears quite low.
Presumably the puberty blockers are used with different timing in the two cases. It is entirely plausible that a puberty-blocking drug would have different side effects when used to delay the onset of puberty to the normal time versus delaying it until much later than usual.
1. Gender dysphoria is a real phenomenon where people feel they are inside the wrong body and hormones/surgery can cure this
2. The majority of people, especially minors, these days who consider themselves trans or gender non conforming are not actually gender dysphoric. Many are gay, on the autism spectrum, or have other mental health issues. A few have narcissistic personalities and enjoy the attention. We need to be a lot more careful about how we prescribe these treatments to ensure that we target only the people who would really benefit.
Trans people have been around forever but the frequency of diagnosis has just gone through the roof. Obviously there’s a cultural component
It would seem that a large fraction of gid cases are a type of autism.
it is not "they have autism, not gid" but rather gid is misclassified in the DSM and should have been been put with the pervasive developmental disorders.
We had the lesbians who only have sex with men discussion last week. it seems everyone here thinks it is nuts to explain all gid cases as homosexuality, given that a significant portion arent attracted to thier assigned at birth sex.
>Many are gay, on the autism spectrum, or have other mental health issues.
None of these things are mutually exclusive. Autism in particular strongly correlates with gender dysphoria in both directions for reasons that are not well understood. And the most common other "mental health issues" are depression and anxiety symptoms, which may actually be caused by gender dysphoria in many cases.
For example, I have formal diagnoses for gender dysphoria, ADHD, depression, and anxiety. The depression and anxiety symptoms have almost completely gone away since I figured out I was probably trans, got diagnosed, and started medical transition. The ADHD seems to be more or less independent of dysphoria and transition.
That being said, there are diagnoses that can mimic the presentation of gender dysphoria and should be ruled out as part of the diagnosis process: specifically, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder type 1, and certain presentations of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Ruling these out is part of the WPATH-8 process.
Yeah I have friends who are trans, they had mental health issues for ages, then they transitioned and seem to be doing a lot better. I have nothing against trans people. I hope you are living your best life. I just think we shouldn't confuse "let's support trans people" with "let's pressure people to transition who may regret it later" or "let's ignore possible side effects of puberty blockers given to minors."
I do keep wondering if all of these conditions that are comorbid to autism have a shared cause. I actually do agree with Anon below that the current rise in ASD and gender dysphoria diagnoses can't just be chalked up to past underdiagnosis, there would definitely be more written record of cases describing at least the symptoms. And it's not like dysgenics is going to suddenly cause a sharp rise in cases across the world... Which leaves us with environmental factors.
If it does all turn out to be because of pollutants, the resulting outrage is going to make the current generational animosity look like a joke in comparison. ...Not that the younger generation wouldn't have done the same thing in their predecessor's position. I personally wouldn't hold any resentment against the older generations, though that's mostly because I have no respect for humanity and don't expect anything from them.
These are my pet hypotheses on the correlation between dysphoria and autism:
1. Autistic people may experience what might be termed "gender incongruity" at roughly the same rate as the gender population, but they find a given degree of gender incongruity much more distressing than neurotypical people do, for similar reasons to why autistics tend to be a lot more bothered by unpleasant sounds, tastes, and textures than neurotypicals are.
2. It seems like a core feature of autism is being at least somewhat lacking in both the ability and the motivation to conform your identity and preferences to social norms. It seems plausible that an effect of this is that neurotypical people would have gender identities that are at least a bit more socially malleable.
That's what I used to think too, but there's just too many other conditions that are comorbid with both ASD and gender dysphoria that aren't even psychological. I'm pretty sure this is what Scott is trying to figure out with all those survey questions about hypermobility and EDS.
> It seems like a core feature of autism is being at least somewhat lacking in both the ability and the motivation to conform your identity and preferences to social norms.
I hadn't thought of this before. I once dated someone who was only slightly on the autism spectrum, but when in intense emotional situations, they would revert to a very binary view of truth: statements were either true and good, or a lie and evil, and there were no exceptions for falsehood or imperfect knowledge or just making a mistake.
I am going to be very cautious about treating this as more than a theoretical potential contributing factor. But wow, the more I think about it, the more it seems to explain. :-/
I have a number of psychotherapy patients on the autism spectrum, not all of them so close to the mild end that they would fit right in in a setting with lots of "nerds." None are happy, and some are very unhappy. Re: the lack of joy and enthusiasm, my intuition is that a certain emotional flatness may come with the territory. But also, most are grievously deprived of companionship because of their social skills deficit, and also lead very restricted lives because of an aversion to novelty and a craving to know in advance exactly how something will turn out. I work to help them improve social skills, and become aware of their inner script of when-in-doubt-do-the-usual-thing and override it more often.
Also, am impressed by work being done by a Calif. researcher on using a brief, structured therapy incorporating 2 MDMA sessions to help people on the autism scale become less socially anhedonic. Can find links if you are interested.
Depression and anxiety is an obvious result of being autistic while living in non-autistic society, where people are mostly unable to straight communication and instinctively consider you rude and weird.
Non cis-genderness and general gender-non-conformity seem to have something to do with autistics being less susceptible to social rules. The fact that people still manage to twist it into "social contamination of transgenderness" is hillarious.
> If it does all turn out to be because of pollutants
On the other hand, imagine how ironic it would be if it turns out that polutants have serious contribution towards transgenderness. That the side which was actively worried about their children becoming trans was actually contributing towards it by supporting oil industry.
Why would it come from the oil industry specifically? There are lots of pollutants, and in fact if there was something we typically consider anodyne that we found out caused gender dysphoria, we would reclassify it as a pollutant.
>Autism in particular strongly correlates with gender dysphoria in both directions for reasons that are not well understood
Correction: it strongly correlates with gender dysphoria _diagnoses_. There's no particular reason to think that gender dysphoria diagnoses strongly correlate with actual gender dysphoria.
Gender dysphoria is an unusually politically sensitive issue and you'd expect on priors for its diagnoses to be mush less trustworthy based on this. And psychiatric diagnoses for many illnesses or issues are pretty fuzzy in the first place.
Something being a politically sensitive issue has a much worse signal to noise ratio than getting a diagnosis from a medical professional. I can understand some amount of extra caution, but there is that, and than there are claims that diagnosis have no strong correlation with an actual condition.
This is not actually true, as I will apparently have to keep pointing out for the rest of my natural life. There is – in stark contrast to homosexuals – *no record*, not *one*, of a transsexual person in the entire West between the emperor Elagabalus (approx. 204-222 AD) and the mid-19th century. There are a number of eunuchs and crossdressers whom activists *choose* to spuriously reinterpret as transsexuals ex post facto, but an examination of these cases proves them wrongheaded in each instance. (Elagabalus is also a unique; there is no other instance preceding him either.)
Please stop repeating this false factoid. Trans people did not meaningfully exist before the industrial revolution. I have no idea why, but that's how it is.
Gender dysphoria as we recognize today has certainly been documented. The most famous example is the 14th century poem "On Becoming a Woman" by rabbi Qalonymos ben Qalonymos. The rabbi refers to maleness as a "lasting deformity" and laments to God to be made female. You can read the poem online if you'd like, it's quite moving. It makes no direct reference to attraction to men.
Examples of people who lived as the opposite of their birth sex include the surgeon James Barry (born 1789), stagecoach driver Charley Parkhurst (born 1812), and more recently, the Countess or Pauline/Arthur Berloget of 1850s France, who wrote, "I, who had so desired to be a girl, have triumphed over natural law." There is also the Quaker preacher Public Universal Friend (born 1752) who explicitly identified as neither male nor female, and requested their followers avoid gendered pronouns when referring to them, saying "I am as I am."
There are also many culturally-specifc third or fourth genders, yes, even in Europe: the femmenielli of Italy, and Balkan sworn virgins. These are social roles that fulfill social purposes, and not merely individual declarations of identity, but social roles develop in response to individual psychology. There are far more examples, of course, outside of "the West."
I take issue with your requirement of "lack of other motivations" to characterize a historical figure as transsexual, it is asking for too much. In a society with highly distinct roles for men and women, going from one category to another, or shunning both, will require taking on a drastically different lifestyle and career by definition. Any "legitimately transsexual" historical figure would also need, at the very least, to be able to cope with the demands of their chosen role.
It is one thing to say a woman crossdressing temporarily to fight in war or inherit an estate is not an example of a transsexual, and another to claim someone like James Barry, who lived his entire adult life as a man, and wanted his sex to be kept secret even after his death, is not reasonable evidence of a trans person, even if he originally transitioned to get into medical school.
If you don't think these examples are sufficiently "pure", I'd be curious to know what your standards are, and whether your standards are in fact similar to typical trans people today.
This is exactly the kind of disingenuous argumentation I mean. Most of your examples are trivially easily dismissed, and you probably know this, yet you repeat them anyway because when given in a group they have the appearance of truth and this allows you to trick others.
The femminielli were simply crossdressing homosexual prostitutes; this we have ample evidence of from late-medieval and early-modern Europe. In France they were called berdaches, and in Venice there exists a bridge called the "Ponte delle Tette", Bridge of Tits, because the city's ordinary prostitutes successfully sued to be allowed to display themselves there in order to compete with the crossdressing male prostitutes. It's strange that people are so keen to make much of these types of obvious drag performance when, in the modern day, conflating drag with transexualism is seen as a big no-no by the same people, and they clearly understand the distinction to be clear and sharp.
Sworn virgins are even worse and more disingenuous an example than this, of course, since they're exactly a case of a social structure existing to allow women to take on the social rights and duties of a man in case of necessity or (rarely, it seems) inclination. The fact that it took a lot longer for most people who are not Albanians to establish analogous forms of elective or universal emancipation doesn't make the sworn virgins transexual, any more than having her own bank account makes a woman transsexual today.
As for the individual persons named by you:
The rabbi Kalonymus is an interesting case, but I will point out that he is conventionally described as a satirist and that the Even Bochan "has long been acknowledged as a masterpiece of Hebrew satire" intended to make fun of Judaism's ideas about men's superior position in society and before the Lord; you know, presumably, as well as I do that the end of the poem is a reference to and paraphrase of the Orthodox Jewish man's morning prayer, in which he thanks God for not making him a woman. Nor indeed is this the only satire of this kind that Kalonymus wrote (Masekhet Purim is the other I can name offhand), so it's hardly strong evidence of *anything* in his personal life.
Margaret Bulkley a.k.a. "James Barry", as you point out yourself, crossdressed to get into medical school, another typical example of the opportunistic crossdressing I adverted to already. The evidence concerning her is also contradictory, with, for example, no indication of any relationships with women, a possible relationship with a man who was in on her secret, and the possibility that an early sexual assault and subsequent pregnancy led her to feign being a man as a form of traumatized self-defense. It's also worth noting that even if we accepted Bulkley/Barry as legitimately transexual, this would merely move the first appearance of transsexualism back by two or three decades, hardly a massive hole below the waterline to what I'm saying.
Charlotte Parkhurst is substantially the same; she crossdressed for protection (I hardly need to tell anyone that the western frontier could be notably fucked up for teenage girls traveling alone), had at some time a straight relationship and (non-surviving) baby, and, being born two decades after Bulkley, is even closer to the time in which I already agree that transsexuals were surfacing.
The PUF was brain-damaged by a fever, decided she had died and her soul had been replaced by that of an angel, and that since angels were understood (by various persons, anyway) to be sexless, she must therefore also be; her condition is much closer to what we would modernly term schizophrenia than to transsexualism (although, be it noted, it was clearly also not schizophrenia as typically understood, proceeding as it did from a severe physical illness. A stroke?). Frankly the PUF is almost the canonical example of a widely cited but obviously "fake" transexual, in that nothing whatsoever about her case resembles the generally accepted modern understanding of transsexualism.
Strangest of all is your use of Arthur Berloget, transexual of the 1850s and forward, as an example *against* my claim that transsexuals first appeared in the mid-19th century! Berloget is indeed precisely one of that handful of indisputable cases which do occur with no predecessors in the mid-19th century! There is indeed little question that Berloget is what we would modernly conceive of as a transsexual! Why would you concieve of this as an argument against me? I am frankly baffled by this, unless it merely shows the rote, copypaste nature of your response.
Incidentally, your use of terminology like "transitioned" is the worst kind of question-begging. Not only are you assuming that which is to be demonstrated, you're violating your own definitions, since you know very well that if it were decided today that transition should be a wholly non-medical issue and transexuals should be content with crossdressing, you would immediately raise the hue and cry about it.
I am interested in knowing your definition of what may fairly be described as "transsexual" (I will generally use the more common term transgender person) so that I can consider how it fits to some other historical examples. This seems better than potentially coming up with a list of historical examples to then work through on an ad hoc basis.
Maybe one way you could express this would be to look at examples you deem spurious and characterize why those examples don't fit with the definition you endorse.
I will put forward a modified version of the Wikipedia definition as my starting point: "A transgender person is someone whose gender identity differs from that associated with the gender that their family, community, and/or society identifies them with." And then "gender identity is the personal sense of one's own gender, which can correlate with a person's assigned sex or can differ from it."
Kind of a weird definition - does it imply that in a maximally trans-inclusive society, nobody would be trans? Since there would be no societal gender identification from which to differ
"I will put forward a modified version of the Wikipedia definition as my starting point: 'A transgender person is someone whose gender identity differs from that associated with the gender that their family, community, and/or society identifies them with.' And then 'gender identity is the personal sense of one's own gender, which can correlate with a person's assigned sex or can differ from it.'"
"Gender" as a concept is also ideological hogwash; most languages don't even have two words for this and English only does because Victorians were too prudish to say sex, so they used a grammatical term as a euphemism. The idea of a sex/gender distinction existing is itself false, enabled only by this accident of the English language. I also don't think that others' views are materially relevant. I would thus prefer to define a transsexual simply as "someone whose sex identity differs from their actual observable physical sex".
This being settled, allow me to begin in the way of examples with the two I already used elsewhere: the famous Chevalier d'Éon in the 18th century, and the castrato priests of Cybele in ancient Rome. These are two figures (or rather a type in the latter case) which are *frequently* claimed by transexual activists in our day as predecessors; there should therefore be no problem in using them as examples of the tendency, I hope you will agree.
d'Éon, despite engendering widespread dispute in his own day about whether he was in reality male or female, did not meaningfully have a sex identity different from his birth sex; of course, due to the controversy just mentioned it would be either impossible or inevitable for any sex identity he had to differ from that which others identified him with, depending on how you look at it, which strikes me as an example of where your definition is not adequate. Either way, I hope we can agree that the existence of letters from himself where he begs to be allowed to resume male clothing in France because he feels humiliated by having to dress as a woman makes it clear that he was in no way confused on the point. Granted, it was decided to require him to dress as a woman in the first place because in previous letters he claimed to be a girl who was raised as a boy to inherit his family estate, but given that that claim was made entirely for personal gain, well. It's also reasonably well established that d'Éon began to crossdress for the purposes of spying, as he was a member of the Secret du Roi, the Ancien Régime's intelligence agency and secret police; evidently in his youth he was able to pass for a woman, but every portrait of him from later in life makes clear that he thoroughly lost this ability with age.
Next, in the case of the priests of Cybele, the so-called galli, the idea that they were transsexual seems to me to crumble on every point where we have any evidence. First of all, "gallus" is the Latin for rooster, cockerel; the *whole point* is that they're *men* who have made the sacrifice of their manhood to the goddess; a costly signal if ever there was one. If they believed themselves to actually be women, there would be no sacrifice and they would not be able to function as priests. Secondly, in those periods when castration of Romans was illegal, the galli were evidently foreigners, which indicates that the animating impulse was religious piety or fervor, not a desire to change sex, which presumably would not have increased among Roman men just because a law changed. (Similarly to what I said in a previous comment, if people suggest this happened, I would like to know what law changes they think would cure/prevent transsexualism in our time and why they aren't advocating for this simple, effective, wholesome, socially nondisruptive, and evidently permanent one-time fix instead of complex medical interventions with significant residual suffering.) Thirdly, there is no sensible reason why Roman transexuals would have all, without exception, formed a religious cult to the point where there isn't a single known example of someone just doing the eunuch-and-women's-clothing part and staying out of the religion – not even Elagabalus, who AFAIK did not castrate himself. This is just asking for far too much acceptance of ludicrous coincidence, particularly considering how crass Romans were about matters of sex in both senses, especially if they could get a laugh out of it. Finally, as a sort of aside remark, I might point out that there were a reasonable number of eunuchs in ancient Rome, and vast numbers in other especially Eastern societes later; none of these are typically considered transsexual by modern activists, so it can't be the case that castration is inherently transsexual or evidence of transsexualism. Effectively nothing about the galli and their manifestation pattern-matches to how we're meant to understand the modern transsexual etiology or experience; therefore, it is reasonable to state that these are two different phenomena. (Note that many things about the galli *do* pattern-match to the behavior of adherents of other weird religions.)
I'm sort of dashing this off off the cuff and reading it over it seems a bit muddled, it could probably have been argued more forcefully with more time spent than I'm willing to dump into an individual comment, but hopefully this can form some reasonable basis at least.
"There are a number of eunuchs and crossdressers whom activists *choose* to spuriously reinterpret as transsexuals ex post facto"
How do you distinguish between a crossdresser and a transsexual, in an era where the word "transsexual" hadn't been coined yet, there was no social support for or acceptance of the thing we would later describe with that word, and the medical technology for a transsexual to do anything more than dress and pass as the opposite sex didn't exist?
Evident compulsiveness, lack of other motivations, presence of the comorbidities now known to us, voluntarity, expressions of distress. Those are just the most obvious criteria off the top of my head. But for example, transexual activists keep citing the Chevalier d'Éon as a historical transsexual even though autograph evidence (in the form of a letter from him to the relevant legal authority, I forget who) existed at least into the early 20th century, and probably still exists today, that he was appalled by the legal decision that required him positively to dress as a woman in France and wanted permission to stop. Or again, (a certain type of) people keep citing the Roman priests of Cybele, even though they're blatantly obviously self-castrati out of religious fervor and piety, much like a number of Christians later, natch.
These behaviors are, *at the very minimum*, sufficiently distinct from the modern transsexual that claiming them for that movement is the iffy angle, not refuting it.
(Also, you seem to inadvertently suggest here that if *we ourselves* were to remove all social support and acceptance of transsexualism, the observed presentation would then disappear and be reverted into other, largely more benign forms of crossdressing; do you really believe that? Given that "crossdresser without significant psychological distress or ailments" is clearly superior to even the outcomes of many hormonally and surgically treated persons, who report significant continued morbidities, that would if so be a forceful case *against* tolerance in this instance. I'm not sure I'm prepared to go there.)
Couldn't it be that the concept of being trans didn't exist, and that people who would now call themselves trans then thought of themselves homosexual? Also, my impression (based mostly on life experience and stuff Dan Savage has said) is that for most gay men wearing drag is a playful thing, done for parties or parades or the fun of feeling outrageous, but not a way of feeling more like a woman. So maybe crossdressers in the past were what we would now call trans? I.e.., maybe they were crossdressing so as to come as close as they could in real life to being the gender they felt they were.
My understanding is that most modern transsexuals are not even homosexual (with reference to their actual sex, that is), so it's hard to see how that could be possible for more than a portion of the group in any case. But also, the references we do have to crossdressing mainly suggest that it was opportunistic for access to male advantages in the case of women (e.g. the famous lady-pirates of Calico Jack's crew) and for men, either to hide from one thing or another (the Chevalier d'Éon, any number of French aristocrats escaping the guillotine dressed as washerwomen, etc.) or exactly the same sort of joking/party thing you describe. The best example of the latter would be a joke in Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazusai, which I started explaining here, but the digression was so long that it was of a size with the rest of the post, so look it up if you really want to know; in any case, that was written in 411 BC in Athens.
Either way, there's no sign or record of anything like what the current regime describes as *distress* around sex or gender, and there is not in literature any example of someone even asserting the impossible desire to switch, except on the pattern of Beatrice's lament in Much Ado About Nothing, where a woman wishes that she were a man so that she could behave like a man, or avenge herself.
<My understanding is that most modern transsexuals are not even homosexual (with reference to their actual sex, that is),
Well, yeah, but you know the thing about Eskimos have 15 (or whatever the number is) words for snow, while English has only one? Well maybe in other eras there weren't words for all the manflavors gender identification and sexual preference, so some word like "homosexual" or "queer" would have been used to cover all forms of being atypical with respect to gender and sexual preference.
As for personal accounts -- there are probably a lot of things we don't have personal accounts of from early on. Many people couldn't even read and write, and even for those who could it's unlkely their diaries and letters would survive unless they were famous. And if being sexually atypical was stigmatized, that makes it even less likely we'd have personal accounts of it. Do we have personal accounts of a taste for BDSM, or water sports, or fellatio? I dunno, maybe we do.
I realize that absent concrete knowledge this seems like a credible and rational line of reasoning. However, in practical fact: no. Some single vague term would not have been used to cover all sexual deviance, let alone consistently during all of 1500 years in the entirety of Europe. It's unlikely that this would have occurred *even in one country* for any period longer than a few generations. Rather, it's unlikely that if transexuals *had* existed, they'd have been conflated with gays other than in exceptional cases; the two concepts of "wanting to fuck other men" and "a strange misapprehension about one's body" are not intimately conceptually connected, however natural the connection seems here and now. It's more likely that they would have been associated with other kinds of lunatics who believed other absurd but largely harmless things.
"Do we have personal accounts of a taste for BDSM, or water sports, or fellatio? I dunno, maybe we do."
Yes, we do, actually. Tons of them. The Romans had separate words for giving head and facefucking. The fragmentary novel Satyricon is, as far as we can judge from the remaining portions, about two guys dragging their twink around due to a sex curse cast on them by a priestess of Priapus for spying on the secret rites. In The Golden Ass, a woman is sentenced to get screwed by the titular donkey; this is played for laughs as the donkey finds it repugnant to bed a criminal. There is any amount of graffiti in Pompeii and elsewhere describing the specific charms and skills of named women, wholly without euphemism. Again, this is Rome alone (starring Macaulay Culkin as the emperor, I guess). I understand that it can be tempting to attribute a sort of naivete or puritanism to the peple of the past wholesale, but they were literally just like us, often less inhibited. I would advise you to let go of this way of thinking, even if you don't feel like hitting the books (which I recommend, however; many of them are very entertaining).
There's some pretty explicit stuff that's survived from antiquity, including literal restroom graffiti. If the modern concept of trans had existed back then on the scale claimed by advocates we'd likely have something to back it up.
Yeah this seems plausible. Given there was no such thing as gender reassignment surgery for most of the history of the human species, gender dysphoric individuals in the past have had to find alternative methods of expression.
It feels like someone should mention the following theory:
*********
No one is transgender *by nature*,
BUT, also
No one is cisgender *by nature*.
Because cisgender and transgender are cultural/societal concepts and they don't exist outside of a society.
Or as Scott put it:
"there is no neutral culture. Having lots of transgender people is downstream of cultural choices. But having lots of cisgender people is also downstream of cultural choices.....Even within evolution’s constraints, culture can do some pretty weird stuff. I think you could probably have a culture where 99% of people were transgender, where it was generally accepted that everyone transitioned on their 18th birthday"
I'm having a hard time taking the report seriously. How, exactly, are you supposed to do a blind control group for puberty blockers? It will be pretty obvious if you're still going through puberty, you can't placebo yourself into just not maturing. And some of these charts are *obviously* bullshit. The worst that I've seen so far, Figure 18, suggests that the gayest of boys are barely more interested in male partners than the least male-attracted girls. And every single curve in that chart is the exact same shape, and it implies that NO girls identify more with male gender than any boys, which is just obviously untrue because boys and girls identifying with the other gender is the entire *reason this study happened*. I'd expect better from a middle school science fair poster.
At this point I've stopped reading. It may be that my early skim has just picked out a couple of weak spots, but if a random sample of it is this bad I am not expecting the rest of it to be any better.
Listen, Beowulf is smart and critical and willing to call bullshit on anything and anybody. If he takes this report seriously then IMHO it's worth reading in full.
But to answer Unsaintly's question, the Cass report discusses this question in their chapter on Evidence-based Medicine in which they discuss the limitations of the current studies and they suggest methodological improvements.
But the bigger question here, Unsaintly, is why are you having trouble taking the report seriously if you haven't even bothered to glance at it? This seems to be the rationalist method, though — come up with reasons to support one's position without looking at the evidence.
I admit this report is huge, and I'll probably never get through the whole thing, but I was curious enough to check it out and bring it to this group's attention. What blows my mind is that most of the critical comments have come from people who are (a) either too lazy or too prejudiced against it to bother to look at it, and then (b) fail to mount an evidence-based argument against it.
Seconding Eremolalos' comment on it "not being the rationalist method, but a common result anyways"; the issue is at least partially one of time.
Namely, "the first replies will tend to be from people who haven't read whatever you're saying/linking/etc.", roughly proportionately to how long it takes to read it (and/or find time to read it in depth). Possibly with an additional multiplier for how much other interesting reading there is available in the vicinity.
I get how irritating it must be that almost nobody (or literally nobody?) read some of the thing on the strength of your post. You brought a big chunk of info about something people argue and speculate about here. That's like bringing home a big fresh kill for the tribe to feast on, and instead we all just sat on our rocks and kept speculating and arguing. I did that myself. Though Anon eventually got me to consider seriously the idea that transsexuals did not exist before the 1800's. But I am sort of impervious to new info these days. I am writing a novel and all the flow valves are set to out. I canceled all my news subscriptions, and don't even own a TV. Anything big I'll hear through the grapevine anyhow
>How, exactly, are you supposed to do a blind control group for puberty blockers? It will be pretty obvious if you're still going through puberty, you can't placebo yourself into just not maturing.
You do a blind control group by giving the control group a placebo and not telling them they're the control group. Just because they may be able to figure out that they're taking a placebo through observation doesn't invalidate it. Many blind control groups for medications are in the same boat, where the fact that the pill doesn't do anything opens the possibility of participants noticing that they're in the control group. You still have to do it anyway if you're going to have any idea what the effects of the medication you're studying actually are.
>Figure 18, suggests that the gayest of boys are barely more interested in male partners than the least male-attracted girls. And every single curve in that chart is the exact same shape, and it implies that NO girls identify more with male gender than any boys, which is just obviously untrue because boys and girls identifying with the other gender is the entire *reason this study happened*.
I checked the paper that she gets that chart from, and can confirm that the cart she presents is directly from that paper. Sadly I don't understand statistical analyses well enough to critique the paper itself, but here's what the paper had to say about it:
"Conventionally, d values of 0.8 or greater for group differences in human behavior/psychology are considered large, those of about 0.5 are considered moderate, those of about 0.2 are considered small, and those below 0.2 are considered negligible. The d value for the sex difference in height is 2.0. Most human behavioral/psychological sex differences are smaller in magnitude than the sex difference in height, but a few are larger. For instance, the sex differences in gender identity and sexual orientation are larger...This sex difference in gender identity is very large with an approximate d value greater than 10.0 (Hines et al., 2003a, 2004). Sexual orientation refers to the direction of a person’s erotic interests, e.g., in males, females, both or neither. Most people who have female-typical external genitalia are interested primarily in male partners, whereas most people who have male-typical external genitalia are not. This sex difference also is large, with an approximate d value of more than 5.0 (Hines et al., 2003a, 2004; Meyer-Bahlburg et al., 2008)."
I could see that chart being accurate: most men are not gay, and most women are not lesbians, so it would make sense that the vast majority of women are more attracted to men then the men who are most attracted to men. Similarly, most people do not have gender identity disorder, so it makes sense that even those with gender dysphoria may not identify with their chosen gender more than cisgender individuals.
> Just because they may be able to figure out that they're taking a placebo through observation doesn't invalidate it.
Of course it does? I mean, what's the point of double blind studies in the first place, in your opinion? So that people can publish *technically still double blind* studies in papers? Or is it about finding things about reality, regardless of researchers and participants beliefs?
We can say that when the chance of figuring it out is low, then the double blindness protocol is invalidated less. But with longterm puberty blockers study the chance of discovering whether you are in the control group or not is around 100%.
I think what FLWAB means is that in order to check the assumption that a treatment has obvious effects, you have to do a study that doesn't already assume the effects will be obvious.
I think the most interesting angle on this is the question of how one _would_ properly study gender dysphoria treatments.
And this is where I regret the polarization in our discussion. Half the population seems to have concluded that gender affirmation treatments are an absolute right and that it would be horrible to deny any kids as much treatment as their doctor and/or parents can push. The other half thinks any such treatment is self-evidently child abuse and thus totally bans it. So it's hard to see a context in which the kind of 'high quality' study the Cass report asks for can happen in the US.
It looks like Europe is doing better than we are at actually asking the important questions, and hopefully we'll be able to learn from them.
I don't know how one could do a proper study of the psychological aspects of gender dysphoria treatments, but studying the medium-term and long-term physical effects of puberty blockers does not seem undoable. You compare height, weight, bone strength, general health etc. of people who used them and people who are otherwise similar who did not use them. There are some subgroups whose development would also give useful info: People who took puberty blockers for a relatively short period then stopped. People who took them but never followed up with male or female hormones.
Yeah, I would definitely agree, though it's worth noting that nobody is taking these for physical health, so measuring mental health would be a necessary component. The goal is to give doctors/families/kids advice on side effects, not necessarily to prove that these drugs are per se harmful.
Anecdotally, a common story among many adolescents who detransitioned in adulthood is that many of them do not regret the treatment even if they changed their mind. I would love more rigorous data here, but it's possible these treatments have worthwhile benefits on mental health even if there are physical side effects and even if the treatment doesn't stick.
As far as I know, that’s not true. They were initially developed to push premature puberty. The daughter of a family friend got her puberty with 8 and took the blockers for I think 4 years und then stopped using them. She is around 35 now and the last thing that I heard is that she is doing fine.
Yes, I have heard informally that a majority of children taking puberty blockers are undergoing medical therapy to correct an otherwise messed-up puberty. This was cited as serious potential collateral damage from efforts in Texas to ban use of the drugs. I can't offer any sources at the moment.
Surely it would make sense to hold off on broad use of any treatment -- especially a treatment with potentially huge, life-altering consequences -- without the answer to those questions?
If we were asking the question de novo, that would be the appropriate course, I think.
But we don't seem to be. I don't claim deep expertise here but my understanding is that puberty blockers have been in use for decades now, and while the evidence for their benefits is unclear, so is the evidence for their drawbacks. That's well short of a good medical study, but it's also not nothing.
To me, this justifies neither 'full speed ahead' or a complete ban, and from what I can read, the Cass report comes to the same conclusion: we should exercise more caution than we currently are, and should try to do better science. But it falls short of endorsing the sort of complete ban that we're seeing in many states.
Previous usage of puberty blockers is a red herring. It was universally used to delay precocious puberty to the natural timing. This is like arguing that since we have treated diabetes with insulin with tolerable side effects, we can therefore give people arbitrary amounts of insulin and it will never be an issue. But in reality, Hypoglycemia (caused by excess insulin) is very dangerous. In general as a rule-of-thumb, medication used to replicate the healthy natural human state can not be expeected to safely be used to push a human beyond the natural state. That doesn't mean everything unnatural is therefore bad, but it does mean that you have to be increasingly cautious the further you move away from the natural.
Why is precocious puberty considered to be a health problem? The only *possible physical* problems that I see listed are (a) an early growth spurt that *may* cause shorter stature, or (b) *possible* abnormal weight gain in girls. All the rest of the negative effects listed for precocious puberty seem to be emotional and psychological. Not that I want to discount the emotional/psychological component, but couldn't counseling handle that downside better and more safely than puberty blockers?
The NHS website says that puberty is considered precocious if it's before 8 for girls, or before 9 for boys. The idea of going through puberty at 7 is pretty awful to me, never mind even earlier than that. And even then, puberty blockers are only considered "if it's thought early puberty will cause emotional or physical problems, such as short height in adulthood or early periods in girls, which may cause significant distress." So it sounds like even puberty as young as 6 or 7 isn't automatically handled with blockers, although that's just from reading the website, I don't have any first or secondhand personal knowledge.
Mental health is far too complicated and individual for such blanket statements. Outside of transgender stuff, lots of cases of e.g. depression and anxiety respond far better to medication than to any form of counselling.
I'm skeptical that counseling will adequately handle either "my body is changing in ways I don't understand and none of my friends are going through this and I'm a GIANT FREAK", or "I really really want to have sex now but that would be a very bad idea and also massively illegal".
Can't we use Scott's "hairdryer" argument here, just as in the case of using puberty blockers for trans people? On the one hand, sure, we could engage in a lot of counseling and therapy, but on the other hand, why not just fix the problem?
I'm not deeply knowledgable either, but just googled puberty blockers advantage disadvantage, & Mayo Clinic listed these undesirable side effects: Possible effects on growth spurts (there's usually a big growth spurt in the year before puberty, with kids growing several inches), bone growth, bone density & fertiity.
I'm not sure why they're saying "possible effects" rather than "effects": maybe because of what was mentioned in Cass report of poor quality of most studies.
I would be surprised if there were not some substantial downsides to interfering with puberty: a crucial, profound, one-time developmental step. The process is probably very complex with many intertwined processes going on, and later maturational processes dependent on the changes at puberty, including of course the gender-specific hormones. Seems very unlikely to me that we could use one drug to stop the body from making the transition of puberty without interfering with a whole bunch of other things.
>I don't claim deep expertise here but my understanding is that puberty blockers have been in use for decades now, and while the evidence for their benefits is unclear, so is the evidence for their drawbacks.
Much of this evidence is unclear largely due to stonewalling from gender medicine practitioners as described in the report, as well as extraordinarily broad-based and occasionally violent pushback from society against those who bring the issue up.
An expensive lifelong medicalization regime, often including extensive cosmetic surgery, is also a pretty obvious drawback all by itself even if it ends up being necessary. No treatment has _zero_ effects.
One of the obvious advantages of puberty blockers is that they make extensive cosmetic surgery unnecessary or at least much less necessary and less extensive.
It doesn't look good when we have used something for long time and still don't have good evidence that it is efficient and safe. It could be a snake oil or something worse. Most ineffective treatments or therapies are in this category.
What prevents collecting good evidence? When the therapy is ineffective or worse, all such evidence is buried and discarded. Instead poor quality evidence that shows some effectiveness is published.
It is very difficult to conduct human trials up to legal and ethical standards for publication in peer-reviewed journals. And this doesn't seem like an area of medical practice where there is a lot of profit to be made (compared to something like a glp-1 agonist for example). Lack of potential for profitable drugs or treatment makes it less likely for research to be privately supported, and because it is socially controversial, there are probably hurdles to public research funding and other resources.
There is a Slate Star Codex piece which breaks this down in the context of research that Scott Alexander was interested in conducting. You might find it relevant if you don't interact with research or structures like an Institutional Review Board https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/
That's not obvious to me given that the lack of treatment can have equally huge, life-altering consequences. With out clear answers either way I would default to using some mix of the best judgement of the patient, their doctors, and if the patient is a child their legal guardians, although when those people don't all agree it's not obvious how to weight their different opinions.
Can you give some examples of where lack of treatment in teenage years has had detrimental outcomes? Please link to studies. One common assertion is that it lowers the chance of teen suicides, but Cass addresses this...
Are you actually disputing that puberty has life-long, irreversible effects on the human body? I don't think I can be bothered to look for a study either way but under the circumstances I don't think it's really necessary.
To what extent that's "detrimental" is a little more complicated but again I believe pretty strongly that people should have the right to make their own choices about their own bodies- I think the burden of proof falls on the people who want to override their right to do that.
I'm not sure what your point is, but I didn't argue that. Yes, puberty has life-long irreversible effects on the human body. But going back to first-causes — and baring hormonal adjustments from the medical profession — our 23rd chromosome pair is the ultimate determinate of puberty and our biological sex. If one goes through gender reassignment therapy, one may be made to look like the opposite sex, but one will not be able to reproduce your 23rd pair. Considering that we don't really know the long-term health effects of hormonal therapies, it seems like a risky choice to make, especially if one isn't an adult.
I'll ask the question again: can you give some examples (research studies) of where lack of treatment in teenage years has had detrimental outcomes? Otherwise we're arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of pin.
"First, do no harm" is at the heart of medicine. If the great majority of children with gender dysphoria recover naturally with no long-term harm, then it is in fact obvious that defaulting to these extreme treatments is a bad idea.
Right, and while we're making hypotheticals that do not align with the evidence (since the report above went out of its way to *not* be about gender dysphoria), if the great majority of children with gender dysphoria DO NOT "recover naturally with no long-term harm", then it is in fact obvious that making it more difficult to access these treatments is a bad idea.
In the interim, though, it seems reasonable to provide treatment options that the overwhelming majority of people asking for them have said were beneficial, and insist on better research going forward so we can come to a sane conclusion, instead of making decisions based on "no evidence" (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence-is-a-red-flag).
>In the interim, though, it seems reasonable to provide treatment options that the overwhelming majority of people asking for them have said were beneficial,
Except we _don't_ know this, given that the gender clinics stonewalled when the report's authors tried to follow up on the cases.
It is also relevant that the people being "treated" are submerged in a social milieu that insists taking these treatments is not only universally beneficial but is in fact heroic, and where people who desist are treated as pariahs and traitors.
Also, this... A longitudinal study from the Netherlands about gender non-contentedness in teens. Turns out that gender non-contentedness peaks at the beginning of adolescence (age 11) and steadily declines until age 19, at which point it plateaued. The authors found that, overall, 78% of the children never experienced gender non-contentedness (gender dysphoria); 19% experienced gender non-contentedness that declined with age; and 2% experienced gender non-contentedness that increased with age.
By age 25, the share of people who always felt gender non-contentedness was 0.75% for men and 0.5% for women.
Question: given that some interventions are irreversible, shouldn't we wait until individuals reach adulthood before they choose their final gender identity?
One thing in life the provides a bit of an analogue to puberty blockers is training to be an elite athlete, where kids spend a vast amount of time training, miss a bunch of the stuff they'd have done if they weren't training, and are at considerable risk of developing things like repetitive stress injuries. Also female gymnast, skaters and dancers must be slender, and many of them do all kinds of unhealthy things to keep their weight down. I have never enjoyed watching the Olympic events where most participants are quite young because of thoughts about how much they had to miss to get to the Olympics. I expect most of these people as kids fell in love with their sport, and with being awesome at it, at a very young age, and were permitted or encouraged by parents and coaches to begin an elite training regimen. My daughter fell in love with gymnastics at age 5 or so, and if she had proved to be extraordinarily talented by age 9 or so I am sure she would have wanted to commit to elite training. Fortunately she was not a good enough gymnast for that possibility to loom, but if it ever had I don't think I would have let her do it. She was too young to understand the big picture -- what she would have to give up to make it to the top.
That study uses a fairly broad measure of "gender non-contentedness", i.e. answering "sometimes" or "often" to "I wish to be of the opposite sex" on a survey. A DSM-V gender dysphoria diagnosis requires at least six months of meeting at least two out of six specific definitions involving "strong desire" for medical or social transition or "marked incongruence" between internal gender identity and physical sex.
And "sometimes" appears to be doing almost all of the work in this study's data. If you just restrict your definition to people who reply "often" instead of "sometimes", then based on eyeballing Figure 1, the percentage of the sample experiencing gender incongruity drops to 1-2% at age 11, less than half a percentage point at age 13, and maybe 0.1% at age 16 before rising back to about 0.2-0.5% at age 25.
The study's authors explicitly call out their metric as being likely to over-estimate gender non-contentedness:
>In a previous study in youth, gender non-contentedness was assessed in a similar way, but with five instead of three response options; “never,” “rarely,” “sometimes,” “often,” or “always.” In that study, 9% of individuals answered one of the latter four, with 6% of them answering “rarely” (Potter et al., 2021). It can be speculated that a large percentage of individuals in our sample who answered to “sometimes” wish to be of the opposite sex, might have answered “rarely” if this answer option was provided. Therefore, our numbers may overestimate the prevalence of gender non-contentedness. Furthermore, this item is multi-interpretable, as positive endorsement may reflect the participants’ wish to have the opposite sex’s identity, but just as well their gender role characteristics.
Well... that's what the puberty blockers are for. They're supposed to buy time so that the patient has time to figure stuff out, at least in theory. I was on them for three years, then I stopped, and I still went through puberty normally afterwards.
Can you be sure that puberty blockers will have no long-term effects on your health? Sorry, if I seem a bit persnickety about this subject. I'm not an MD, but I did take my med school's embryology course. And it's not just the hormones, but the timing of hormonal signals, that play an important role in human sexual development as well as bone and muscle development. Having said that, my knowledge is forty years out of date. But I was curious about the current state of our knowledge and I queried CoPilot, and different studies seem to be yielding contradictory results. If I were an MD, I would remember that line from the Hippocratic Oath where physicians are told, "first, do no harm".
You
What drugs are commonly used as puberty blockers, and are there any longitudinal studies on their long-term effects?
Copilot
Puberty blockers are medications used to delay the changes of puberty in transgender and gender-diverse youth who have already started puberty. The most commonly used drugs for this purpose are called gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) analogues. Here’s a summary of their possible benefits, side effects, and long-term effects:
Goserelin (Zoladex): This medication suppresses sex hormones (testosterone and estrogen) during puberty.
Histrelin (Supprelin LA): Another commonly used puberty blocker that helps pause physical development.
Leuprolide (Lupron Depot-Ped, Fensolvi): Also falls under the category of GnRH analogues and is used to delay puberty changes.
Now, regarding longitudinal studies on their long-term effects, there is evidence to consider:
A long-term study conducted by the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust in the United Kingdom found that the majority of children who took puberty blockers did not resume puberty after stopping the medication. Contrary to common beliefs, almost all children treated with puberty blockers went on to take cross-sex hormones to permanently alter their sex characteristics. Additionally, participants reported no improvement in psychological well-being, and bone density and normal growth were affected compared to their peers.
Another study suggests that young people who have been on puberty blockers have normal reproductive function after they stop taking them. Data also indicates that puberty blockers do not have long-term effects on bone or metabolic health.
However, a Mayo Clinic preprint study has raised concerns about long-term fertility issues in boys who have taken puberty blockers. The findings suggest that the impacts of these blockers may be permanent, disputing claims that such effects can be reversed.
In summary, while puberty blockers can be beneficial for gender-diverse youth, it’s essential to consider both their short-term benefits and potential long-term effects. As research continues, medical professionals must carefully weigh the risks and benefits when prescribing these medications.
>Can you be sure that puberty blockers will have no long-term effects on your health?
No, but we can be sure that *puberty* will have long-term effects on one's health, including ones that are clearly negative (in particular, there are a lot of serious diseases regarding the uterus and ovaries that only become an issue after female puberty). It seems like forcing trans people to go through that twice should also be included in your risk profile.
You know, I suppose you're right. In fact, being born is so dangerous that we often intentionally delay it! This can come with medical risks of its own, but we decide the benefits outweigh the risks. If only there were some other medical intervention this metaphor could apply to.
Nearly all medications in use fall under this category, in fact. Puberty blockers do too. The point is that "do no harm" should include, y'know, the potential harm from *both* puberty and blockers, rather than just blockers.
Children are not capable of "figuring this stuff out" by definition. They're literally children! If you were lucky and dodged the bullet I'm genuinely happy for you, but that's all you were: lucky.
>Children are not capable of "figuring this stuff out" by definition
So it's a good thing we have puberty blockers to give them more time to figure out whether they want to make the serious medical decision to have hormones irreversibly alter their body in ways that have well documented effects to their health! (A process known as "puberty")
It's not possible to "make the serious medical decision" to not grow up, sorry. We don't live in The Culture yet, and acting as if we do is causing enormous damage to innocent people.
...What's that supposed to mean? Let's not pretend that minors are all just braindead zombies, they are absolutely capable of thinking. And frankly, I wouldn't trust most adults to make decisions for themselves either, but we let them have agency because, well... we don't have a better option.
If there was a better way to diagnose gender dysphoria other than self reporting, I would absolutely support that, but unfortunately there isn't. And again, obviously asking a pre-pubescent child to make a big, life-altering decision like this is too much, which is precisely why puberty blockers are used to give them more time.
Legally, minors are not allowed to do all sorts of things because they're generally considered (under the law) to lack the capacity (due to their age and level of maturity) for things like signing contracts. This principle is based on the idea that minors may not fully understand the implications of the contract or they may be easily influenced.
There are all sorts of things that minors can't do. For instance, Federal law prohibits licensed firearms dealers from selling handguns to anyone under the age of 21 and long guns to anyone under the age of 18.
There are also all sorts of state-level age restrictions about sex between minors (for instance, a fourteen-year-old can't have sex with a twelve-year-old in some jurisdictions). And I think all states maintain that the age of consent for sex with an adult at at least age 16. (Of course, the minor doesn't get in trouble for violating the age of consent statutes, but the adults do — because those laws assume that minors don't have the "capacity" to resist the pressures that adults can put on them.)
Many states restrict abortion to minors without parental consent.
Minors can't vote.
And when the draft was in effect, minors couldn't be drafted for military service, and they could only volunteer with the consent of their parents at age 16. I don't know if this is still allowed.
In general, minors are not allowed to serve time in adult prisons, and their record is expunged upon adulthood because their crimes were perpetrated when they had diminished capacity.
So, State and Federal laws carve out all sorts of special cases for minors. If that's the case, why should we let minors have agency about their sexual identity? There may be good reasons, but I admit I've become more skeptical about the need for this exception.
Minors going on puberty blockers or hormones through a legitimate route are, to my knowledge, all doing so with parental consent with the possible exception of legally emancipated minors. Though I am personally very hesitant about the idea that parental consent should always be necessary, especially for older teens. This is consistent with existing policies on medical treatments.
The most important difference between accessing puberty blockers, and say, the right to own a gun or have sex with an adult, is that there are few to no consequences to simply waiting to do those things later. You can wait until 18 to buy a long gun, without being permanently harmed.
However, someone forced to wait until 18 for hormonal transition will, in the meantime, undergo a process that irreversibly changes their body in a way that is often highly distressing, and may require many additional surgeries to begin to correct. If not allowing minors to buy guns somehow made their fingers atrophy so that they struggle to operate tools in the future, I'd feel much more amendable to letting minors buy guns. Given that drastic changes will occur to someone's body either way, we should at least afford them some agency, even if they are underage.
If by "have agency about their sexual identity", you meant social transition such as names, pronouns, and clothes, I would defend this for the same reason minors should be allowed to have friends, hobbies, and political or religious views of their own: they're not property.
Er... I don't think it's really very controversial that minors on average aren't as smart as adults, and have much less of an understanding of the long-term consequences of their actions. I mean, have you ever met one?
>If there was a better way to diagnose gender dysphoria other than self reporting, I would absolutely support that, but unfortunately there isn't.
"Something must be done, this is something, therefore it must be done" is the sort of thinking that brought us the Iraq war. It is frequently the case that when there's only one course of action available and it's terrible, you're better off not doing anything.
>And again, obviously asking a pre-pubescent child to make a big, life-altering decision like this is too much, which is precisely why puberty blockers are used to give them more time.
I'm glad you at least acknowledge that a pre-pubescent child is incapable of making this decision, which is hugely more than most activists are willing to do... but "more time" is dangerously wrong, because going through puberty is part of what makes you smart enough to realize it's a better idea to go through puberty and live a normal life. (And I note you even said that yourself: if puberty is blocked... isn't the child still pre-pubescent and therefore unqualified?)
...You keep assuming that I was perfectly content with my decision to stop my blockers, but that is far from the actual case.
Most of the reason I didn't go through with HRT was because I'm incapable of making actually consequential decisions. But it was also because I knew there would be a major blowback against the increasing visibility of trans people. And who would have thought, I was completely fucking right.
So I ended up going through puberty, and guess what? I still feel the same way as I did back then, even worse in many regards. No matter how much I try to keep running away from reality, the pain never goes away. And I know that you're never going to understand this, so I don't even know why I'm typing all if this down. ...I'm just venting, I guess.
About gender discontent at the beginning of puberty: I had that. I was revolted by my body hair and fuller hips, which to me just looked like an ugly fat butt, a perpetual scattering of zits, hair that got greasy overnight and, of course, my period. Seemed like a whole new level of nastiness, plus there was now the possibility of mortifying accidents. And I was on the swim team and couldn't figure out how to get a tampon in and if I just didn't show up for practice once a month everybody would know why and the idea of that was intolerably embarrassing.
It didn't occur to me to wish I was male, though. I just wanted my kid body back. But if the idea of gender dysphoria had been in the air, I might have concluded that's what I had.
I have, though, seen kids as young as 6 who do truly seem to have something inborn going on with gender. I remember a boy about that age who insisted on wearing dresses, and truly did have a female presence. I kept forgetting he was a boy. And this was 25 or so years ago, before gender dysphoria was so much a thing. The kid seemed happy. His parents worried about how life was going to work out for him, but had given up fighting with him about his clothing etc., and just enjoyed him as he was.
Oh god, what the hell is this new Substack feature where the whole width of the text column narrows when you select something?? This is seriously annoying. You've got to find some way to turn this off.
(And geez, website makers in general should remember that lots of people are "selection readers"; having selection even just pop a little thing is annoying, let alone *this*!)
I've long been annoyed by how slow this blog loads on desktop browsers, especially when posts have a lot of comments (e.g., the Ivermectin post with over 2200 comments). I finally decided to do something about it, and created a browser extension that reimplements the comments section which speeds up page load considerably. I can finally open the Ivermectin post again!
The source code is available on Github: https://github.com/maksverver/astral-codex-eleven, and you can file bug reports or feature requests there too. If you are especially paranoid, you can unzip the extension before installing; it's implemented in 100% unobfuscated Javascript without frameworks or libraries, so it should be relatively easy to verify it does nothing inappropriate (no ads, click tracking, or uploading of data of any kind).
While the main goal was to be able to load posts with lots of comments in a reasonable amount of time, I also worked in a few other improvements, like keyboard navigation (h/j/k) and more precise comment timestamps.
I wrote a post at the end of the last open thread about why Substack probably won’t fix this. It was a few days into the thread though and nobody commented. It’s not worth posting again but the main argument is that this is not a social media platforms driven by comments unlike reddit. The slow comments affect fewer than 1% (my guess) of the users and nobody is defecting - if we were the situation would fix itself.
Holy crap. I knew substack's code for displaying comments was bad, but I had chocked it up to there maybe being some technical limitation with the sheer amount of text on the page. But the speed at which they load in your extension (and how they don't take a full second to display when tabbing back) proves this is not the case, and makes substack's team just seem incompetent.
I will say that I disagree strongly that profile pictures "add little value"; I personally heavily rely on avatars in identifying who's commenting over just usernames, since my visual memory (and pattern recognition) is much stronger there. I'd certainly appreciate them. (If I have time, I might look into submitting a PR for this, but no promises)
I'd also like the avatars back, but if it's a huge effort to have them AND the lightning quick comment reading, I guess I can live without them. Or maybe just toggle the add-on off if I want to see them again (otherwise bye-bye Unicorn Power: https://pbfcomics.com/comics/nice-shirt/)
I focus more on the names, but I can see recognition value in the avatars.
One thing Substack is clearly doing wrong is setting the avatar to the left of the comment instead of above it. This ends up wasting tons and tons of horizontal space in any case where the commenters are talking to each other instead of doing nothing but responding directly to the post.
FWIW I blasted avatars with Ublock on Firefox, which significantly sped up the comment loading. It was weird at first, and then my correlation engine quickly adapted to seeing just the names. But I do like being able to see them again with this extension.
I don't doubt what you say, but there should be multiple layers of image caching to stop this exact problem. What the HELL has been going on in browsers, or Substack, to cause this?
Oh, it’s a disaster all right. I did it because someone mentioned it a couple of weeks ago in these here comment boxes, that the freaking avatars slow the comments down. So I made custom filter in Ublock that blasted almost, but not all (? - don’t ask! I’m a stranger here meself :) ), avatars. Significant speeding up of comment loading ensued.
I will be trying this. It's the first such fix I've seen that attempts to keep the comments, rather than just turning them off. Thank you for your work!
So my mother has a kidney tumor which may or may not be cancerous. She says that the doctors are quite confident but I've not been entirely convinced by the way my grandfather and uncle cancers were treated, so I'm looking for recommendations on what to read to be able to do at least a sanity check on what her doctors say.
If the imaging shows typical features for a cancer, as opposed to a cyst, they should operate and remove it. Most kidney cancers in an early stage are curable. Depending on the pathological features at time of operation they may recommend a 12 month course of immunotherapy as adjuvant to reduce the risk of recurrence
Guidelines should be the default in treatment decisions, and physicians should be able to justify any decisions that don't follow guidelines--e.g., "This guideline doesn't apply because ___."
Confidence is not a good metric to judge physicians by. For important diagnoses and treatment decisions, it's worthwhile to try to get a second opinion.
I have a question about lgG4 antibodies and food intolerance.
Specifically, I recently made a lgG4 blood test and it showed reactions to almost two dozen foods. I already have celiac disease, and continue to have (much milder) GI issues on a gluten (and lactose) free diet.
Are elevated lgG4 levels merely indicative of exposure, or should I actually eliminate the foods? It would be logistically difficult to do so.
Have you recently switched to a gluten-free, lactose-free diet? I'm asking because for a while after switching it's not unusual to still have reactions to almost anything even if your diet is completely free from gluten (and lactose, in your case). It should eventually calm down - if it doesn't, then you need to go back and ask your doctor. As for elevated IgG4 antibodies, as far as I can tell from a quick search, they can indicate a lot of different things (including being raised in asymptomatic individuals) so I wouldn't rely on them as a tell-tale for things to cut out of your diet. Not as the only indicator, anyway.
Thank you so much for your answer! I switched to GFLF last September and the "getting better" seems to have plateau'd. Your answer made me hopeful that I might still get better, though I need to schedule a follow-up soon anyway. Thanks for the answer about lgG4 antibodies, too! That's about the same conclusion I'd also come to, but I was worried I'd missed something.
Also, if you are sufficiently motivated, you could try an elimination diet - cut out everything that you think might be causing problems for a few weeks and see if the problems subside. Then add things back in, one by one, monitoring the results. I'd trust that kind of test more than the IgG4 blood test.
I suppose the final question is, are you absolutely sure you've eliminated all gluten sources? It's a sneaky molecule.
Lately I've become easily "triggered" and upset about politics that I come across in my day-to-day. I didn't used to be this way - I was more open-minded about views I disagreed with, more intellectually charitable, and less emotionally invested. I am not able to avoid the triggers or situations where they happen (it's about coming across things "in the wild", rather than places, incl. online ones, where I can easily choose to opt out.)
I really don't like being this way, and don't want this vice to become amplified over time. How can I change?
I think listening to another side's framing and believing them has been the most helpful to me. For instance, the war in Ukraine. Both sides use peace, well being, and other utilitarian justifications in their framing, and paint the other side as stupid, evil liars. Anti war people point out: that weapons companies make money and use it to bribe politicians, conscription happens, and lots of civilians die. The other side is worried about 2nd order effects like defending democracy, the liberal International order, strategic stability, bad precedents, etc. You don't have to buy either side, but most news source will paint their opponents as believing "Hey we like killing babies, we want more of that" which is just not true for any political issues. Same for all the issues of the day: DEI, Israel, abortion, inflation, gun control, climate change, healthcare, immigration, etc.
"Knowing a man well never leads to hate and almost always leads to love."
I'm sorry that I don't have any real answers. I'm dealing with something similar, and haven't gotten rid of it, but here's some stuff that might help.
Maybe try looking into Zen or some other form of Buddhism? This sounds like textbook "attachment", where encountering a stimulus causes a series of reactions in your mind, which end in suffering.
Something that jumped out at me, was your use of the word "vice". That makes me worry that you're reinforcing this by positing a component of voluntariness that may not be warranted. (How good are you at not thinking of elephants?) Don't blame yourself like that, if for no other reason than that it might make the problem worse. Instead, I'd suggest trying to relax through it. Try to notice the process happening as quickly as you can, and then step back (inside) and watch what happens. Paying attention to your thoughts, breathing, and pulse. Find the "Litany against Fear" from the book "Dune", and do that, but with the upsetness. Understand the process, and slowly dissolve it. Get to a place where you can laugh at yourself and at the process.
Is it just one aspect of politics that you find triggering you, or many?
Because there's no point getting worked up about something you can't do anything about, and you can't really do anything about most political issues. You might be able to do something useful, at least on a local scale, regarding *one* issue. But you'd have to focus on it, and not get distracted by all the stupid people who are wrong about everything else.
So, maybe pick one political issue where you're going to make a difference, donating your time and/or money, and speaking on behalf of the cause you believe in. Everything else, is someone else's problem. There are lots of good people out there, some of whom will have chosen as their One Thing the very thing the clueless dolt in front of you is wrong about, and you've got to leave it to them while you go about your One Thing.
And when you're talking to other people about that thing, if they're the stupid ones who are wrong about it, the *only* way you can accomplish anything is to treat them with courtesy and respect and even then you're probably going to have to settle for planting the seed of an idea that might change their mind in a few months. But because you're actually there to *do something* rather than just venting your rage, you're going to suck it up and fake courtesy and respect while you make your case calmly, rationally, and hopefully persuasively. Eventually, you'll find that you aren't faking it any more.
Alternately, you might decide that you can't do anything about *any* of this. In which case, you treat politics the way you treat the weather - an arbitrary, impersonal thing you can't hope to control and can barely forecast. Do you get triggered by bad weather, directing emotional outbursts at the Storm God or the TV weatherman? Or do you go on with your life, and help your family, friends, and neighbors muddle through the storm as best you can?
Hard to answer without more details about what types of things are causing this and what you are feeling?
For instance is your relative "lack of charity" more of an emotional response but your rational brain is giving more charity to the problematic views?
Or is your rational brain saying "these views are abhorrent and have no merit" and you want to change your rational brain.
If it's the later it's hard to understand why you would want to change that.
Like if the views actually have no merit in your brain's evaluation why would you want yourself to believe that they do have merit.
If it's the former there might be a few things you should keep in mind:
1. Read: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/ and understand that the views that happen to percolate to your attention may do so because of their abhorrence so that the sample "views you are exposed to" is not a representative of "views people have" so you need not dispair for the sake of humanity.
2. Remember that sometimes bad actors (like the Russian government) might intentionally feed the toksoplasma for various reasons
3. Remember that lots of people say abhorrent things just to signal support with a side and not because they believe them. Like people who say "we should kill all the rich people" don't really mean that, usually. Like they wouldn't shoot a guy just because they happened to win the lottery.
4. exposure therapy. continuously seek out obhorent views until you become numb to the emotional impact
I find asking myself “what am I supposed to do about it?” really helps. Sometimes the answer is a something, like calling my congresscreature, or giving money to a cause. But for the most part… nothing. Then, why getting upset about it.
I don't know, I mostly grew out of this kind of thing as I got older. I don't know whether it's just age, or having closer-to-home things to worry about, or whether all my self-talk about not getting worked up about dumb political things eventually paid off.
Or maybe it's just the experience of seeing plenty of dumb political moments and fashions come and go with no real effect on my life increases my confidence that the next time I see some idiots saying something stupid it probably won't massively effect me either.
One thing I like to remind myself sometimes is that over the whole course of my life, roughly half of the elections will be won by the bunch of jerks that I hate more, and the other half of the elections will be won by the bunch of jerks that I hate less, that this has been going on for a long time, and that it mostly evens itself out.
This is very close to my experience. I also chock it up to how often I watch people on either/all sides make a complete fool of themselves. Nowadays they become memes and get repeated thousands of times by their ideological enemies. Like some guy with no sleeves and a misspelled sign or some purple hair screaming nonsense. I'm like - "Nope, Not me!"
...Until that stops happening, and people start getting killed. Even I'm not naive enough to think that this charade of a status quo is going to last forever. Once people realize that democracy is the only thing stopping them from creating their ideal society, it's all over.
Still not my problem, of course. It's the people who survive who are going to suffer for their ambition.
I've gone back and forth on this axis over the last decade or so. So I obviously haven't solved the problem, but some things that have helped me improve include:
- Finding context. Either looking at "more important issues" like ex. who cares about the outcome of <this issue> honestly, there's a horrible famine in Sudan, this thing that's making me mad doesn't matter. Only works if you aren't getting mad about how little people care about important issues.
- Focusing on my personal life and family and friends. Assuming the political issue in question doesn't directly impact you, reminding myself of the important and meaningful parts of my own life and letting those distract me is helpful.
- Depending on how charitable you feel, reframing the people annoying you as either objects of sympathy - "Wow that thing they are saying is awful but they seem uneducated and exposed to bad influences. It's so sad they are like that." or as objects of derision - "Wow it is so not worth my time to engage with such an inbecile." Both result in me being able to step back from engaging/caring about the situation.
- Any form of irony, nihilism, and/or just plain laughing at the dark humor of the world that you find relatable. If you can laugh at yourself getting worked up that's great, if you can laugh at the situation for being so terrible, that's partial, and if you can laugh at the source of the frustration that at least let's the one off go.
- I read a lot, and fiction or nonfiction that covers the topics or themes you find enraging I find helps restore the charitable and open minded focus by putting me in the learning/listening mindset vs. the discussing/debating one.
YMMV on all of these, but as a fellow afflicted person, good luck!
There’s a very helpful book called “stop fixing yourself” which says, instead of trying to change yourself, try to understand the motives and reasons for the behavior you want to change. It’s been helpful for me.
When you think about tolerance as a cultural virtue, to what extent does it include tolerating intolerance in others?
For instance within a single country, if minor ethnic group A doesn’t tolerate people of major ethnic group B, is it more in line with tolerance as a virtue for group B to tolerate group A’s intolerance or to seek to enforce country-wide tolerance through legislation?
Edit: To clarify, group A’s intolerance doesn’t extend to an explicit, doctrinal call to violence against group B.
I read an article once called "Dissolving the paradox of tolerance". I can't find the article any more. It seems like the sort of thing that Scott would have written but apparently he didn't.
Anyway the argument was that the supposed paradox comes mostly from the vagueness of the word "tolerance". To be "intolerant" of someone is an extremely broad spectrum from "herd them into death camps", through "actively and publically shun them" to "think they're basically alright but you wouldn't want your sister to marry one". Once you start being more specific about what you mean about "be intolerant", most of the paradoxical examples go away.
1. Group A is intolerant of Group B, should we tolerate Group A? Stupid question, be more specific.
2. Group A advocates throwing Group B off rooftops, is it okay if we don't invite Group A to our cocktail parties? Yes.
3. Group A refuses to invite Group B to their cocktail parties, is it okay if we throw Group A off a rooftop? No.
For the most part the paradox goes away once you stop using vague terms.
For anyone else who, like me, was ignorant enough not to have known that there was an official “Paradox of Tolerance” (associated with Karl Popper), in Popper’s words it starts like this:
“Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”
Popper goes on to say that the tolerant should still let the intolerant spout intolerance until they get irrational about it (such as denouncing all argument), which sounds good but hard to objectively evaluate.
Since I’m not aware of any serious advocates for unlimited tolerance, I’m not too concerned about the paradox specifically (I agree with Popper that unlimited tolerance sounds bad). I’m just trying to understand where other people draw the line and what’s reasonable to expect of a society.
The full original quote (which, should be noted, is a footnote in a text talking about something else and not a fully developed treatise) goes:
"Less well known [than other paradoxes] is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
The discriminant is not that the other group is being irrational -- there's hardly a political, ideological, religious, or ethical group that would be worthy of tolerance otherwise -- but resort to violence over argument, which seems to be how "intolerance" is actually defined in this context. At this point there isn't much of a paradox left: of course you cannot argue with someone who has decided not to take part in any argument, and of course when someone is shooting at you there is little you can do but shoot back.
>The discriminant is not that the other group is being irrational -- there's hardly a political, ideological, religious, or ethical group that would be worthy of tolerance otherwise -- but resort to violence over argument, which seems to be how "intolerance" is actually defined in this context.
You might think that intolerance just boils down to violence, but I don’t think that’s exactly what he said and I don’t think most people see intolerance that way. If a blue person won’t hire a purple person because blue people think purple people are barely people at all, and blue people dismiss any rational argument from purple people to the contrary, that would be considered intolerant by most folks because it is irrational, not violent. If a red teacher won’t let a green student in his classroom because he believes all green students are unclean even though they aren’t, that’s irrational and widely considered intolerant. Are you saying Popper believes this behavior should be tolerated because it doesn’t involve violence? I think based on what he said he thinks it might be ethical to suppress these behaviors if public opinion and rational argument aren’t enough to keep them in check.
> I’m just trying to understand where other people draw the line and what’s reasonable to expect of a society.
Part of the problem is that there's no way to draw a bright line, it's just a continual spectrum. And it doesn't help either that everyone's always trying to work the refs and get themselves treated more favorably and the other side less favorably while ignoring the meta level.
I see your point, but isn’t saying minor groups should be punished less for intolerance kind of like saying weaklings should be punished less for assault and battery?
I don't think you're necessarily obligated to find out if a given member of Group A happens to hold a rare sub-belief that the majority doesn't share. The whole point of group identification is as a shorthand for the things the group supports.
If someone self-identifies as a Nazi, I probably won't be interested in talking to them further to find out if they actually support killing Jews or if they just want to rebuild the German Empire.
(You do, however, have an obligation to know if the thing that "everyone in group A believes" is actually a majority or not.)
As an absolute minimum, you should tolerate people who are, let's say, half as tolerant as you. That is basically compensation for your biases, where you see your own actions as more reasonable and justified than the actions of others.
On the opposite extreme, tolerating physical attacks is basically a suicide pact. And when you start criticizing people who defend themselves from physical attacks for being insufficiently tolerant, then you are basically cheering for the baddies.
Problem is, in real life this often gets very complicated, because people act in groups, so (1) you always get some people doing the verbal intolerance and other people doing the physical violence, and it's quite difficult to stop the violent ones when all the onlookers are applauding for them, and (2) the victims of physical attacks often extend their definition of "defense" to include attacking random people from the other group.
> As an absolute minimum, you should tolerate people who are, let's say, half as tolerant as you. That is basically compensation for your biases, where you see your own actions as more reasonable and justified than the actions of others.
The simple idea behind this, of tolerating some greater level of perceived intolerance to compensate for your own inevitable biases, seems like a great place to start.
I have fallen on: tolerate _talk_ about intolerance completely. People are allowed to advocate for intolerance, express preference for intolerance, etc. But do not tolerate actions of intolerance. Actions must follow the law but speech can be anything. This is because it is an incredibly important norm to allow people to express opinions. When you disallow peaceful expression of opinions, you get back to people attempting force and violence. I'd much rather have the (admittedly odious) pressure release valve of intolerant speech.
The correct answer is to treat all people equally regardless of their ethnic group membership and/or the size of those ethnic groups.
If it's illegal for an A to do (intolerant act) towards B, then it needs to be equally illegal for B to do it to A; this includes not just technical legal equality but also the odds of being prosecuted, severity of sentencing, et cetera, and in an ideal world would also include the amount of social opprobrium received although one recognizes that's impossible to enforce but can be encouraged via the culture. Anything else simply creates a caste system, which is a) flatly unjust and b) will eventually explode with far worse consequences than equal treatment would have.
In the United States, we have the legal concept of protected groups or protected classes which is where maybe the most substantial thinking about this that I am familiar with. And we do periodically change the list of protected groups.
Taking that as a starting point, one principle becomes clearer to me: this is an area where the law has to be kept up with evolving social practices and classes of people. So any solution (in my United States framework) would still involve periodic public debate about adding or removing protected classes, like our current system.
My impression of the United States approach to protected classes does emphasize identifying actual harms faced by members of protected classes and potential protected classes when making that designation. Unfortunately I only have an interested layperson's knowledge of the topic and I don't have any background reading ready at hand to offer.
Protected classes aren't "black" or "white," (your position within the classes) they're "black or white" (the class itself). This is a common misconception and I don't know how it got started as everyone is clearly stated to be equal before the law by every civil rights act ever enacted.
They may be equally protected on paper, but the chances of getting fired for tweeting "kill all whites" are probably very small. So people are referring to how the law works in practice, not in theory.
The laws are written to be applied equally, and the courts usually do so. Employers have the latitude to do things differently. Nobody can deny that they have the arbitrary power to ruin people's lives with no recourse to fairness, but that can't be confused with civil rights legislation.
As I can comprehend the intent of this aspect of American law, a protected class begins when one or more constituencies within the class experience enough intolerance to warrant protection. Then the class is named and enshrined in law as protected.
At that point, even constituencies within the class that did not historically experience intolerance are entitled to certain protections in American law. However it should not be surprising or an argument against the process or theory that the groups experiencing the most active protection under the law are the ones that have historically experienced intolerance, rather than groups whose collective experience would not generally warrant being protected as a class.
Understanding the power dynamics is useful for considering this scenario, although simply knowing more about power situation won't answer the question.
In other words, it is relevant to know what the relative power or status is between the two groups. It is particularly important to know whether your Group A has social advantages or disadvantages when compared to Group B in this society. Knowing that information doesn't resolve the dilemma, but it would help frame the stakes.
Probably this question as framed is too complex to answer without developing the scenario more.
The category of examples that come to mind for me involve religious communities with strict criteria for membership where some people might never be allowed based on their identity. Or there might be practices like banishment, excommunication, or shunning that are used to move people from being accepted Group A to being part of the un-tolerated Group B.
"society", as you use it here, is a dangerous overgeneralization. Every person moves in multiple circles in multiple dimensions. All it requires to harm someone through intolerance is a brief period of dominance in one of those circles or dimensions, and all it requires to make it a lasting harm is to find ways to prevent the other circles and dimensions from counterbalancing it.
I don't understand how it is an over-generalization or dangerous. The original prompt uses the term "country" and that naturally tends to lead to discussion about the legal framework of that hypothetical country. My use of the word society is only a little different from country, so I would suggest just reading "country" in my post to keep it aligned with the original prompt.
I don't see why it's a bad thing or dangerous to consider this within the scope of a single country. Or for that matter any self-described society that has laws or social mores. It's true people can be in multiple circles at once -- I would only say in reply that we could complexify the scenario by adding more of those circles if that seems more useful to you.
Is your point along the same lines as the idea of intersectionality? In other words, it is dangerous not to consider all intersecting social identities when considering this question?
Whether using "country", "circle", or "society", these social arrangements and their rules seem central to discussing intolerance. I don't know how it could be done otherwise.
I think that "whether your Group A has social advantages or disadvantages when compared to Group B in this society" is far too simplistic, and likely to lead to generalizations that erase certain types of problems from the discourse.
You bring up "intersectionality", and I think what's happened to that term in the last 20-30 years is a great example. It's gone from meaning that we need to look harder, to creating Venn diagrams, to justifying hierarchical rankings. I think an adversarial take on the concept would prove more useful: group A may have less formal power in area X than group B, but what other resources can someone from group A use to screw over someone from group B? Are there areas in which they have more power, what other groups are they a member of, are there other factions in society, are there outside powers that can be brought into play, is it possible to change the playing field somehow? Can you just walk up and stab them?
There's this urge to boil individuals down to a number, and collect the numbers into a graph, and then collapse the graph into a single number for all of society. But life's a lot messier than that.
I suggested reverting to the original "country" instead of my "society". I get the impression that you are very vested in using words that best describe the topic you are discussing.
I don't see the terminology I've selected as inevitably leading towards collapsing the graph to a single number for all society, but I'd be game if you have another approach and some other words for discussing this.
>In other words, it is relevant to know what the relative power or status is between the two groups.
I originally described the two groups as “minor ethnic group A” and “major ethnic group B” in an effort to illustrate that B is larger/more powerful than A.
Thanks. I initially understood that you meant that Group B was larger than Group A, but it wasn't clear that you meant that Group B also had greater power or status. With this clarification in mind, I am still coming up with examples like relatively small religious communities that are somewhat geographically based. I'm also trying to think of other categories of examples.
Depends heavily on what we're talking about when we say tolerance/intolerance. Does group A simply harbor a general dislike towards group B, e.g. they prefer not to mingle with members of group B? Then I think this is potentially concerning and perhaps should be addressed culturally/socially, but not necessarily legislatively. Are members of group A actively physically assaulting members of group B, engaging in discriminatory business practices against them, etc.? Then yes, that should be dealt with legally.
Thanks for your perspective. To clarify, group A’s intolerance doesn’t extend to an explicit, doctrinal call to violence against group B. I think most people agree that this can’t be tolerated within a functional society. Let’s just say group A thinks group B’s way of life is inherently immoral, unjust, fundamentally flawed.
Well, you can't really do anything legally about someone's thoughts/feelings, so it really depends on how that intolerance is materially expressed: hate speech, discriminative hiring practices, social stigma against in-group members who hang out with group B, etc.
> you can't really do anything legally about someone's thoughts/feelings
a) Sure you can! Depends on the legal system perhaps, but in America it's quite possible.
b) The legal cause of action can be different than the real cause of action. That is, if you identify wrongthink, then just find some other legal excuse to go after the person.
c) Really, why restrict yourself to "legal" means? Just don't get caught.
What I mean is you can't directly do anything about it. You can't just charge someone for "having the wrong thoughts"; at the very least, they need to say something or do something that you can charge them for.
Can this be exploited? Sure. But I don't think that's relevant to what we're talking about here, which is about "tolerance as virtue", i.e. what we believe, ideally, *should* be done.
"Creating a hostile environment" seems to work, depending on the exact type of wrongthink? Even if the person had only expressed the wrongthink outside of the environment in question.
And yeah, sorry, this is a tangent, and not a helpful one. I don't have much to say about main issue, at least not rationally. My PTSD thinks we should be tolerant of everyone except people who advocate for intolerance, who should be slowly tortured to death in public in ways that will give children nightmares 500 years from now. But I don't think my PTSD is always a reliable guide to ethical behavior; somehow it usually ends up advocating for schemes that would kill off everyone in the world.
Can someone tell me how voting for the ACX Book Review contest works? Will it just be based on the likes that each review post gets? Or is there some sort of jury, or a ranked voting system? I tried looking up how it was last year, but found Substack quite difficult to navigate.
During the initial round of voting, Scott will post a series of giant Google docs with all the submissions typed up together. There will be a Google form where you select a book review from a drop-down menu and rate it from 1 to 10. You don't have to rate every single book review.
When initial voting is done, Scott calculates the average score of each one. Any review above a certain cutoff score becomes a finalist and gets posted as its own post. (The cutoff score in past years has been ~7 or 8 out of 10.)
After all the finalists have been posted, (this usually takes several months) then Scott posts another Google form where you vote for your top choices out of the finalists.
I think the first year review contest was just a single vote by readers (in a google form) for whichever review you liked the most and the second year (last year) allowed you to vote for multiple reviews. I strongly doubt there would be any kind of jury but who knows what our illustrious host will decide this time
I get up very early and get to the gym before sunrise. If I have ADHD medication upon waking up, it revs me up and I'm eager to start exercising. Caffeine works about half as well for these purposes.
If I don't have any stimulants, it's a struggle. Things improve as I start the workout, and then things really improve once the sun rises and I finish my workout. My mid-morning, I'm wide awake.
So I'm clearly not dependent on stimulants to feel alert during the day; it seems like a pre-sunrise issue. I've tried cold showers and artificial sunlight lamps, but they seem only marginally helpful. Any tips?
Is this something you only experience when waking up before dawn? It could be sleep inertia or a similar phenomenon that naturally fades as your body wakes up.
You could try something like nighttime bupriopion? The only study google is giving me is this collection of case studies (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8020706/), but I swear I also read about a larger study a few years ago.
Our school has recently had chicken pox, scarlet fever, whooping cough and covid all doing the rounds in the same couple of weeks! I was surprised about the chicken pox as it's a middle school (aged 9-13) and I had assumed virtually all children would have had it by that age.
"[T]here could be an increase in the rate of shingles in adults over time, which would make the vaccine programme not cost-effective.
"This is because, if chickenpox in children disappears as a result of a vaccine programme, adults would no longer have their immunity boosted by exposure to their chickenpox-suffering children and grandchildren and would be more likely to get shingles. Put simply, the conclusion of the previous review was that it would not be cost-effective for the NHS to immunise children against chickenpox."
I find that unconvincing. There is a shingles vaccine now. Why not vaccinate against chicken pox in childhood and then against shingles for the over-50 crowd? Letting kids get sick (and my case of chicken pox at age 9 was miserable) just so Grandma's immune system can get a boost seems like a weak argument.
They did say "cost-effective", so presumably that's what convinced them. It might be possible to do all the vaccinations you want, but is it cost-effective? Maybe that cash should be spent on bed-nets.
But the objection is to a temporary effect. If you vaccinate everyone against chickenpox, that might aggravate shingles in the elderly people of today. But it will flat-out prevent shingles in the elderly people of the future; how could this possibly fail to be cost-effective?
I thought the objection was: right now, the waves of chicken pox in young people are providing old people with free boosts to the partial immunity from their shingles vaccines. But if we vaccinate the young people against chicken pox, there won't be as many waves of the disease going around, and old people won't be as protected against shingles, and so the next time the disease goes through the country, they'll have worse cases.
Fwiw, I can’t imagine having two newborns at the same time and still produce the volume you produce. I steal all my time in the very early hours and between meetings.
Does orbital bombardment still make sense as a potential weapons systems? A couple years ago we discussed Project Thor on here (briefly, a satellite or launch system in orbit that would drop tungsten rods onto targets on Earth). People argued that Project Thor is not very realistic because you can't just leave a very expensive, very valuable weapons system sort of hanging around in orbit where anyone could attack or hack it. I agree with that argument.
But how about simply launching the tungsten rods as missiles? A land-based system sends the rods into orbit, likely via SpaceX. They maneuver into position and then fall onto the target back on Earth. It would undoubtedly be slower & more expensive than our existing missile capability. But would the drop from orbit offer enhanced damage against dug-in targets? I'm particularly thinking of Iran's underground nuclear facilities here. A tungsten rod from orbit might not be better than a nuclear weapon, but it does avoid nuclear weapon usage, and might just obliterate a ground-based target while being extremely difficult to defend against....
When I discussed this with the CEO of a NASA contractor that I know, he said he thought SpaceX had the right technical skillset to not just launch the rods, but also guide them back to Earth- he said their guidance systems for re-entry are top notch. The original issue with this idea was just cost, but SpaceX has also greatly reduced the cost-to-launch
Something like this, but taboo the word "orbit" except insofar as it appears in the word 'suborbital". At the time your weapon hits the target, it will be on a suborbital trajectory - by definition, because an orbital trajectory doesn't impact the surface. So just wait until you know what and where the target is, and then use your rocket to launch the payload onto a suborbital trajectory directly from your launch site to the target. There's no advantage to actually putting the thing in orbit here; that just requires adding another 500 m/s or so of velocity to circularize and then subtracting 500 m/s or so when you want to deorbit, leaving you exactly where you were before but having squandered a bunch of rocket fuel and propulsion hardware.
Basically, you're talking about an ICBM with a kinetic-energy warhead rather than a thermonuclear one. And if you go the SpaceX route, maybe an ICBM with a reusable first stage (but a more cumbersome launch procedure). People have proposed non-nuclear ICBMs before; with modern precision guidance it isn't a completely ridiculous idead.
It's never been done, for two reasons. First, ICBMs are expensive, and nobody has yet been willing to pay that price for delivering a mere few tons of TNT equivalent to a target. And second, because "everybody knows" ICBMs are only cost-effective with nuclear warheads, everybody tends to assume that any ICBM launched in wartime will be nuclear. And they might not wait to confirm that before nuking you in return.
Both of these will also apply to a hypothetical orbital or fractional-orbital system. If boosters get cheap enough, people might reconsider the suborbital version, but there's still no reason to go all the way to orbit and back.
Imagine, instead of just launching 1 large tungsten rod, you launch say a dozen or more tungsten artillery shells with their own guidance systems- maybe encased like a bullet to survive re-entry. You could launch those at ground targets, but also naval ones- say, one overly aggressive Asian nation trying to blockade an island 90 miles off their coast..... Would be impossible to defend against those falling from the sky
> There's no advantage to actually putting the thing in orbit here; that just requires adding another 500 m/s or so of velocity to circularize and then subtracting 500 m/s or so when you want to deorbit, leaving you exactly where you were before but having squandered a bunch of rocket fuel and propulsion hardware
I guess the advantage would be if you have enough of them in orbit that you'd have one passing overhead any given target in a short timeframe, so you could blow up anything you like with fifteen minutes' notice or something.
Although even then I guess you might as well use an explosive warhead while you're at it.
You need a *lot* of warheads in orbit to always have one fifteen minutes out from an arbitrary target. But having one warhead on one missile on the ground, allows you to engage any target in half an hour or so.
One problem: to a foreign observer, launching a tungsten rod on an ICBM looks a lot like launching a nuke on an ICBM. You don't want to start a nuclear war through a misunderstanding.
Yes and no; my understanding is that you can very quickly differentiate a missile whose intent is to arc back down to a target, and a mission into space.
Of course, throwing a bunch of instant-pounding rods into orbit to threaten any and every country is going to ruffle some feathers.
Fractional orbital bombardment systems are a thing, never particularly common but everybody knows the concept. If anyone launches a payload into low orbit in wartime, particularly one where the first orbit passes over the enemy's capital or whatnot, it's going to be presumed a nuclear warhead until proven otherwise.
If anybody launches a payload into low orbit in peacetime, lots of people are going to be curious about what it's for, some of them are going to be suspiciously curious as a matter of principle, and their spies and analysts will probably figure it out before you get around to starting a war.
I read an interesting substack a year ago about how the SpaceX Starship would deliver about as many Joule/$ as non-nuclear B52s do today, but now I can't seem to find it.
Cost would still be a gigantic issue; you can send explosives on an ICBM to accomplish the same thing.
On the fundamentals, you can look at the potential energy of an object in space (you can't just use mgh, because g is not constant over the distances involved, but this is a well-understood question) and assume that's how much energy you'll release on impact. Then you ask how much energy you want to release on impact and that will tell you the size of the rod you need. Then you can ask how much it will cost to launch that rod.
At orbital-reentry velocity, or ICBM velocity, the kinetic energy of an inert mass is at least a factor of five greater than the detonation energy of an equal mass of high explosives. And it's rare for anyone to build a warhead that's more than 50% explosives.
So if you're going to put a "warhead" on an orbital or ICBM-class rocket, there's no point in putting anything less than nuclear explosives inside. Conventional explosives would add maybe 10% to the yield, all else being equal, but all else won't be equal - the low density of explosives compared to steel will make the warhead bigger, so more drag and it will be moving slower when it hits, which will cost you more than 10% of the yield.
Just make it out of the densest material you can find, and make it as long and skinny and streamlined as you can manage to keep stable. Against some targets, you'll prefer a cannister that dispenses lots of heavy metal darts shortly before impact.
If you're willing to go nuclear, and you can afford to go nuclear, that will be more destructive still so just focus on efficiently packaging your H-bombs for re-entry.
You are correct! My back-of-the-envelope calculation using orbital velocity of 7 km/s yields 24.5 MJ/kg of kinetic energy (mV²/2), while I found a figure of 5 MJ/kg for high explosives. Of course the projectile will not hit the ground at the orbital velocity, but the numbers are at least in the ballpark.
Substack ate my reply, try again. The Reddit thread was confusing: they all talk about terminal velocity = escape velocity, but it makes no sense to me. For one, they are ignoring the atmosphere. And I don’t see how it applies to a projectile launched from a few 100s km away.
I think the argument is that a tungsten rod dropped from space would have superior firepower to existing non-nuclear weapons, and greater penetration against hardened underground targets. Specifically, in this case, Iran's nuclear facilities which are reportedly underneath a mountain
There would be something like that, but it would spread out quickly - the rough-and-ready metric that I used early seems to imply that a massive 10m-long rod could penetrate something like 70m. The deepest bunkers can be hundreds of metres underground, so any shockwave would have to pass through tens to hundreds of metres of rock and concrete to do any damage.
I have my doubts that a rod could possibly penetrate all that deeply and do all that much damage when it gets there. A concrete bunker sure, but a deeply buried facility? I don't know anything about the Iranian facility but Cheyenne Mountain in the US is beneath 600m of granite and there's no reason why the Iranians couldn't dig something similar. Even if you use a whole SpaceX starship to launch a single rod it can't have more than about 8 kT of kinetic energy (minus atmospheric losses, which would be significant) and that's a lot, but it's not "blow up a whole mountain" type energy.
𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗴𝗶𝗰 𝗼𝗯𝗷𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗹𝗶𝗸𝗲𝗹𝘆 𝘁𝗼 𝗶𝗺𝗽𝗼𝘀𝗲 𝘀𝗵𝗮𝗿𝗽 𝗹𝗶𝗺𝗶𝘁𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗮𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝘁𝗼 𝘂𝘀𝗲 𝗼𝗿𝗯𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗹 𝗳𝗶𝗿𝗲𝗽𝗼𝘄𝗲𝗿 if the goal is to control the planet or even to be able to meaningfully extract resources from it. Blasting a world into uninhabitability using nuclear munitions or even just de-orbiting large rocks may be strategically unacceptable.
[...]
𝗧𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗻 𝘁𝗶𝗲𝘀 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘀𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗱 𝗽𝗼𝗶𝗻𝘁, 𝘄𝗵𝗶𝗰𝗵 𝗶𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗹𝗶𝗺𝗶𝘁𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗳𝗶𝗿𝗲𝗽𝗼𝘄𝗲𝗿 𝗮𝗴𝗮𝗶𝗻𝘀𝘁 𝗶𝗻𝗳𝗮𝗻𝘁𝗿𝘆 𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗰𝗲𝘀 𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗰𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗰𝗲𝗮𝗹𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁. How much firepower do you need to remove deeply entrenched infantry? 𝗔 𝗹𝗼𝘁, 𝗶𝘁 𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗻𝘀 𝗼𝘂𝘁. Stephen Biddle (you may recall him) wrote a piece in 𝘍𝘰𝘳𝘦𝘪𝘨𝘯 𝘈𝘧𝘧𝘢𝘪𝘳𝘴 (82.2, 2003), “Afghanistan and the Future of Warfare” where he laid out some statistics for firepower against entrenched infantry. He noted, for instance that “French defenses at Verdun in 1916 endured a two-day German artillery barrage equal to about 1,200 tons of explosives — in nuclear parlance more than a kiloton, or more explosive power than the w48 𝙩𝙖𝙘𝙩𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙡 𝙣𝙪𝙘𝙡𝙚𝙖𝙧 𝙬𝙖𝙧𝙝𝙚𝙖𝙙 — yet enough of the entrenched defenders survived this maelstrom to halt the German assault [emphasis mine].” And “On July 18, 1944… [the allies] deposited… 𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝗻 𝟴 𝗸𝗶𝗹𝗼𝘁𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗳𝗶𝗿𝗲𝗽𝗼𝘄𝗲𝗿 — on just seven kilometers of German frontage 𝗶𝗻 𝗹𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗿𝗲𝗲 𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗿𝘀 [emphasis again mine].” In both cases, there were enough defenders left not merely to fight, 𝙗𝙪𝙩 𝙩𝙤 𝙖𝙘𝙩𝙪𝙖𝙡𝙡𝙮 𝙬𝙞𝙣 𝙗𝙤𝙩𝙝 𝙗𝙖𝙩𝙩𝙡𝙚𝙨. Nor is this merely a feature of old dumb-bombs; in Afghanistan, Biddle notes, “One dug-in al Qaeda command-post was found surrounded by no fewer than five 2,000-pound bomb craters. Still, its garrison survived and resisted until overrun.” 𝗜𝗻 𝘀𝗵𝗼𝗿𝘁, 𝗶𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝗽𝗼𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗶𝗻𝗳𝗮𝗻𝘁𝗿𝘆 – 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗼𝗻𝗹𝘆 𝙞𝙢𝙥𝙧𝙤𝙫𝙞𝙨𝙚𝙙 𝙛𝙞𝙚𝙡𝙙-𝙛𝙤𝙧𝙩𝙞𝙛𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙨 – 𝘁𝗼 𝘀𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗿𝗴𝘆 𝗱𝗲𝗹𝗶𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆 𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗹𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗹 𝗼𝗳 𝙩𝙖𝙘𝙩𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙡 𝙣𝙪𝙘𝙡𝙚𝙖𝙧 𝙮𝙞𝙚𝙡𝙙𝙨 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗼𝗻𝗹𝘆 𝘀𝘂𝗿𝘃𝗶𝘃𝗲, 𝗯𝘂𝘁 𝗯𝗲 𝙛𝙞𝙜𝙝𝙩𝙖𝙗𝙡𝙚 𝗮𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗼𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿 𝗲𝗻𝗱.
------
(All emphasis is original. I would emphasize that, for an attacking force that itself inhabits the same planet being attacked, rendering the planet uninhabitable is 𝘨𝘶𝘢𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘦𝘥 to be strategically unacceptable.)
That makes absolutely no sense. They do not have superior firepower in proportion to their cost, which is the only way that would matter, and dropping anything that affected facilities underneath a mountain would have catastrophic effects in most of the world; it would be the worst war crime ever committed, and whoever was responsible would get wiped out by a coalition of everyone else in the world.
I don't see why that would be. You have no fallout; possibly a lot of the energy is even released underground; the total energy of the explosion is not more than that released by a full load of B52 (conventional) bombs.
I don't like the idea because it's an explicit militarization of space without any really huge gain in capabilities. But I don't think the strikes would amount to some unprecedented crime against humanity.
> The above ground mass of Mt Everest is estimated at 357 trillion pounds or 1.619×10^14 kg. To melt 1 kg of granite starting from 200 C costs about 1.3 MJ. 20 Gigatons TNT is 8.4×10^13 MJ. So, no, even with 100% efficiency, such a bomb is simply not large enough to accomplish the task. It is a factor ten too small at least.
> This is ignoring of course, that most of the energy of such a bomb would be directed upwards, through the Earth’s atmosphere, as a huge pulse of thermal radiation, and would vanish uselessly into space. The energy would not be deposited directly downwards into the rock, where it needs to go, should you, for some unimaginably crazy reason, actually wish to destroy Mt. Everest.
> In comparison to what is needed to destroy mountains, the biggest explosions human beings can make are miniscule. They are laughably small. The biggest nuclear weapon ever exploded was in the range of 57 megatons-TNT.
A full load of B52 bombs, by the way, appears to be something like 30 megatons. This is obviously not enough to accomplish anything if the goal is to strike below an existing mountain.
Using our generous estimate of 40 gigatons of explosives' worth of energy released straight into the mountain to destroy Mount Everest, admittedly an unusually large mountain, first, let's note that we have exactly the same problem of most of the impact energy not going into the mountain, and second, that the Torino scale threshold for "impact will cause global catastrophe" is an impact with the equivalent kinetic energy of 10 (ten) gigatons of explosives.
For that threshold, we're not worried about the "problem" that impact energy mostly doesn't go right into the ground below the impact -- rather, that is the reason we expect a global catastrophe.
"dropping anything that affected facilities underneath a mountain would have catastrophic effects in most of the world; it would be the worst war crime ever committed, and whoever was responsible would get wiped out by a coalition of everyone else in the world."
Why do you say that? Basically you couldn't do it without a massive explosion that would put the mountain into the atmosphere, or something?
I recently noticed that I find historical or technical inaccuracies can really break my suspension of disbelief in media such as video games.
It depends on the setting, though. The space mechanics in the X universe and the like are fundamentally underwater mechanics, because you have a maximum speed (which depends on your engine strength) and also do not need to carry reaction mass, so you are acting more like a submarine than a spacecraft, not to mention that interesting things in space are many orders of magnitude further apart than in games. This does not break immersion for me because realistically simulating space is hard from a gameplay perspective. Likewise I won't complain that two dimensional games from FTL or Rimworld or Factorio enforce a square grid and do not have rooms which stack in z direction even though it this is obviously what would happen in reality. Or how research gets handled in every video game. Or how the probability of making a full recovery after having been shot half to death in most video games is close to 100%. Or how unrealistic it is in a deckcrafter game that you can only use abilities if you draw their card. This is all part of the genres, and I can accept that.
What gets me though is making an (implicit) promise of accuracy and then underdelivering. I really stumbled when (IIRC) The Doomsday Book mentioned Potatoes in medieval England, for example.
You can have the Roman Empire as a setting for your video game. You can have Julius Caesar in it. I might even give you a pass on making young Caesar a subordinate NPC in the party. Likewise, if you really want, your squad of Romans can have an archer. The Empire is a big place, plenty of space to find some mercenary coming from a culture with a tradition of archery. But if you make Julius Caesar the archer of the party I will stop playing your game right there. (Expeditions: Rome, for the curious.)
Or take Victoria 3. This game seems to put a lot of effort in historical accuracy. Building chains which produce resources required in the industrial revolution are also a major keystone, from what I gather. So why then is the Bessemer process (reality: 1856) on the same research tier as the atmospheric engine (reality: Newcomb 1712)? Why not throw nuclear power (~1945) in on the same tier while you are at it? This totally broke immersion for me.
> You can have the Roman Empire as a setting for your video game. You can have Julius Caesar in it. I might even give you a pass on making young Caesar a subordinate NPC in the party. Likewise, if you really want, your squad of Romans can have an archer. The Empire is a big place, plenty of space to find some mercenary coming from a culture with a tradition of archery. But if you make Julius Caesar the archer of the party I will stop playing your game right there.
This isn't something I'd expect you to tolerate if you hate seeing potatoes in medieval England. By definition, Julius Caesar cannot be present in the Roman Empire.
He also really can't be part of a "party"; he was a politician and their entire career track was well specified.
I knew when I wrote it that this phrasing was coming to bite me.
Is there a better phrase to mean 'the land masses controlled by ancient Rome in whatever state form'? In German, the term 'Roemisches Reich' fills that role, because 'Reich' is a large realm more generally, not necessarily ruled by a 'Kaiser', while in English there is an association between 'empire' and 'emperor'.
I would argue that the latin phrase 'Imperium Romanum' is also a bit more in that direction (from reading acoup, 'imperium' was a property of certain offices in the Republic which basically meant they were allowed to command armies), and German Wikipedia claims that the phrase 'Imperium Romanum' is used in Cicero's time (late republic), so it might be what I am looking for.
The English Wikipedia has a disambigiation page for Roman Empire, stating that "The Roman Empire usually refers to the post-republican, autocratic government period of Roman civilization" and then goes on to admit that it might also refer to other time periods.
> Is there a better phrase to mean 'the land masses controlled by ancient Rome in whatever state form'? In German, the term 'Roemisches Reich' fills that role, because 'Reich' is a large realm more generally, not necessarily ruled by a 'Kaiser', while in English there is an association between 'empire' and 'emperor'.
If I were going for that, I would probably use the phrase "ancient Rome". There are other options; I might refer to the general time and place by a phrase like "the classical Mediterranean", but that's overtly geographic and definitely includes areas that might not be under Roman control, depending on the details of what time it is. ("Rome" sounds geographic, but it has the same political extension that you see all the time when decisions are attributed to e.g. "Washington" or "Berlin".)
We have words like "realm" (as you've noted!) that refer to territory without specifying how the territory is governed, but they tend not to appear in the names of specific entities.
> from reading acoup, 'imperium' was a property of certain offices in the Republic which basically meant they were allowed to command armies
While that's true, it is surely not the sense that is meant in the phrase "imperium Romanum".
But you're right that "imperium Romanum" wouldn't refer to an "empire" in some technical sense, and certainly wouldn't be related to the concept of an "emperor" - as best I'm aware, there wasn't a Roman concept of an "emperor", and they technically held power by simultaneously holding many different formal offices, including some that were only for them. ("Trib. pot.") The closest title they had to "emperor" was "Caesar", which is technically a part of their name, not a title, and literally means "a member of Julius Caesar's family". So the phrase should mean something like "everything under Roman command", which seems like a good match for Reich.
One could conceive, for instance, a classical Mediterranean pirate game where the pirates capture young Caesar (following a notable episode of actual Caesar's game), and he features as a party member while they are bringing him back to the pirate... lair or whatever.
"Base" is the most neutral word I could think of for this.
Maybe "fortress" if it's fortified, but I don't really know how they were set up. Modern pirates operate out of regular towns populated mostly by non-pirates, and it seems like classical pirates could have easily done the same thing... except that they held a bunch of captives, which would probably be easier if they had their own fortress somewhere.
I'm pretty sure that captives being held against their will aren't allowed to have weapons. What would it mean for Caesar to be in the player's party here?
"While on his voyage thither [to Rhodes, to study rhetoric], in the winter season, he was taken by pirates near the island of Pharmacusa, and detained by them, burning with indignation, for nearly forty days; his only attendants being a physician and two chamberlains. For he had instantly dispatched his other servants and the friends who accompanied him, to raise money for his ransom."
So, he allegedly told the pirates that once he was freed, he would crucify them, and by jings he did do that. Clearly the pirates didn't believe him, or they preferred "collect ransom now, worry about that later". He was 25 at the time, so you could stretch it that, bored out of his mind as a 'guest' of the pirates, and maybe them having a jest at the expense of their 'guest' who was threatening to hunt them down and execute them afterwards, the pirates brought him along on a raid or similar where he was part of the party. "Let's see you put your money where your mouth is", as it were, if this snobby young Roman is as good as he's claiming to be in regards to leadership and fighting and the rest of it.
Plutarch's account certainly gives us leeway:
"2 1 To begin with, then, when the pirates demanded twenty talents for his ransom, he laughed at them for not knowing who their captive was, and of his own accord agreed to give them fifty. 2 In the next place, after he had sent various followers to various cities to procure the money and was left with one friend and two attendants among Cilicians, most murderous of men, he held them in such disdain that whenever he lay down to sleep he would send and order them to stop talking. 3 For eight and thirty days, as if the men were not his watchers, but his royal body-guard, he shared in their sports and exercises with great unconcern. 4 He also wrote poems and sundry speeches which he read aloud to them, and those who did not admire these he would call to their faces illiterate Barbarians, and often laughingly threatened to hang them all. The pirates were delighted at this, and attributed his boldness of speech to a certain simplicity and boyish mirth."
EDIT: Regarding pirate bases, seems they were a regular scourge and grew into a genuinely severe problem until Pompey eventually set about methodically to break their power. "Cilician" became a synonym for "pirate":
"Cilician pirates dominated the Mediterranean Sea from the 2nd century BC until their suppression by Pompey in 67–66 BC. Because there were notorious pirate strongholds in Cilicia, on the southern coast of Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey), the term "Cilician" was long used to generically refer to any pirates in the Mediterranean.
...It was thought that a war against the pirates would be big and expensive and that it was impossible to attack all the pirates at once or to drive them back everywhere. As not much was done against them, some towns were turned into pirate winter quarters and raids further inland were carried out. Many pirates settled on land in various places and relied on an informal network of mutual assistance.
...Western campaign
Pompey divided the Mediterranean into thirteen districts, to each of which he assigned a fleet and a commander. Pompey then swept through the western Mediterranean with his own powerful fleet, driving the pirates out or into the paths of his other commanders.
By keeping vigilance over all the sea at the same time (and at great cost), there was nowhere to run or hide. Those Cilician pirates that did escape fled to the eastern Mediterranean. Pompey completed this first part of his campaign in 40 days.
Eastern campaign
Pompey then turned to the eastern Mediterranean. He gave mild terms to those pirates who surrendered to him personally, as opposed to his other commanders. Some pirates surrendered their ships, their families and themselves up to Pompey. From these, he learned about where others were hiding.
Many pirates retreated to their strongholds of Asia Minor, where they gathered and waited for Pompey to attack them. At Coracesium Pompey won a decisive victory and blockaded the town. The Cilician pirates surrendered all their harbours and fortified islands."
So they had not alone harbours, used towns as winter quarters, but also had fortified islands. The pirates who captured Caesar could well have had a base on such an island, or a camp around their harbour.
So our Cilician pirates, holed up in their winter quarters (Suetonius says Caesar was captured while travelling in the winter season) while they await the return of the ransom for Caesar, decide to do a little light inland pillaging and looting, and bring the young lordling along with them as a joke member of their party.
Not a video game but Jake Tapper wrote a political thriller style novel where a 1956 Mustang made an appearance. IRL they wouldn’t appear for another decade. Tapper was born in 1969 I believe so he gets a pass, but no editor picking up on it was pretty bad.
Editors and proof-reading appear to be luxury optional items in modern publishing, the current practice seems to be "knock the raw manuscript into some sort of shape, then send the files to China for typesetting and printing the physical copies".
This is a huge problem with self-published books. I read a few of them years ago; their ebook forms are cheap on Amazon and often have attractive theming and blurbs.
Sadly, the big lesson I learned was "don't ever read self-published books".
It depends. I found that the real popular web serials (e.g. Worm, the bigger ratfict novels (HPMOR, Unsong, Worth the Candle, Luminosity)) are usually readable (even though Deiseach might disagree at least on HPMOR).
I am not sure if this is because of the feedback from writers, or if all the rationalists have someone editing their texts before publishing, or because to write a viral web serial you need to be able to edit your texts well in the first place.
I think people directly putting their work on Amazon is kind of a red flag not because of anything fundamental but more out of signaling concerns.
Sort of like a private car sale (instead of cutting in a dealer who might be obliged to give some guarantee on it) or hiring someone without formal education (instead of someone who payed their tributes of lifetime and debt in the ivory tower): sure, there are a lot of legitimate reasons to cut out the middle man, but there are also a lot of less legitimate reasons, namely, that you would not make it past the middle man. This information asymmetry makes deals difficult.
I tend to select on authors mostly through personal recommendations. (It used to be that I read Hugo and Nebula award winners, I don't mind reading SF with woke undertones as long as it is fun to read. (Contrast with Eneasz, who mentioned on some podcast that he uses these awards (iirc) to know what not to read.) Of course, after the 2023 debacle, Hugo has jumped the sharks.)
(Of course, I also don't do Amazon for ebooks because I refuse to deal with DRM for books. Kindle is great hardware though.)
I have read, and liked, HPMOR. I'm not saying it's impossible for self-published work to be good. But the odds are so poor that it's not worth finding out. (I read HPMOR on the strength of a personal recommendation.)
I would bet pretty heavily on your third reason, "to write a viral web serial you need to be able to edit your texts well in the first place".
I have found that by far the strongest predictor that a book will be good is "the author has written another book, and that one was good".
I seem to be four steps from Winston Churchill. The first step gets me to my grandfather, who I have met. During WWII, he served as a driver for senior officers in the Finnish military, where he almost certainly met some senior officer (step 2) who met Carl Mannerheim, the head of the Finnish military (step 3.) Mannerheim met Churchill twice in his life (step 4.)
Anyone have a Winston Churchill number lower than that?
My dad(1) was a local politician who definitely met the then prime minister(2) of Ireland a few times. That prime minister definitely met the US president(3). From there you probably get all leaders(4) who weren’t directly met by the Irish pm.
Sure, I've met several people who have met Queen Elizabeth II, and she met Winston Churchill many times.
The Queen met a ridiculously high number of people in her life. I wouldn't be surprised if she met (under some reasonable definition of the word "meet") more people than anyone else in history.
This - and many more than any politician, even one with such a long career as WSC. So I think a Churchill number of 3 through the late Queen is easy mode in the UK. I'm in the UK, and although I never met HMQ I know dozens of people who have. In fact my grandfather, grandmother and mother all met HMQ *during the time that WSC was Prime Minister*. But none of them ever met him in person at any time.
Playing on harder mode, my father met every Prime Minister from 1963-2010 (Home, Wilson, Heath, Callaghan, Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown), of whom the first five certainly knew WSC.
If you're British, as I am, and of an age, you are likely to have met quite a few people who met Churchill. I have, variously: Clarissa Eden, who I met at a book launch in London in the 90s, and who, amazingly, died as recently as 2021: 66 years after her husband took over from Churchill.
I also got to know a very senior civil servant who in early career worked in Churchill's private office at No 10 in the 1950s.
And perhaps above all else my late mother in law, who worked at an airfield in East Anglia, and met Churchill when he visited in summer 1944.
Four for me - as a teen I met Original Seven astronaut Deke Slayton, who was astronaut boss at the time, and would have worked with the Apollo 11 crew. They met with Prince Phillip, who would have met Churchill many times.
Not me, but as a reader of many of Churchill's own works plus several serious biographies, I'll bet that a decent number of people of European heritage can come up with 4 or fewer steps. His professional lifetime at high levels of responsibility and/or prominence was _so_ lengthy. Also he was always an enthusiastic traveler who wanted to meet people as part of his work and/or for its own sake.
Oh wait -- I met Walter Mondale, who as VP met Queen Elizabeth II. And I know two people who each met the Queen at honorific ceremonies (one got knighted the other got an OBE). So that's three 3's for me to Churchill just offhand....never thought of it this way before. Kind of neat actually.
Shook hands with George Will once, and George McGovern -- could be a couple more 3's there, not sure.
I'm two steps. One of my childhood neighbors was Lt-Col Montagu Cleeve, who I often used to meet, and he was Winnie's big gun expert in WW2 and so would certainly have met him.
Old timers of that generation rarely spoke of their wartime experiences, but he did once mention he had been at the front through most of the Battle of the Somme campaign in 1916, including the fateful first day. He was so whippet slim that I reckon he must have turned sideways and advanced crab-wise after going over the top, so to all the German machine gunners it would have been like trying to hit a playing card edge on!
Driving one day in the 1990s I suddenly heard him on the car radio. "Feck, that's Monty!" I thought, "What's he doing on Classic FM?". It turned out he was reminiscing about WW1 in a series called "Forgotten Voices of the Great War" (the latter being what it was called before WW2). He said the worse thing for him was not the mud, nor the lice, nor even the shells and bullets, but the giant rats everywhere!
I think I can do 2: I've met a European royal who likely met Churchill as a child or teen. I need to do more research to verify the link but it seems probable. If not I have 3 (through Queen Elizabeth), but so do others in this thread.
Many years ago I met Charles when he was still a prince. We shook hands, but didn't interact much beyond that. He was around 17 when Churchill died, so I imagine they must have been introduced at some point. So that's two steps?
I'm also fairly certain I heard from Herman Wouk that he'd met Churchill (but a quick google search didn't confirm it, top-loaded as it is with pithy quotes). If true that would be my best bet as Herman Wouk was a congregant of mine and study partner in Palm Springs for some time.
Indeed. What are the odds that Fei-Fei Li met Her Majesty, giving me a less vague “3”… a quick google fails to find a connection, and I’m not quite so close to her that I could ask.
But now I also wonder whether Amnon Shashua met QE2, giving me another possible 3.
I've met Gerry Adams, who - during the Northern Ireland peace negotations - would have almost certainly parlayed with senior British figures of the sort who could have very well met Winston Churchill at some point.
Al Franken was in the US Senate with John Kerry, and may have met him. John Kerry met Queen Elizabeth, who met Winston Churchill. So Al Franken's Churchill number may be 3. And yours may be 4.
A random thought - it appears Jewish-Americans are underrepresented as novelists.
Those who come to mind are Philip Roth, Jonathan and Faye Kellerman, Leon Uris, Chaim Potok, and Harlan Coben. (As a Canadian, I'll add the great Mordechai Richler.)
Surely I'm missing a bunch, but if not is there something in North-American Jewish culture that discourages fiction-writing?
Norman mailer was Jewish. I’ve heard arguments that the American novel is the American Jewish novel, at least post war. Roth and Mailer in particular. Who else is there vying for top spot? Updike?
I feel they have all fallen somewhat out of fashion though.
As a space nerd, I have Mailer's Of A Fire On The Moon in the basement. Still haven't read it yet. Thanks for the nudge.
I read a John Updike short story (A Sense Of Shelter) in a 1st-year English Lit class in college many years ago. I've reread it a number of times. I found/find it very evocative. I've tried to borrow his Rabbit novels from the library, but it seems they've fallen out of fashion.
I don't think that's likely. Even if we stopped with your list it's still a little unclear whether we'd actually be talking *under* representation, given how few Jewish people there actually are in America (2.4%). But you also missed Sidney Sheldon, Isaac Asimov, Herman Wouk, and probably twenty more that I can't call to mind off the top of my head.
Jack Kirby (Jacob Kurtzberg) suggested something along the lines that since comics weren't Proper Art and not Important, no-one took it away from them.
When in my peak SF-reading era (aged c. 12 to 15) I went through any number of paperback anthologies of short stories. In my memories, these collections were usually compiled and edited by Robert Silverberg.
Curse you, I was too slow. I have the 'reply' box open right now to say "the joke answer is that they all get hoovered up by screenwriting and never write that novel".
Oh you need to read Bellow. You can’t understand the first half of the American 20th century without him. The guy is incredible Michael Chabon has a couple of outstanding novels too.
To me they seem solidly represented, perhaps even overrepresented considering they only make up 2% of the population. I think the overrepresentation of Jews everywhere else makes you think there should be more than there are, but there are a pretty good amount of fictional writers there.
Are we all really descendents of Charlemagne? Is every European alive in the 10th century who left descendants the ancestor of every living European today?
All though I havent interrogated the mathematics on this it seems to depend on everybody having a large number of ancestors at that point, and of people alive at that era producing a lot of descendants. Hand wave a bit about big numbers and you are done.
Its easy enough to intuit a case ( by induction) where it isnt true. Imgaine an island isolated since the end of the 10th century, populated by exactly 100 people. Simple ancestor mathematics would suggest that by the end of the 19C, with 900/25 generations passing, everybody on the Island would have 68,719,476,735 ancestors, much more people than alive in Europe at the time. Everybody is a world citizen!
In fact they have, as we established, 100 unique ancestors at most. This pedigree collapse is ackowleged to a certain extent, but the amount of collapse is to my mind not taken into account.
The island of course, is an extreme example, but given that people married with 2 miles for most of history, not that extreme. [1]
With regard to descendents. Cities are population sinks for much of this time. Although I cant get the statistics on how much cities populations would fall without migration, it’s generally accepted that places like London are large population sinks over the Middle Ages. If we assume that the existing population of London reproduces only 90% of its population per generation ( a small enough sink), over many generations the population it contributes later on is negligible.
The population is continuously getting replenished from the countryside. The plague exagerated this process, with cities being widely hit.
Therefore a descendent of Charlmagne who arrives in London ( which is the most likely) around 1000AD, doesnt contribute much to London’s later population, and probably nothing to rural England, or the Shetlands or what have you. The reverse is true. The people from this area swamp the genetics in London.
If you're of European descent on any side of your family tree, yes, you have Charlemagne among your ancestors — because his descendants can be traced up to 1400. And 1400 is a special date according to Joseph Chang, a professor of Statistics and Data Science at Yale. He proved that, except for recent immigrants to Europe, the most recent common ancestor of every European today was someone who lived in Europe about 600 years ago. In other words, all Europeans alive today have among their ancestors the same man or woman who lived around 1400. Contrariwise, until, about a thousand years ago, according to Chang’s model: 20 percent of the adult Europeans alive in 1000 would turn out to be the ancestors of no one living today (that is, they had no children or all their descendants eventually died childless); each of the remaining 80 percent would turn out to be a direct ancestor of every European living today.
This is a thorny problem and it's not clear to me that we will ever have a definitive answer. The issue is that the degree of diffusion of ancestry over long time frames is *highly* dependent on possibly rare events, that is, the odds of some person crossing class or geographical boundaries to be incorporated in to the ancestry of some otherwise unrelated group.
There have been papers published that try to establish how far back we have to go before we have a common set of ancestors for all humanity, but they rely on fairly naive diffusion models and give possibly incorrect (too recent) a date, given the continuing isolation of some Native American populations and others.
The claim that every European alive in the 10th century who left descendants are the ancestor of every living European today goes around a lot, it's even in the scientific literature, but I haven't seen any good calculation that backs it up.
This video is pretty good IMO: It uses the Queen of Denmark as a model and gets an Identical Ancestors Point for Europe that's a bit higher than 128 generations ago (i.e. far earlier than 1000 CE): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgXu19LNYEk
I don't know how much population-sink cities would affect the calculation: wouldn't just medieval Paris (or whatever) "concentrate down" the 1000 CE population to a small set of post-plague decedents (to use two arbitrary dates), but as soon as one of the "concentrated" decedents "escape" to the countryside and becomes super-fertile then the 1000 CE Parisians will have lots of decedents again. I.e. the other side of the cities-as-population-sink coin is that rural areas are hyper fertile, and it seems like a small amount of mixing between the two would make them cancel out each other when we look at long time periods.
Actually, it was modeled by Joseph Chang back in 1999. And 1400 is the key year. If you have a European ancestor who was alive in 1400, then every other European alive today shares that ancestor. Charlemaigne had descendants who were alive in 1400, so if you have any European ancestry you're related to old Charlie.
There's a big difference between having *a single common ancestor* and the Identical Ancestors Point (the first one is obviously more recent). But even with that said I'm sceptical of these calculations before looking at them: If late Queen Margrethe II had 3000 ancestors in 1425, and I'm sure we can find plenty of rural farmer on the other side of Europe with an equally inbreed ancestral line, and Europe in 1400 had about 80 million people in it, I would guess that we can find two people who don't have an overlap. But I'll look into the math.
I wasn't able to read the article but I remain skeptical given that it's based on a spherical-cow type model rather than a detailed study of geographical and class mobility in Europe 1400-present.
I’ll have a look at that video but I’m very dubious about any descent mathematics - I just don’t think it’s possible to work it out. Shakespeare had 3 children and no known heirs. However knowing he had descendants at one generation would presumably, if plugged into whatever mathematical model used here, assume that everybody will be his descendent at some stage in the future.
Why wouldn't it be possible to work it out? It's not that complicated to model.
A simple model will assume that Shakespeare had decedents because that's the most likely outcome for a person with three children. That's just how models work. But it's not that hard to build a probabilistic model and make Monte-Carlo simulations of European population history: such a simulation would give you plenty of people with three kids but no current decedents (just like Shakespeare).
But it's important to note that starting at about seven generations back you'll begin to have ancestors who've contributed nothing to your genome. So even though you are technically a descendant of Charlemagne, the chances that you inherited anything from Charlie's genome is virtually nil.
> Our numbers of ancestors grow so quickly that it is soon unavoidable that we have shared ancestors. Six hundred years ago (roughly 20 generations back) I'll have just over a million ancestors alive (220), a thousand years back I potentially have over a billion ancestors alive (233). There simply aren’t that many people alive in Europe back then, and so I’m a descendant of everyone who lived then as long as they left descendants (and vast numbers did).
Thats the kind of simple math that I’m disputing. In my isolated island example, at 36 generations everybody on the island has at most 100 ancestors and not 68 billion (2^36) because nobody joined the gene pool. In reality there were no, or few, isolated islands but plenty of mostly isolated villages where people largely mated within a mile or two, and anybody who came in were exotic if they were ten miles away.
The problem with the math is probably in this offhand statement
“ the first individual who all of our family trees trace back to, in a well mixed population of size N individuals.”
“Well mixed” is doing a lot of work there.
I also wonder why the restriction is Europe. At 1000 years (40 generations) there’s a potential 1 trillion ancestors and the world population is much smaller.
I think we would be surprised to find that people in the Shetlands in 1900 have any Japanese ancestors from 900.
Honestly London isn’t in practice much closer to the shetlands - even today it takes 30 hours to travel from London, if you don’t take a plane.
This is probably weeks or travel for most of the era under consideration.
There’s no easy way to model this, but simple “well mixed” populations are not the answer.
Cities were population sinks, but the social status of Nobility was not a population sink.
One of the assumptions involved in the "Charlemagne as ancestor" proposition is that Charlemagne had many children by many women... and a good number of those children married into royal/noble families scattered across Europe. This was an important step in moving his descendants over many hundreds of miles in a single generation.
Another assumption is that there was a attrition at the edges of the Nobility social status, such that younger sons and daughters would have children, but those younger children would not carry the same rank as their parents...and that this process would iterate over the generations until it reached someone who could socially intermix with the peasant class.
These assumptions are not well-enumerated. Though it's probably not too hard to fill out a table of how-far-to-marry and how-many-children for most of the children of Charlemagne.
The Charlemagne case is a reduction of the European Royalty and Nobility case into a single, easy-to-state example. The probability is very high that all members of the Royalty/Nobility class during the approximate lifetime of Charlemagne are the ancestors, along some path, of everyone of European descent who is alive today.
Along a different subject of descent from a well-known historical people: I am fairly certain that I am descended from a man who sailed on the ship "Mayflower". There are estimates that some 35 million or so other people can claim that status, also. (Several people on the "Finding your Roots" TV show, on PBS, have been shown to be descended from at least one passenger on the "Mayflower".)
While that is a minority of the population of North America, it's not a vanishingly-small minority. The 102 people who were the founding population of Plymouth, intermarrying with the many thousands of migrants who arrived in New England over the next 50 or so years, are now represented by approximately 35 million descendants.
These number don't increase linearly with generations, or with centuries. They increase exponentially--even if the exponent involved is some number less than 2.
This is the kind of math that leads to the statement that all people of European descent alive today are likely descended from Charlemagne.
I definitely think that the offspring of nobility have a better chance of spreading through the population than a random person for two reasons. 1) being wealthy they have more children to begin with (although to spread throughout the population most of their offspring have to be as poor as everybody else) and 2) they are more likely to immigrate to places outside cities which saves them from the population sink.
> The probability is very high that all members of the Royalty/Nobility class during the approximate lifetime of Charlemagne are the ancestors, along some path, of everyone of European descent who is alive today.
I disagree. These probabilities ignore the way populations flow and the effect of cities. It’s just simple math, applied incorrectly, assuming humans reproduce mathematically like bacteria.
> The 102 people who were the founding population of Plymouth, intermarrying with the many thousands of migrants who arrived in New England over the next 50 or so years, are now represented by approximately 35 million descendants.
I was going to mention that the American population mathematics is different but I knew we would get to it in the comments.
You really can’t use this large exponential growth elsewhere. The Amish were a few thousand on arrival and the population will reach 1 million by 2050. Pretty soon we will all be Amish.
However If the Amish had arrived in london then or earlier, they would have a different demographic profile right now.
Ok, so the Amish couldn’t have existed pre reformation - but If a religious group that only intermarried only amongst itself had arrived in London in 1000AD then by 1900, assuming the original population of this group was 1000 and that all generations had children they would have 22 descendants.
(This is assuming that the natural decreases in population was by a mere 10% a year )
That would be to go from 10% of the population to 0.00045% ( the population of London was 5 million in 1900.)
These are two extremes and the truth is in between. Intermarriage would spread the number of descendants of the 1000 migrants throughout London’s population but it’s likely that even that would be swamped by migration.
Possibly with Charlemagne if his descendants bypassed cities they would, paradoxically, have contributed more to the UK‘s and London‘s population.
On the other hand, the nobility would have gone through another process of culling - the frequent periodic warfare where they would have been bound to participate.
The peasantry are also bound to participate in wars, if only in the role of "guy whose harvest was 'foraged' by one army or another" or "girl who was raped a dozen times in the Sack of [X] and didn't survive the experience". And then there are all the peasants, etc, who are given a spear and told "you're a soldier now" but without the high-quality armor and horses of the aristocrats.
Good armor makes a *huge* difference. And when you lose a battle, so does a fast horse.
Instead of a link, a quote, from A Farewell to Alms:
Note that in England the reproductive success of the class that engaged in warfare on a large scale in the pre-industrial era, the aristocracy, was much poorer than for economically successful commoners, and was probably less good than that of the average person. Table 6.3 shows for the English aristocracy - kings, queens, dukes and duchesses - the Net Reproduction Rate, as well as life expectancy at birth for males by period from 1330 (when Dukes were first created) Medieval manorial tenants, for example, had a life expectancy at age 20 of about 30, compared to 22 for the aristocracy.
These excess deaths at relatively young ages contributed to the low net fertility of aristocrats. Thus in the earliest period we observe fertility, 1480-1679, the aristocracy, despite its privileged social position was barely reproducing itself. Only after 1730 when death rates from violence declined to levels little above the general population, did aristocratic life expectancy come to exceed the general population. In this period also did aristocrats finally enjoy more reproductive success than the average person.
Those are from near the end of chapter 6 "Malthus and Darwin: Survival of the Richest".
My understanding is that, for instance, the reason why the original Magyars don't really feature that much in current-day Hungarian genetic inheritance is that the Hungarian nobility, which they would have formed, got pruned down pretty hard at regular intervals through warfare.
As I said when this was discussed previously, I've had family members doing family studies that reach in some cases up until 1400s or 1500s, and insofar as I've been able to tell, 90 % of all of my ancestors have lived somewhere around two (separate) very specific peasant areas in Eastern Finland (one where my mother comes from and one where my father comes from), with people living and creating families with other people who are perhaps not within a 2-mile radius, but at least within a 50 km radius.
Considering this, while it's *possible* that Charlemagne would be my ancestor - say, one of his descendants moving to Russia and begetting a Russian trader visiting my father's original home village - it is by no means certain.
"90 % of all of my ancestors have lived somewhere around two very specific peasant areas in Eastern Finland".
That's the wrong metric. Two ways of looking at it:
1) If 10% of your ancestors are born elsewhere, that's a lot of people. Like, really a lot. And it suffices that one of them came from a place that mixed well.
2) Let's assume that basically all of your ancestors come from just one island. But if there was ever a few hundred years ago a stranger washed ashore that island who mixed into the gene pool, then after a few generations this stranger is ancestor to the whole island, and so are all his ancestors. Even if this was the only violation to the "no outsider" record of the island.
In a nutshell, being isolated is a very unstable state for these questions. Even a single deviation destroys it thoroughly.
Currently the implied probability (to the nearest whole percentage point, mid-price) of the following people winning the US Presidential Election is, in the order Betfair/Polymarket/Metaculus/Manifold (numbers 3 weeks ago in brackets):
Trump: 43/46/50/49 (48/50/50/50)
Biden: 42/45/50/49 (38/41/49/47)
RFK: 4/4/1/0 (3/3/1/0)
(Michelle) Obama: 3/2/1/0 (3/2/1/0)
Newsom: 2/0/1/0 (2/1/1/0)
Harris: 1/1/1/0 (2/2/1/0)
Broadly Biden has improved and Trump has worsened across the board, but the effect has been more pronounced in real money markets. In fact Trump and Biden were at one point tied at 42% on Betfair, which caused me to cash out half my Biden position and reinvest it (at the same odds) on Trump, so that I now make 76% profit on my original stake if either of them wins, which feels like a good position to be in.
The odds on Betfair imply a 15% chance that somebody else wins, which seems too high to me, and I think is small odds bias. RFK specifically is also up in the real money markets, while the play markets continue to ignore him. My guess is that RFK bettors are acting from conviction in their guy rather than a rational assessment of his chances (and there is the usual problem that a return of 3.6% on a market which may not resolve until 6 January probably fails to compensate for the opportunity cost).
I’m not sure what has caused the tilt from Trump to Biden: in my judgment nothing very surprising has happened in the past 3 (or 6) weeks. Trump’s legal problems continue as expected, there’s been good and bad news on the economy (jobs up, inflation also up) and the situation in Gaza remains as it is. Broadly though, the new numbers are much closer to where I think they should be, so if anything the question is why Biden was so low before (a sitting president in a good economy with a campaign finance advantage should not have been at 28%, in my assessment).
>I’m not sure what has caused the tilt from Trump to Biden: in my judgment nothing very surprising has happened in the past 3 (or 6) weeks.
The number one threat to a sitting President is a bad economy, particularly the country being in a recession in the months before the election . The closer we get to the election without a recession having begun, the less likely that there will be one immediately before the election. Hence, "nothing happening" is good news for Biden, and if prediction markets did not shift towards him under those circumstances, that should undermine one's confidence in those markets.
The prediction markets in this case are following the polls, which also show a narrowing of Trump's lead over the last month.
My thinking is that Trump's numbers largely follow what's been going on in the news with him lately. Recently that's not much so his numbers have been dropping off; with another show trial starting up I predict his numbers will go up again in the short term.
The graph here https://www.economist.com/interactive/us-2024-election/trump-biden-polls does show a slight narrowing between the central lines in a wide spread, from Trump 45/Biden 44 to Trump 44/Biden 44, but while we need to give some weight to the polls (and the fact that Trump is polling so much better than at the same stage of the last cycle is the main reason to think he should be the favourite), we shouldn't give them too much weight so far out from the election, so a shift of that size should not have resulted in the probabilities (on Betfair) going from Trump 47/Biden 28 to Trump 43/Biden 42 over the same timeframe.
With all the emphasis on the presidency going to Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, various Kennedies, etc., I'm kind of surprised Donald Trump Jr. never comes up.
At least with the Kennedies you can see the idea that "this family should be president" passing down to subsequent generations. If you think Michelle Obama would be a good president because she's related (not by blood!) to Barack Obama, surely Sasha Obama would be a better president. She doesn't yet meet the age requirement, but that's not true of Donald Trump Jr.
According to Polymarket, Junior is 3rd favourite to be the Republican Nominee, with mid-point odds of 0.9%, behind Haley but ahead of DeSantis. Betfair only gives him 0.15% (placing him behind Haley, Carson, DeSantis and Ramaswamy (in that order), but ahead of Tucker Carlson).
> The odds on Betfair imply a 15% chance that somebody else wins, which seems too high to me, and I think is small odds bias.
Definitely partly small odds bias, but we are talking about two old men here. There's a real chance that one or both of them is incapacitated on health grounds before the election and someone else gets drafted in. Someone popular enough might stand a decent chance in that case.
That's definitely a possibility but over such a short timeframe putting the odds anywhere near as high as 15% is insane. I'd guess closer to 5% myself, maybe less.
Biden is a sitting president. I'm always amused at people saying he can't win. For better or worse we have a two-party system (no, RFK will not win a single state or even a single EC vote), and half the country will vote for one, and the other half for the other, and the outcome will hang on weird turnout distributions in a handful of states, and a sitting president has an advantage.
I remember a bunch of guys in February making a push to retire Biden from the ticket on the small fact that he's old and the big fact that he's running even with Trump. I can't access Betfair from this computer but I'd put good money on Harris and Newsom being much higher back in January/February when replacing Biden seemed possible. Now that Biden is guaranteed to be the Democratic nominee, the money pivoted back to Biden.
As for Newsome or Harris, those odds kinda make sense to me, even now. Basically, what are the odds of Biden suffering some catastrophic infirmity, say a crippling stroke, at his age and stress level in the next six months. 3% doesn't seem wild to me and, contingent on Biden being removed from the ticket, Newsom or Harris stepping into that role and having a >50% chance of beating Trump seems reasonable.
I was getting 3.55 (=28% chance) on Biden in mid-February, and he was still about that level in early March (see https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-318/comment/50883466). Newsom and Harris were higher, although it's mostly Obama who made up the difference (there was a discussion about this on Open Thread 315).
Biden is still old and he's still running even with Trump: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/national/. The "bunch of guys" never included anyone with any direct influence on the outcome. They've made less noise recently, but I've not seen any of them row back the argument. Few people thought that Biden might lose the primary: the argument has always been that he should step aside, which he still could. So this seems more like a vibe-shift than any change in the fundamentals.
By the way, if you could access Betfair, you would be able to get 1/7 on Biden being the nominee, which is of course free money if you consider this outcome to be guaranteed (and I myself have money on this outcome, so I don't entirely disagree).
I think this is definitely something to watch, but the move in the markets mostly predates the published decision in the Arizona Supreme Court, so unless somebody was betting inside information, that won't be the cause.
Does anyone have any resource recommendations for starting an online business that aren't clickbaity coursemongers with little actual value?
I'm a complete noob but would like to start a healthcare-related online blog and eventually service business. Any advice on how to get off the ground would be greatly appreciated. For example, I have a domain and have registered the domain but have no real idea on what steps to take next. What are the best practices for coding the website, brand design etc? Thanks
I've heard the statistic that, in the U.S., "half of all marriages end in divorce." That often leads to the observation that, of the remaining 50% of marriages that last until the end, many must be unhappy unions that persist only due to some combination of financial considerations, inertia (laziness), unwillingness to hurt their children with a divorce, or unwillingness to lose social status.
But has anyone considered the flip side of that? How many divorcees REGRET divorcing their spouses? And in how many instances is the regret mutual?
The rejoinder I've heard for that stat is that it came from measuring the marriage rate (number of marriages per 1000 people per year, or whatever) to the divorce rate measured the same way, and the latter was half of the former. Not taking into account that the marriage rate was lower at that time than it was in the past when the people then getting divorced, were getting married.
In addition I have heard that first marriages are less likely to end in divorce than later marriages (because of people who get serially married/divorced)
And divorce has gotten less common than when that stat was first being thrown around.
First marriages are much less likely to end in divorce. The number goes down again if your marriage passes some basic sanity checks (you are both over the age of 21 and have a reasonable age gap, you have been dating for at least a year, neither of you has a criminal record et cetera.
You'd think these numbers really ought to be easier to find though. The Bureau of Births, Deaths and Marriages (or your local equivalent) really should be shouting these numbers from the rooftops so that people can have a more realistic understanding of marriage success rates.
Another annoying fake statistic that often gets repeated is the "80% of small businesses fail within the first year", which as far as I can figure out is not based on anything in particular and is far from the truth for any reasonable definition of small business.
My understanding is that at one point in history, some number X of marriages were measured to occur in the United States, and approximately half that number were measured.
If that is the source of the claim about 50% of marriages ending in divorce, then it a poorly-informed statistic. It can't be used to estimate the probability of any marriage ending in divorce during the years between the marriage beginning and one (or both) spouses dying. It can't be used to measure the increase or decrease in the rate of divorce (or the rate of marriage).
Keep in mind that repeat divorcees make up a disproportionate number of the divorces, so it's something above 50% of the remaining that stay together. Quick stats I'm seeing show that 67% and 74% of second and third marriages end in divorce, greatly increasing the total number.
Some basic math: If 100 people get married and 30 get divorced twice while the remaining original 70 remain married, that would be a 46% divorce rate. Real rates are more complicated since some divorce once while a rare set might divorce 4, 5, or 10 times.
Also, by the time you're looking at people who changed stable partners several times in their adult life, you're pretty far away from the traditional model of marriage for life. So it might be more relevant to look at how much long-term relationships last regardless of whether they got married or not.
That's a tough question to answer, because "spiritual / mediation advice" ranges from light mindfulness taught by any rando, up to all kinds of spiritual practices from any of the world's traditions, taught by their respective qualified teachers. It goes as deep as the spiritual side of any of the world's religions can go, including yours if you have one.
In any case, learn to relax and see things holistically sounds like pretty decent beginner advice.
In my experience, meditation in this context is about focusing all of your awareness on some sensation before any mental processing of it can happen. This is very different than trying to relax. Though I'm not sure if the people you've heard this from mean something different.
> Though, this apparently can result in some major psychological issues if overdone
For sure especially with bad guidance or going in without any knowledge (e.g. Goeanka retreats for people without knowledge/experience).
I didn't read the whole article but I thought it was interesting how the she pretty much perfectly describe A&P followed by Dissolution and Fear described in MCTB
Hmmm. Yes, but being relaxed wasn't the object of my meditation practice, rather it was a side-effect. The object of my meditation was to understand how thoughts, emotions, and sensations arise in the mind and to learn how to silence them. Relaxation, bliss, stress reduction, etc. were not the primary objectives the practices imparted to me by my Kagyu and Gelug teachers. Detachment was. And Prajna — "wisdom" — but wisdom in knowing how one's mind worked.
Kagyu and Gelug! Let me bother you with the same question I have been bothering others with. One thing that confounds me about figuring out thoughts arising in the mind is that I just can't do it: the closest to "watching thoughts" for me is *recalling* what I thought a few moments ago. It is so bad that as I sit to "meditate" and try to watch my thoughts, I sometimes scratch myself, and only after that realize that I had scratched myself. Is this level of mindlessness normal in the initial stages? Is this why vajrayana folks recommend competence in sutrayana before even starting vajrayana?
P.S., edit: If not for avoiding suffering, is it merely for curiosity that you wanted detachment and prajna? And -- if it is not too personal -- despite all that you need CBD to sleep?
> Is this level of mindlessness normal in the initial stages?
Yup. Most of what we think we're perceiving in real-time is the immediate memory of the perception that our mind has just processed (filtering out details, and tagging it with a hypertext of associated emotions and feelings etc.). The thoughts that arise within us are the same way. If you're initially losing track of your awareness, it's OK to count your breaths (though some of my teachers advised against it, some thought it was fine). At some point, you'll stop needing to count, and some further point along the path, you'll find the thoughts will stop spontaneously arising (think of thoughts as feeding off your attention, and if you starve them, they'll give up trying). After a year — or five — or ten of doing this practice (YMMV), you'll be able to achieve one-pointed (undistracted) awareness.
If you have an itch, scratch it, and try to return to your breath. The Zenners don't like that advice, though. They seem to think you're giving in by scratching the itch. I resisted the urge to scratch until the itching took over my entire body. I resisted further and I started to hallucinate that I was on fire — then I screamed, jumped up from my meditation, and left the hall until the feeling went away. The lay instructor thought I was crazy when I told him why I screamed. But he wasn't very clued into all the possible ways your mind can sabotage your intentions, though. A lama later told me to just scratch the itch and return to the breath. He pointed out that it was a positive sign that I was hallucinating though since that's what the Buddha went through before he achieved enlightenment.
After about five years of almost daily practice, I could achieve that one-pointed consciousness state for a block of time (not indefinitely). Then I reached a plateau (but I didn't have an instructor who I trusted — that's another story — and I was meditating on my own). I kept it up on my own for another five years, but I wouldn't say I achieved many benefits from my ten years of meditation, per se, except that it's made me more patient dealing with extreme boredom situations — like waiting in the DMV line. ;-)
Theoretically, one should be able to ignore all sorts of unpleasant things without flinching. For instance, those Vietnamese Buddhist monks who self-immolated didn't scream or move while the fire consumed them. I could never be able to do that! But I discontinued my meditation practice because I had a very different type of uncomfortable experience/hallucination. I was practicing without a teacher and trying some advanced visualizations (Vajrayana stuff), and the visualizations became real! Scary real. Dharma protector deities are happy to teach you a lesson, but the lesson won't necessarily be very pleasant. I never went back to meditation. So I advise you not to undertake meditation practice without at least the occasional supervision of an advanced meditator — and even the introductory stuff can backfire on you (viz. my itch that turned into fire).
BTW, some meditators confuse bliss with enlightenment. You might end up in a blissful state, and you might be able to cultivate at will — but that's not necessarily beneficial to your advancement, because you get attached to the bliss. We called those people bliss-heads. Detachment is the goal of the Middle Way. I can't speak for other Buddhist schools or the Vedanta schools.
I also undertook some Sufi meditation training. That was totally different from my Buddhist experiences. The Sufi practices put my mind into a high-energy state that was very exhilarating. They didn't explicitly say it, but it seemed like they were after an ecstatic state where they could merge with the godhead.
As for sleep, for most people, our sleep gets more brittle as we get older. Although according to Bob Thurman are some advanced sleeping and dreaming meditation practices (really!), I never had instructors who were familiar with them. And though relaxation techniques may help you get to sleep, they're hard to implement when you're suddenly wide awake at 3 in the morning. With CBD, I can sleep like I did when I was younger.
Absolutely fascinating. Thank you very much for sharing.
You say "After ... I could achieve that one-pointed consciousness state for a block of time" and "At ... some further point along the path, you'll find the thoughts will stop spontaneously arising". Was there a stage where you had thoughts, but you could watch them "from the outside"' without getting engrossed in them, and without the "hypertext"?
Everything else in your comments: dieties, sufi meditation, CBD etc. are interesting, though I am sorry about the unpleasant experiences, both fire and the "lesson", and that things did not work out. I am still intrigued as to why you wanted detachment if you didn't care about stress-control or bliss: just curiosity about the nature of reality?
There's a lot to unpack in your questions. I'll address your first one and get back to the second one later.
> Was there a stage where you had thoughts, but you could watch them "from the outside"' without getting engrossed in them, and without the "hypertext"?
I'm not sure I experience things the same way you do or anyone else does. We assume that we do, but I'm not convinced that we do. And verbalizing internal experiences is harder because it's a symbolic abstraction of experience (and then we fall down the rabbit hole of whether our shared symbols describe the same thing). Having said that, I am going to put down my laptop sit upright in my chair, and follow my breath for a few inhalations and exhalations (inhaling through my nose, exhaling through my mouth with my tongue lightly touching the front of my palate — eyelids barely open). I'll try to describe what I was experiencing. Back in a few minutes.
....
At the beginning of my first inhalation, I was in the middle of remembering all the arguments about the best way to breathe when meditating. There were a lot of quick almost subliminal associations that jangle with those memories — humor and frustration associated with dozens of earnest discussions about the best way to breathe are bundled together with those memories (but I'm NOT remembering any particular discussions or incidents, I'm just aware that they're there) — long inhalation through my nose — the memory thoughts drop away. I'm chest breathing on my first inhalation, and I'm aware of the air filling my lungs. I've stopped inhaling, and I'm aware of my heartbeat and the constant background tinnitus in my ears, but I have the familiar impression (association) of my mind being in a deep warm cavern. A morning dove is cooing outside my window (no associations or memories with that, I'm just aware that it's cooing). I exhale through my mouth slowly deflating my lungs and I have the subliminal (symbolic) visualization of all my thoughts and memories flowing out with my exhalation. Pause before I inhale again, and there's just stillness.
As I begin my next inhalation my normal mind processes start their chatter again. But their jangle decreases as I follow the air into my lungs — but It's not until I have air in my lungs that I'm in stillness again. I'm aware of my pulse and the gentle ringing in my ears. That's all. Exhale, I'm aware of the air leaving my lungs. Stillness until I'm about to begin my next inhalation and then random thoughts and memories start springing up again. They get snuffed out when I focus on the airflow through my nostrils and sinuses. Quick thought: funny that I'm unable to feel the air flowing down my trachea, but I feel it entering my lungs. Stillness again when my lungs are filled. And stillness as I exhale and pause before the next inhalation.
And so on...
So these were my remembered impressions of my first two inhalations and exhalations. I noticed that I'm pretty aware of everything around me. And when I conceptualize thoughts and perceptions, I see them as multidimensional things. They pop up through a chain of associations like beads on a string. If I clutch at a thought beed, my mind will automatically pull up another thought or impressions hung together along a string of associations. I can short-circuit that process by following the sensations of the breath and being aware of the sensations of my body. I'm waaaaaay out of practice though, and I can't help but get distracted by thoughts between each breath cycle. When I was in practicing regularly, I didn't.
And I don't see myself as watching my thoughts from outside. They're coming up from within the thing I consider to be the larger "me." But it's also important to note that I see the me kernal — identity part of my mind — as being nestled in a larger womb/pool/sea of consciousness. I can't really perceive the fluid that my identity is floating in, but shiny thought-fishes are always arising from the depths. I can either reel them in, or I can just sit in the boat — but the only way I can stop reeling them in is to follow my breath. I can just sit in the boat while I inhale and exhale until the thoughts and impressions start rising up from the depths again at the end of each breath cycle.
You may have a totally different visualization of your selfhood, so I don't know if this helps or not.
What advice have you followed to help you be a better husband/wife?
I firmly believe that the most important factor in life satisfaction is a happy family. Most relationship advice centers managing a troublesome partner rather than improving oneself. While it’s obviously hard to be specific, this community is most like myself out of any I’ve found. What works for you?
I'm not married yet, but I'm in a long term relationship and I truly think they are my partner for life.
I find it's really important to be mindful of context and factors that may cause myself or my partner to have friction, and make decisions to reduce friction.
A really common issue - the friking dishes. We're in a privileged position of having a decent income and no kids, so when things are getting too much and I want to scream at my partner for not doing the dishes, I take a step back and interrogate what's happening. Usually what's happening is that I'm stressed and tired and I can't cope with another chore. This is the point where I say, "takeout tonight, then we'll tidy up when we get home".
A lot of people consider the shared pool of tangible resources (money) but not necessarily the intangible (time, energy), and it's important to notice when the demands of life is outstripping available time and energy. We don't fight when we're not tired and hungry!
This goes for a lot of things. Partner drank my coconut water? No big deal, he'll have to buy me another later.
We spend a lot of money on takeout, groceries, etc, because I think mutually we value our relationship more than money. And I have watched a lot of people in my family in unhappy marriages (they're an older generation, they won't divorce) because they just refuse to spend the money to reduce friction.
I think I learnt this from my parents, mostly. (Happily married for nearly 30 years now). Prioritise reducing friction whenever you can. For a frankly ridiculous number of petty grievances, money makes them go away. If you don't have money, then accepting help from family and friends.
More precisely: Peterson pre 2019 is a lot worth listening to, especially on the "do not let sleeping dragons lie". Raise long term issues with your partner. When there's some obvious elephant in the room, find a way to talk about it.
Other big advice: get married or find another sufficiently binding agreement that puts your backs to the wall and forces you to grow. Life's always going to throw cannonballs in your face. Any situation where giving up remains an option on the table is a situation where one of those cannonballs will one day lead to that option being picked up.
I was given some advice by the pastor who married us a few days before the service. I took the advice to heart, and have tried to live by it, and I do believe it has been helpful to my marriage.
He said, "Marriage is not 50-50. Its 100-100. You're going to find yourself thinking that your partner is not doing their fair share: fight that thought. You give 100% of yourself to this marriage, regardless of what your partner gives you. Do not keep score. It will seem unfair sometimes, because it is unfair. You two will never be 'even', so do not aim for that as a goal. Resentment will destroy any marriage."
My wife introduced me to a system called "Fair Play Cards" for managing household tasks. The goal is to reduce "mental load" and "second shift" problems by making tasks open and visible. In a nutshell:
1. List off all the tasks you're doing in your household, and agree on what they entail. Not just basics like cooking and cleaning, also think of more intermittent and hidden things like who's going to the kid's soccer game or who sends birthday/holiday cards to friends. The book has a big list of suggestions to consider.
2. Divvy up the tasks in a way that feels fair to both of you. Since you carefully listed off everything you could think of, you both should have a good idea of what sort of load the other is taking on. If one partner is doing a lot of work but the other doesn't know about it because they're keeping silent about it, that breeds resentment.
3. When you take on a task, you own both the planning and implementation, from start to finish. If you own the grocery shopping task, you are responsible for knowing what ingredients you need and deciding what to put on the shopping list, not just going out and buying stuff. This solves the "mental load" problem where one partner thinks "of course I help, I do all the grocery shopping" and doesn't realize how much time and effort it takes to keep track of the pantry stocks, plan meals, etc.
4. Meet once a week to update each other on your status, plan tasks for next week, and make sure you're both doing okay. Renegotiate tasks as needed. My wife and I get take-out so that we don't have to worry about cooking and cleaning for that night and can just talk.
It's worked pretty well for us. We've also noticed another benefit: when the other spouse is out of town for something, you have a good idea of what you need to take care of while they're gone.
Great question. I (married ~17 yrs) would suggest the following as things you can do unilaterally:
a) You gotta give up the ego around your partner, 100%. This is easy when times are good, but you also gotta do it when your partner is pissed at you over some trivial thing that makes no sense to you. It may help to remember they are not pissed at you, they are having a hard day and you just happened to do that one thing that drives them nuts. There is no argument you can win, because it's not an argument, it's an emotion. The best thing to do is say I'm sorry and put some distance between you ("I need to go check on the dog")
b) If something your partner does bugs you, don't react in the moment. First wait and see if it's a pattern, and see if you can put up with it. When we first moved in together I decided consciously to wait a year before before mentioning any of their annoying habits. After a year most of them had become things I was used to, or understood, or even appreciated as intrinsic to who she is. I gave the others another year, and so on - by now I'm pretty much used to everything except the kitchen mess, but she's such a great cook I decided it was the least I could do to clean up after her.
c) If it's a really big issue, raise it as the start of a conversation that may last days, weeks or months. Don't have all your talking points lined up and expect to come out with a decision or agreement that you want. Say from the start that you want to talk about x, want to hear what they think about your idea/concern/unhappiness, but don't expect a resolution right away. Because if it's a hard issue, you'll both need to listen, think a while, talk, listen, think a while, if you hope to land somewhere that works for both you.
Nothing that made any sense. Which one of had better taste in music, which of us had read more or better authors, which childhood sucked the most. Stuff like that.
The most widely applicable advice I can think of is: someone in the relationship has to keep their mouth shut when things are bothering them, and it might as well be you. The idea that couples should talk about problems and faults they have with each other is a mistake - for the most part you need to just deal with it. Be really, really judicious with criticisms and demands.
Depends on which side you err... if your tendency is already to keep your mouth shut and put up, you can accumulate serious amounts of resentment, and it's not pretty when it all bursts out. Bringing things up in time can help avoid that.
Yes, whoever came up with "never go to bed angry at each other" advice was on a mission to ruin relationship. Don't stay up till 4 am trying to "resolve" an argument, do go to bed, more often than not you'll wake up and won't even remember what the hell that angry argument was all about.
I think it's often misunderstood - I take it to mean that you should get your own head straight before you go to bed so you're not lying there mentally rehearsing the disagreement. Ideally you want to be able to say "I love you, I'm sorry we fought, sleep well and we'll figure it out tomorrow". I think it's good advice on the whole, but I agree with you some people take it to extremes.
"you should get your own head straight before you go to bed so you're not lying there mentally rehearsing the disagreement"
Ideally - yes. But it's often impossible because there's no space to get there in the middle of a fight. So "I can't do this anymore, I need to sleep" is as good a pretense to break the fight as any.
Everyone has a limit to what they'll tolerate. The major discontents get brought to the surface once that threshold is breached. Placing a premium on communication does not mean confronting on every little thing, it's about working through issues as harmoniously as possible.
Very often couples fight because of "tone", defensiveness / hurt feelings, or otherwise some other source of stress that may be out of the ordinary that leads to one more to get snappy. Since we're not mindreaders, communicating well and understanding where everyone is coming from can help diffuse disputes promptly. The confrontations will be inevitable, the difference is whether they will escalate in anger and blunt pointed criticism (all those things we tolerate big and small) versus taking a break and reconvening with honest thoughts and feelings *without* antagonizing your partner.
I would say the couples ONLY fight about tone, defensiveness, hurt feelings or the like. I mean sometimes genuinely large issues come up but it’s rare. Couples probably aren’t having knockdown battles over the Nicene Creed, or the status of trade agreements with China, or even money. It’s almost always tone, irritating habits, chores undone, general feelings of being disrespected or the like.
What you wrote sounds great, but the problem is that these things are incredibly unlike to change. Your wife might leave her family and move across the earth for you. Your husband will convert to Judaism if it means that much to you. But neither is going to stop sounding condescending when talking about proper nutrition for the kids or start cleaning the house “properly” because those things are too ingrained. It’s very difficult to change them at all, and if you start listing all the ways you would prefer you partner was different than they are you’re going to end up even angrier and more unhappy when they fail to update.
I disagree. If both parties approach in good faith for improved communication, the primary shift is that they better understand each other and sooner intervene to avoid needless blowups. No one is expected to be perfect or completely change in their habits for another person, and that isn't contingent on it being the case.
For example, were there a "tone" incident at a certain point in a relationship both parties are pretty aware of what's happening, and so one of two things could happen first a) the person speaking could clarify / apologize, b) the person offended could voice their concern rather than starting a silent treatment and accumulating more discontents, and then diffuse before anything starts.
None of this requires fundamentally changing a person. It's about understanding them, in a two-way street, and making certain concessions and compromises. Anyone who can't make a compromise in a relationship won't get far.
If you're in a situation where your partner won't meet halfway, and you've done all the couples therapy shit, then you have to decide whether you're better off swallowing it or leaving.
Being able to talk about issues seems to me one of the most important things about my relationship with my wife. I think it matters a lot how you approach, and "criticism" or "demand" seems like bad ideas, while "request" or other softer language works just fine.
That said, I definitely agree with you about learning to keep your mouth shut, especially in the heat of a moment. Calling your spouse a derogatory term or with a laundry list of everything that's ever bothered you about them while you're angry is going to make everything worse. Calming down and coming back in an hour with a more helpful approach is really good for relationships.
A very solid set, and I would expand upon a few things.
"Regular, consistent date nights" is often used as a code for "sex is really important", possibly because our culture codes that you must behave as though sex as fundamentally frivolous. I'll be more explicit and simply say "Sex is really, really important". If partnered (particularly life-partnered), you should almost certainly be having more sex. Sex for humans can be bonding. It can be a time to turn off your thoughts. It can be a time to be someone else. It can be a time for the pleasure of giving pleasure. It can be so many things, all the while being quick and inexpensive entertainment and a great sleep-aid. Both partners in a life-relationship need to get comfortable with the fact that if is to be "successful" (i.e., they carry one of you out feet-first) then you will be boinking literally thousands of times with the same person, so it behooves you both to get good at it.
I use "Regular, consistent date nights" as code for "For god's sakes get out of the house occasionally", which is also important.
Rations. In addition to everything else you and your partner will be doing together, you will quite often be eating together. It's a really good idea if one or both of you commit to being able to produce good meals for each other on a regular basis, and enjoy doing so. Poor rations lead to poor morale inexorably, and you often won't even notice _why_ morale is poor. Armies have mutinied over it. The rest of housework is important, but meal provision is an often overlooked key to long-term joint happiness.
You have limits, as you are human. Limits on what you will accept, on what you are capable of, and on what you enjoy. While you should be always be looking to overcome your limits, your partner should nonetheless know and respect them. That means _telling_ your partner when your limits are approached, and what you need with respect to them. This advice of course applies in reflection as well.
If possible, time apart (say a week or so) can be a great opportunity to gain perspective on the partnership. Traveling for work doesn't really count, as you are unlikely to have time for the necessary reflection. Separate vacations, long weekends with friends, hobby retreats, what have you.
These are excellent. I’m curious about “I don’t really know her” because I do feel I know my fiancée extremely well — we probably spend more time together than any couple I know, because of what we do.
What I’ve found is that the woman I thought I knew, when we were engaged existed more in my head than in reality. Training myself to both follow the breath and get in a habit of skepticism made it easier to see that, behind that idea of her, there is this immensely vast unknowable thing. When I focus on that, I’m open to being wrong and curious about what she’ll do next.
The boundary between self and other is, I think, a kind of fractal that grows exponentially. I become more of who I am in our relationship, in part because raising kids is so hard. These challenges make me better understand myself, which then helps me to learn more about her, which increases the surface area of that boundary.
Not apxhard, butting it a bit, hope you don't mind. I've been married for >20y and still don't think I really "know" my wife. Or, to say better, the "unknown" space is still vastly greater than the "known". But I know what you mean: in the early years I may have had a similar illusion.
I think it's fundamentally impossible to fully "know" another person, especially one of the opposite sex. Understanding that brings a degree of humility and curiosity that are vital for a long-term relationship.
If I could distill this to one sentence, it would be "don't assume, ask".
Yes, I'm sure he's a pretty smart guy with very wide reading habits, but I've been consistently unimpressed with his rigour of thought on Marginal Revolution or other work, or hearing him interviewed on podcasts; he's very confident, but I find his willingness to hold forth confidently to be unrelated to the actual extent to which he has thought about something (examples off the top of my head is a lack of thinking through how children or disabled people fit into his libertarianish socio political worldview, or his incoherent ideas about animals ethics.)
Allow me to point out one thing I appreciate, apart from the usefulness of his link aggregation. Cowen sometimes tries to indicate useful limits on how much explanatory power his favorite ideas have, in a way that is useful to the reader, rather than just as a parenthetical remark meant to dissuade criticism. This seems rare in the blogosphere.
I chose this example both because it is recent and because I think it would be a helpful one for the many ACX commenters who have read Hayek and/or Seeing Like a State.
>examples off the top of my head is a lack of thinking through how children or disabled people fit into his libertarianish socio political worldview
What do children have to do with libertarianism? This objection strikes me as a category error. Libertarianism is a political philosophy and children don't participate in politics. I believe the only libertarian attitude here would be to limit State interference and let families raise their kids however they like (modulo things like abuse).
I guess OP means: what about orphans or children with woefully inadequate parents, and what about people who have expensive care needs that a realistic salary can't pay for? Sometimes people can't stand on their own two feet without help — does libertarianism just say "bad luck, you're on your own?"
I think the stock libertarian reply would be that most people agree that helping needy people is important, and if we do agree that we're free to help via private charity. I think a libertarian would say that it's wrong to force people to be charitable if they don't want to be, and also that the state is an inefficient and untrustworthy means of allocating charity, so it's better overall to let people help directly.
Yes, I think this is both correct and consistent with my answer. "Letting people help via private charity" conforms to the libertarian notion of "this isn't within the State's remit, deal with it yourself." Some people might view this as a cruelly laissez faire attitude in the context of child care, but libertarians (rightly, in my opinion) view the harms caused by a potentially indifferent culture to be less than those caused by well-meaning policy enacted by incompetent bureaucrats. Government simply can't solve some problems directly and ultimately does more damage when it tries.
MR is a very frequently updated content aggregator, usually with something interesting.
He hosts interesting interviews with interesting people, and asks good questions.
He shares insightful comments even if I don't agree with him on 33-50%+ of everything. His readership seems to lean far more to the right and criticizes him at every turn, so in that microcosm the quasi-libertarianism seems moderate.
This does _not_ answer your steel-manning request, since that is way beyond my ken. As a lay person I attach a great deal of weight to how someone is viewed by peers and Professor Cowen appears to be held in high regard by peers. The breadth of his culture is unusual; in modern times with super-specializations finding a single human who knows so much about so much reveals both the interconnectedness of knowledge and the possibility of a modern "renaissance man". His writing is interesting, I almost always finish reading the full piece, of many others I abandon midway.
He has said that his routine for interviewing people is to read the top N books on Amazon. For example, he interviewed Martina Navratilova and read the top five books on tennis and a couple on Navratilova. When he interviewed her, he came across as something of an expert. When he interviewed Gary Kasparov, he asked him about an opening from, 1981 (or whatever) and was able to hold forth on the merits of moving his knight where he did (or whatever). I have heard him speak knowledgeably about my own profession (software engineering) too. I listened to him interviewing Fareed Zakaria last night. Cowen knew more about the history of India and foreign relations in the 80s than any non-expert has any right to know. He does this week after week.
I can't think of anyone in the world who has such a diversity of knowledge. Maybe he doesn't know as much about a topic as the experts in that topic but he sure knows a lot and his knowledge sure is diverse.
PS. I don't think Marginal Revolution provides credible evidence either way. It's a casual blog.
I should maybe clarify: it's not that he's not knowledgeable, relative to an average member of the public. It's that he seems to be performing a level of expertise and understanding that he lacks.
I’d like to hear this too. I’ve only followed Tyler for a couple years but I’ve noticed much more of an offputting soldier mindset in him. Not sure whether that’s him changing or just me noticing.
In what way is he a "soldier"? The comments on MR rightly accuse him of being far too Straussian, since he rarely takes any strong stands on issues. I've read MR since its inception btw.
I haven't seen "soldier"-ish behavior either; if at all he has chips on his shoulder he is good at hiding them. This is despite him seemingly obsessed with status -- this is not just about platonic discussions of the concept but of status, but a lot of "Who is the most underrated/overrated", who needs to increase in status type stuff. That said, one hears related complaints. Many accuse him of being provocative, and he seems to drive some sections of his readership really mad, but I am not sure what to think of this: in such situations the rest of his readership seems to barely notice any pressing of buttons. He *seems* sometimes to throw in gratuitous bits that at least superficially sound judgemental, like: "Via the apparently excellent Bruce Cleaver." He makes comments such as "Country X does this thing better than country Y" or "women tend to have a better attitude on this than men", using language that is mild, and yet more definitive and less tentative than one might normally expect.
True, and while it is clear Tyler is a bit of a troll, an underappreciated fact about the commenters on MR is they are mostly rather highly self aware and in on the joke. The median comment on MR would get a ban on ACX, so I always have to remember to be well behaved here after saying what I *really* think under one of my sockpuppet accounts on MR (yes, I could say what I really think here, but not without much prevarication and bowing to the rarionalist gods, and I simply don't have the patience, being a post-rationalist after all).
While Scott polices various bad faith attributions/conflict-theoretic behavior, MR seems to police content more. Yesterday in that Michael Cook post there was a handle called "Crusader", worrying about Khamenei asking Iranian Americans to fight against the US. Though I felt the comment was stupid, it wasn't phrased incitefully, and was anyway overwhelmed by numerous counters, some of which were insightful. But they deleted the comment and thereby the counters as well.
What is your explanation for the quality of MR comments having deteriorated over the last 10 years (if you agree with this)? Tyler was no more or less a troll back then. Is it that back then smart people tended to look up more to economists to explain the world to them (as a recent piece of Noahpinion suggests)?
I know what you mean by deteriorating comments, but they are worse in one dimension while being better in others. People who want a rationalist style pedantry have a forum here (I'm describing tradeoffs on Scott's moderation, not declaring it inferior). I would agree over the last year MR comments have gotten a bit ridiculous at times even for my taste.
I have seen the deletions you mention on occasion and it really is a puzzle as to why certain comments are targeted. Adds to the mystique of the place, though I personally never had any of my comments deleted.
I think where I disagree with the moderation here is that bad faith comments are fine if they provide a new perspective. Though I'm highly immune to getting emotional over political discussion, and admit that others may regard ridiculous comments to be inflammatory. (is in this thread, unlees deleted, you can see someone being accused of supporting Hamas and him going ballistic. If I was accused of X, I would just find it silly for pretty much all values of X if I judged it untrue; sometimes humans really confuse me)
I see Tyler as a great curator. He's great at finding interesting stuff from around the web and connecting it with other interesting stuff. He's also really good at drawing people out in conversation, so I find his podcast worth listening to. But, agreed, when I read his original stuff, it's mostly pretty mid.
TBH I don't get him either. He's on my list of people who a lot of people I respect seem to respect but just seems completely banal to me (Paul graham is an even more extreme case, even before, uh, recent trends).
Graham is at least successful in a field requiring more than "what your contemporaries let you get away with saying" (as Richard Rorty defined "truth").
Suppose you're a highly educated, socially conservative American Christian with two young children (a boy and a girl) and while you don't want to raise them as cloistered fundamentalists, you also think the broader culture has kind of gone crazy and you don't want them to end up woke or (God forbid) transgender. If you could choose to live anywhere in the US (any state, city/suburban/rural), where would you choose to live to best achieve this goal?
The obvious, and perhaps correct, answer is a strongly religious area in a red state. On the other hand, anecdotally many woke ex-Christians (or ex-conservative Christians) are rebelling against growing up in restrictive conservative environments. And there's a lot of crazy out there in conservative areas for children to rebel against. So maybe there's a case to be made for exposing your children to progressive craziness to inoculate them against it.
Correct me if I've got you wrong - so I think what you want to avoid is a specific kind of person that makes everything about politics?
If so, I think geography might not be the biggest factor. This is an attitude thing, and it comes from home. Besides, you're looking at a 10 - 15 year time horizon - a place can change a great deal in this time, and the "woke" that you're talking about will inevitably shapeshift. It'll be some completely new thing by the time your kids are teens.
I think the biggest thing you can do is model being a good, grounded human. This means try to avoid very biased, partisan content. Steer clear of the opinion columns. Personally don't engage with political content that makes you angry (much easier said than done).
The aim is to model someone who focuses on the important things in life - the day to day. Your family, loved ones, and doesn't spend energy raging about real or imagined slights on one political tribe or another.
Don't set a precedent that it's normal to spend all your time ranting about politics. That means even if say, your cashier is visibly trans, you treat them like a normal person - polite respect. You don't give them any special attention, negative or positive. Just normal.
Its different if there's a local issue that will impact your own day to day, but approach it with practicality and respect for community norms. Model the behaviour you wanna see, wrt to fitting in with community wishes. You might wanna pick a specific community that you think you can fit into - not necessarily for educational reasons, but because it would make you happy to be surrounded by people who understand you and have similar values.
I can't predict what stupid debate is going to dominate our attentions in 2038, but I hope this skillset and attitude will be broadly applicable. It doesn't require finding a homogeneous community and hoping it doesn't change over the next decade. It only requires being mindful of what you spend your time talking about and how you go about it.
Interestingly someone else suggested Austin specifically as a good place to move to. Perhaps it has both a disproportionate number of far-left progressives and principled conservatives, so that it depends on your social circles in the city?
Because I don't want to encourage any more conservatives to move here who will vote for the anti-abortion extremists in Austin. This used to be a nice state. You won't be welcome be people like me if you vote for Greg Abbot, Dan Patrick and his ilk.
There's always the midwest or certain large cities in the south, but I think your concern is mostly a boogeyman. Twitter-land doesn't reflect opinions on the ground. For all of it, kids just want to be kids, they're interested in sports videogames and anime, not politics. Even in later years, it's the always-online types who adopt more extreme views, in either direction.
If you're planning on going to Church or sending kids to a religious private school, then you already control for environment so it's a moot point.
I am inclined to think that "no smartphone" is 50% of the battle, and restricting Internet usage/encouraging them to play outside is another 25%. But I do think peer influence and IRL social environment also matter here.
Private school (or homeschooling) is an option but it's nice to not feel you have to rely on that. And I'm not totally convinced that either option is the best way to inoculate your children against progressive craziness, especially if they're not exposed to those ideas much outside of school and then are suddenly hit with them when they go to college.
Learning how to think and be skeptical is the only inoculation against bad ideas.
Having been to college, radicalism was not new to anyone by the time they arrived as it was all exposed through internet, but one's major of study (STEM vs liberal arts) is a reliable predictor of whether peer environment will be far left or moderate. Classmates are ultimately the ones you hang around with anyway.
All that said, I don't think you can force or expect your kids to reflect the same worldview you have.
My understanding is that smartphones are just a fact of life for kids nowadays and denying them one will exclude them from routine social activities and make them an outcast.
I expect my kids to make that argument! I'm inclined to give them dumb phones but I also understand there are some smartphones with restricted features on the market -- I'll probably look into those too. I'd also love to enroll them in a school that doesn't allow smartphones, which seem to be getting more common.
You absolutely can and should raise your children without smartphones. All you need to make it work is a sufficient number of other parents who are doing the same thing.
If everyone has a smartphone, the kid without one is just a pariah.
If one in twenty kids don't have one, most other kids will be familiar with the idea that they aren't a given.
If one in five kids doesn't have one, then kids will no longer expect that all social activity, invitations to gatherings, etc. should be carried out through the phone, as every group will likely have one or two people who need to be contacted separately.
I'm less enthused about the pressuring government for regulation angle, but I definitely see the value in sending a clear signal that a huge number of parents are already in agreement about this.
People have tried that, and it never works. The reason these modern religious movements like Quiverfull fail is because they give their children the option to leave. If you want to properly indoctrinate your children, cutting them off from the outside world is the only way to get decent results.
The Amish are doing fine giving their children the option to leave. I believe the children are expected to get exposure to the outside world, so that they can make a genuine choice to be Amish.
I have thought about the Amish here -- something like 93% of Amish children remain Amish now. Is the combination of "cloistered upbringing" followed by rumspringa at adolescence the key to their success? And is there a way for us to replicate that if we don't want to go off and join an intentional community like the Amish or Hutterites?
Ya know there are conservative transgender people, and there were transgender people long before 2015 or whenever you want to attribute wokeness to. There are worse things.
Do you know personally any adult or young adult trans people?
I hate to make this another thread about tension on this point but genuinely I think the answer to your question is it's the wrong question. Raise your kids to be independent, rigorous thinkers and questioners, and give them the emotional tool box to deal with distress and they won't be susceptible to social contagion. Spend their formative years giving your best arguments for your conservative values, why they work, why some people think they don't, and don't lie to them. Give them a happy childhood and reason to like you.
If youre at all sure your own values are correct and you raise independent happy free thinking kids and you've had their whole childhood to share your perspective, they're gonna end up close but not exactly where you are in all probability. And if they don't, that's a thing you really don't have control over.
And if they end up trans anyway, which is a 1/50-1/100 chance roughly, they'll be trans and happy.
Yes, I know several trans people personally, and interact with others I don't know well fairly frequently (I live in a very left-wing city currently). I think this thread is probably not the most productive place to debate the (un)desirability of people identifying as transgender -- it's a starting premise for the question I'm asking that this is bad for oneself. (OTOH, the *causes* are relevant -- if, say, transgenderism was mainly caused by environmental pollutants than social contagion, then one might prefer to live in a liberal city rather than a conservative rural area, counterintuitive as that might initially be.)
That said, I do generally agree with your other advice. I have no desire to indoctrinate my children, both because I think it would be wrong and because I think it would be ineffective, and I will love them no matter what choices they make.
Teaching your kids to be really good independent skeptical thinkers and also teaching them religion in a serious capacity seem to contradict each other.
I agree that that is a good solution but I don't think everyone can implement it.
I genuinely accidentally tacked on an extra 0 by mistake. Its 1-2%. Adults in the US has remained steady at ~1% for a while depending on how you count (many demo sites list 0.5%) , youth has doubled over the last 10 years to ~2-3%, again depending how you count.
>On the other hand, anecdotally many woke ex-Christians (or ex-conservative Christians) are rebelling against growing up in restrictive conservative environments.
In my experience, at least some of the most strident atheists I know come from rural or less-inhabited areas and are the children of secular families in areas that some religious group (in Finland, typically Laestadians) dominates strongly, or at least families who don't belong to the specific group in question. People who have left such a religious group tend to be less across-the-board antireligious and more specifically against *that* particular group.
They will learn from your example, not from your words.
If I am happy and emotionally well regulated and I don’t regularly express contempt and disgust for others, i think my kids will pick up on that.
If I am angry about the world, anxious about the future and dismissive of others, I think my kids will call BS on my claims to believe that I’m trying to be like Jesus.
I live outside Cincinnati, where I grew up. Mark Twain said he wanted to be here when the world ended because we are always “20 years behind the times,” which is maybe a good thing if the culture is running off or a cliff. I definitely recommend it as a good place for raising kids.
I want my kids to understand Marx and feminism and progressivism and understand why those ideas are appealing. I will keep centering, “remove the plank from your own eye before the splinter from your neighbors”, because I really think Christianity would be far more popular and powerful if we did a better job following His example.
Thanks, I appreciate the perspective. And my natural inclinations are similar for teaching the appeal of ideas I reject. I have to admit though that the last decade (the decade of Trump, BLM, transgenderism, covid, etc.) has shaken my faith in human reasonability, as I have seen so many of my friends and family who are otherwise intelligent and sane adopt what seem to me insane (and often harmful) beliefs. And this has made me somewhat less charitable in how I think about other people's beliefs, because in some cases it seems to me that widely believed [insane thing] is not actually prima facie appealing at all, but instead believed for totally arational reasons like social desirability.
Yes, I think this is true too. But we fortunately have to excellent teachers, admired by history. Jesus tells us to fix our own models rather than try to adjust or judge the models of people. And Socrates tells us the essence of wisdom if knowing we have a deep capacity to fool ourselves, and we do it all the time. I think it only takes a small number doing the right thing, and as long as they do it without anger or contempt or disgust, but with love and respect, others can’t help but follow. I think we shoot ourselves in the foot when we express disgust or anger at people for thinking the wrong way. But that’s much easier said than done.
Hmm. I'm not American. I was raised a moderate evangelical Christian. I am now fairly socially conservative, not really a Christian but a theist with a Christian-inspired personal theology, and have never been an atheist or rebelled in a significant way (unless you count a short time around 19 calling myself a Marxist). If it's acceptable for your children to turn out like me, a few random thoughts:
1. Tell them they have a right to believe whatever they want. I can't emphasise it enough. I don't think we can overstate the extent to which being told you're not allowed to question destroys someone and makes them an extremist. It's the exact reason the wokists are such widely hated scum.
2. Condemn your side's extremists. It's not enough to not hold horrible beliefs yourself. I remember how bewildering and horrifying it was to discover the things many Christians believed. I was angry, and scared, seeing things like "God will eternally torure everyone who dies without believing the exact right things, and this will be wonderful and just!", and what I wanted (which I got some of but could have used a lot more) was an unequivocal "the people saying this are *evil* and completely fake Christians and false prophets".
3. I don't know about location. I grew up in the suburbs of Melbourne in the 2000s. I'm not sure what the American equivalent is to "progressive-leaning but in a relaxed kind of way" but I'm guessing maybe New England?
On #3, is Melbourne still that relaxed nowadays? I read about things like the "Let Women Speak" rally last year and the suspension of Moira Deeming from the (right-wing!) Liberal Party for attending the rally and it looks to me like the city has gone off the rails.
I would tend to think of New England as a bit more easy-going (with the Pacific Northwest a closer American analogue to contemporary Melbourne) though there's plenty of craziness there too (but maybe more confined to college campuses?).
Yes, the government's gone off the rails recently, that's why I specified the 2000s. Though my sense is that the average person is a lot less politicised than the average person in say San Fransisco. Also, though I don't follow the details of what politicians say or are censured for saying on a daily basis, there's a much stronger effect (due mostly to our electoral system) of major parties sticking closer to the centre, *especially* when they've lost a few elections in a row (which the state Liberals have). By comparison, the federal Labor government around 2010 was aggressively opposing gay marriage, cracking down on territories' attempts to enact civil unions and binding every one of their MPs to vote against it (this was their first term after losing four elections). Needless to say, this didn't reflect their actual positions.
(And also, parties exert much more control over their members' public statements and votes than in the US).
As someone raised in a similar religious background, I wanted more #2 but found the adults in my life were fairly incapable of actually backing up that claim scripturally. Now a couple of my siblings have moved to just accepting statements like that (probably not 'wonderful', but certainly 'just'). Slim odds I know, but were there any resources (books, essays, etc) that made that case to you - the case that the bible doesn't say that most good people go to hell?
On the broader point: I agree exposure to a wide array of ideas is much preferable to sheltering. I read the Communist Manifesto and Atlas Shrugged in the same year as a teenager, and now think I'm immunized against both poles of extremity - I expect similar exposure plus open discussion would prevent most people from becoming extremists.
"Slim odds I know, but were there any resources (books, essays, etc) that made that case to you - the case that the bible doesn't say that most good people go to hell?"
There are perhaps three distinct issues here.
1. Whether God permanently punishes some people without eventual forgiveness (which amounts to universalism being false).
2. Whether this permanent punishment is simply destruction (anilihation) or hell.
3. Whether the thing they are punished for is some evil action, or simply not being a saved Christian.
It seems hard to find much support for 1. On 2, however, my memory is that pretty much throughout the Old Testament and through most of Paul, the fate of sinners is described as death, perishing, or not inheriting the kingdom of God. And there's little or no reference to hell.
Most references to hell I think are from Jesus (ironically, supposedly the most loving manifestation of God) and Revelation. Moving on to 3, the two parts of the Gospels that I remember being most explicitly about hell are the "sheep and the goats" in Matthew, and the "rich man and Lazuras", and both are clearly about punishing rich people who ignored or oppressed the poor. References to punishing those who don't believe are less explicit.
So, there seems plenty of support for denying the fundamentalist position on 2 and 3. The fundamentalists would read "perish" as a metaphor for hell, but others will just as easily read "hell" as a metaphor for perishing. And it's most clearly invoked for rich people mistreating the poor, but obviously that doesn't fit very well with the worldview of those who tend to be fundamentalists, so they disregard that and instead focus on punishment for not believing in Jesus, (or not believing in the right way).
1. I've always had a much better opinion of the universalist religions / sects because infinite punishment for finite crime (or, in the case of pretty good thoughtful kind people who just don't believe the human sacrifice of some dude a couple thousand years ago absolves them of their sin, arguably no crime at all) seems wrong. Alas, the Christian bible seems fairly conclusive on this not being so, and I doubt my family would ever be convinced on that point.
2. seems more promising, I'll look more into the annihilation vs torture claims in the bible - I also remember that the OT was pretty mild on hell. I'm totally fine with my family thinking that I'll be annihilated after I die (as I think this is also the most likely outcome), it's just the "thinking it's correct that I forever be tortured" that's a pretty hard pill to swallow from people I love.
3. My family's theology also seems quite convinced on this one, being good or bad isn't the key factor, believing in Jesus is. The serial rapist who repents in prison goes to heaven, Gandhi goes to hell.
I'll keep an eye out for essays / books / etc (ideally from a Christian perspective as that's all that would be convincing) making the case for 2 that nonbelievers just get annihilated.
IMO, a truly benevolent God could not send people to hell forever, and the benevolence of god is frequently repeated dogma. But then again, I ended up atheist.
I too ended up atheist, but it sure would be nice to not have most members of my family (with whom I am still surprisingly close) think I'm going to hell to be tortured forever and that's *somehow a good thing*.
Thus the looking for biblical arguments against that particular theology (otherwise I'd have pretty little interest in biblical arguments).
Yes, New England generally fits the bill. Look at states like MA and NH consistently electing Republican governors while sending moderate/reasonable Democratic congresspeople to DC.
Salt lake city maybe? But I haven't actually lived there enough to know how crazy it really is. It seemed like an unusually balanced and reasonable place when I've visited.
I have given this a lot of thought over the last few months.
We don't want to end up with fragile beliefs that persist only because we never allow ourselves to hear arguments that contradict them. I can't imagine anyone who wants to still be monitoring and influencing their kids' media exposure by the time those kids are 20.
At the same time, we all understand that seductive ideas introduced before the kid has enough context or perspective to properly evaluate them could lead them down dangerous and self-destructive routes.
[EDITED TO ADD: I would consider a child who turns away from transgender rhetoric because "my daddy told me that was bad" to be probably initially necessary, but strictly worse than a child who can say, "that's bullshit because X, Y, Z". Not just because one is a more mature response, but because knowledge of X, Y and Z are going to make them more robust against other bad ideas or ideological attacks that I as their father are unaware of.]
I'd love a way to quantify at what point a child is intellectually robust enough to begin reading bad/enemy ideas. I don't believe it will end up having anything to do with that child's age, and a lot more to do with what mental models the child has in its head that tell it how to deal with new information.
I remember reading someone suggest that we teach all kids to be Flat Earthers at 15, so they have the experience of finding later on that it doesn't add up and realising that some strongly held beliefs can be bullshit.
There's another possiblity, and it might be as simple as: poisonous ideas were seductive when they first came out, purely because the consequences weren't known and/or the incumbent ideology hadn't got the concepts or vocabulary to hand to identify the mistake/spot the dirty trick the idea was making.
So while the transgender meme did definitely spread across society, and definitely ruined the lives of a lot of people, society might eventually become "immunised" to it and your kids can be allowed to read all this stuff with a clear conscience because the culture it's landing in is a different shape now.
This would be very nice, if true. Am I going to bet my kids' future happiness on it? Probably not.
Yup, it sounds like we're in similar places. I've also been tempted by the same line of thought about transgenderism but I'm also not confident it will work out that way.
My current thinking about how I would like my children to be exposed to transgenderism in particular is for them to learn that there are people who (for various reasons) pretend that they're the opposite sex, and that the rest of us have to figure out how to relate to them. Then we can have a conversation about how different people think about that issue (e.g., do we use preferred pronouns etc.). That is something that my children will have to figure out and if they come out in a different place than me then that's okay.
What I would like to avoid is my children seriously considering whether *they* are transgender, and there I do feel like being around fewer (especially) same-age peers who have bought into that idea may be helpful. I think this is consistent with my desire that my children be exposed to serious intellectual ideas from a variety of perspectives. That kind of intellectual pluralism doesn't imply that it's healthy for children to be in an environment that prompts them to seriously consider various forms of self-harm -- e.g., I would similarly rather my children didn't find themselves seriously asking the question "should I cut off my limbs?".
Yes - even if transgenderism slides from grace, the belief system behind it will only go underground and throw up some further lunacy in a few years' time. So hoping for the best is definitely not my favourite option. In fact it enrages me when other parents adopt that approach by default. (These are your *kids*! Don't you care at all who's shitting in their minds?)
On the other hand, most be-childrened people where I'm living now aren't paying attention, but low-key aren't pro- this kind of stuff, so hopefully the company my offspring end up keeping won't be too bad of an influence.
My biggest concern right now is probably media. I believe that the same agenda going on in Disney, et al. is also being pushed in children's programming - and without any kind of indignant fan backlash that might check its progress.
My current thinking is that I might just fill a hard drive with a few thousand hours of the TV shows that I remember from my own childhood, and restrict the child's options to that. (We ourselves don't have a TV in the house, or any kind of streaming service subscription, so that makes it a lot easier.)
I would do the same with children's books, but it's a bit harder because we see a lot of those being sold at fairs and the like, and when a child is old enough they'll start wanting them of their own accord. I always stop and flick through a couple, and I would say maybe one in three includes some kind of progressive sensibilities I don't like.
I actually think there's an awful lot of value sitting on YouTube. I'm thinking of scraping a few hundred channels - things like Veritasium, Colin Furze, etc - which are great content. It's not fair on the content creators, of course, but I am not interested in giving my child unsupervised access to Youtube proper.
> what point a child is intellectually robust enough to begin reading bad/enemy ideas
Many (most?) ideas are bad, but I'm hesitant to label any ideas as 'enemy'.
> while the transgender meme... society might eventually become "immunised" to it
The fact that plenty of seemingly-intelligent college kids call themselves communists ~30 years after that was definitively proven to be a terrible ideology suggests to me that such immunization is not guaranteed - I suspect it's not even coin-toss odds.
I'm comfortable giving that label to ideas that advance the interests of the propagating party at the cost of the receiving one.
For example, a fair minded guy talking about class economics or gender politics might say a bunch of stuff and a lot of it could be wrong. As that guy gains life experience and builds better models of the world, he's going to change his mind and become less wrong.
But a class warrior telling just-so stories that spread resentment towards the factory bosses, or a lesbian feminist teaching a classroom full of young boys to hate themselves, I would count as enemy ideas. Both those individuals are *not* dumb and would gain no benefit from changing their behaviour. (It is a *good* idea to teach self-limiting beliefs to people whose own interests conflict with yours.)
But they are clearly doing something malign, from the perspective of the people receiving the memes.
EDIT: A non-political example of an enemy idea: "This nice salesman is offering me a deal but the offer isn't open for long so I gotta decide right now - well as he says, sometimes you just have to Follow Your Heart because after all you only live once."
> I'm comfortable giving that label to ideas that advance the interests of the propagating party at the cost of the receiving one.
Well argued. You've changed my position, thank you. Looking back, I think my former position was an over-generalization of my heuristic that we should be slow to label people as enemies (far too often people see even the majority of their own countrymen as 'enemies', which seems quite bad to me), but you're right that ideas that match that definition are enemy ideas.
> plenty of seemingly-intelligent college kids call themselves communists
You're not wrong. But I'd allege that in Victorian times when these ideas were first proposed, we not only didn't know how it would go, but we didn't even have concepts of groupthink, organisational incentive structures, or the free market as a discoverer of value. Those ideas probably existed, but they weren't arrayed out there in the public consciousness, ready to hand to explain what communism was doing wrong.
Which is why back then it was the brightest minds of the realm expounding the ideology, not just idiot college kids.
"Those ideas probably existed, but they weren't arrayed out there in the public consciousness, ready to hand to explain what communism was doing wrong."
Read up on Bastiat and especially his debate with Proudhon. A sincere recommendation of a great man, who did great work. In the 1840s.
+1 to the recommendation on Bastiat. Reading his work and comparing it to the Communist Manifesto (roughly contemporaneous), it's hard not to get the feeling that Marx was by far a lessor mind.
One of the things I most remember from ACOUP is how he said that the Roman model of governance was "find the most virtuous people and put them in charge". If things go wrong, it means your leaders weren't virtuous enough. They had no concept of designing institutions to work with flawed humans because it just wasn't part of the intellectual water like it is today.
I should point out that from an evolutionary perspective, "my daddy told me that was bad" is just about the best possible reason to reject something.
The reason for this is that culture transmitted from parent to child must be helpful to the family, because it reproduces when they do. Culture transmitted from peer to peer is free to be harmful to its hosts.
There was a blogger, EvolutionistX, who coined terminology that focused this difference, referring to vertically transmitted culture as "mitochondrial memes" and horizontally transmitted culture as "viral memes".
> I remember reading someone suggest that we teach all kids to be Flat Earthers at 15, so they have the experience of finding later on that it doesn't add up and realising that some strongly held beliefs can be bullshit.
This is already a pretty conventional strategy, called "Santa Claus".
I would rather like to cheat evolution, by having all of my kids survive and reproduce without allowing dumb chance to kill them off in ways I could have prevented.
An adult becoming transgender just to rebel against their parents is unlikely, that’s more of a child social contagion thing. Your priority should be getting them to adulthood safely, and being able to accept that you will have little influence on whether they become woke or trans in the long run. Spending their childhood around Christians seems the best way to ensure they won’t have those values during childhood.
Top advice has some grounding in science, what follows is pure speculation. If you don’t want your children to rebel, there seems to be three keys. Give your children a happy childhood, be someone your child likes, and don’t lie to them. Every adult I met that has rebelled had one of those traits, and all three are decently in your control. The trickiest one is not lying, because I’ve met adults who consider just being raised Christian to be lying, since they became atheist.
If I suspect I have mild autism making it more difficult to make and keep friends, is it worth visiting a psychiatrist to maybe get a diagnosis? Is there anything practical they can offer that would actually help? And should I be worried that a formal diagnosis would make me less employable or more likely to be involuntarily committed?
People have been involuntarily committed for saying true things to psychiatrists when they were supposed to tell the socially expected lies (e.g. rounding off your occasional existential musings to "No of course I do not ever have suicidal thoughts"). And autistic people are at least somewhat more likely to miss the fact that society expects them to lie about something.
I agree that this risk is probably very low in this context, but it isn't zero.
I can't see why you would be involuntarily committed for autism unless you think you have some other issue as well, or unless you are extremely anxious and worried about such things.
It might not be any harm to see someone about such anxiety.
I have a general unfamiliarity with the mental health system, such that I do not know whether "has a diagnosis for a mental illness, nevermind that it's totally unrelated" is enough to shift an edge case to the other side . Hopefully I won't get into any edge cases, but I'm pessimistic enough about what the gains could be that even a mild downside is worth considering.
In that case, note that our host is a professional psychiatrist with significant experience with the inpatient mental health system, and has written an informative guide titled, well...
I’m sure other people will have better answers than mine, but I have mild autism myself, and in my personal experience: going to a therapist/psychologist if your autism makes you feel like crap is good, since it helps understanding better what is actually making your life difficult, etc. Someone with training in CBT could also help you improve your ability to make friends or do other stuff. In my case, doing all that involved getting a diagnosis: I showed up to my therapist because some things that turned out to be consequences of autism were making me miserable, and I had no clue why I was behaving like that, so the therapist thought that actually making sure whether it was autism or not was valuable. But in the general case, you can get therapy for "I’m crap at making friends and I think it’s because I’m autistic" without needing an actual diagnosis. I also don’t think you’d have to share your diagnosis with anyone, if you get diagnosed. Since being diagnosed doesn’t make your symptoms worse, you’re still as employable as without a diagnosis. At any rate, discrimination against high-functioning ASD isn’t that massive, compared to other disorders? So, overall, I don’t think there’s really anything wrong with getting a diagnosis. On the other hand, I talked about therapists while you talked about psychiatrists: if your therapist is properly trained, in psychology, maybe CBT, etc., the only advantages of seeing a psychiatrist instead is that the psychiatrist can give medication, focuses more on treating disorders rather than on managing them, and is (even) more expensive. So, for uncomplicated autism, which can’t be ‘cured’, there’s not much point in seeing one. It is also slightly easier for a psychiatrist to involuntarily commit you, but that doesn’t matter as much as you seem to think: both would be pretty much legally obliged to commit you if you say you intend to kill yourself and won’t change your mind (and some are more or less willing to take risks on that front), but no one will commit you just for being mildly autistic (once again, a diagnosis doesn’t make your symptoms worse: if you’re not crazy right now, you still won’t be if you get diagnosed! :-) )
I don’t have the same issues as you, but I’ve seen psychiatrists for a while. I could envision an SSRI being helpful for someone like you. It’s helped me to lower my anxiety and neuroticism which improved my social fluidity. I feel more like a normal person now.
Do you work for the federal government or another highly regulated industry? If not, I wouldn’t be worried about it affecting your employment. They won’t involuntarily commit you unless you’re a danger to yourself or others.
I had a fairly traumatic life event happen recently. It's made me think about whether I'm really leading the life I want to. I fill my life with lots of fun and educational media, and I value learning new skills a lot. I play several instruments and have several other hobbies, and I love getting better at these things. I'm a very successful software engineer at a big big tech company, building very niche systems, striving for operational efficiency and delivery of small new features.
But it almost feels like I'm filling my life with valueless hobbies, and wasting my time. These fill my time and keep me busy and somewhat happy, but they don't really make the world a better place or bring me closer to the people I love.
I wonder if I should be doing something greater with my life, to try to make the world actively better, instead of just existing in it. There must be something I can do. I feel like I worked so hard to become an engineer in big tech, and my skill set includes management skills, design and coding skills, and business skills. I'd like to leverage those skills in some way. How did one leverage skills such as these to try to do something that is more impactful? The sheer magnitude of the question paralyzes me, and I never end up making progress on it
These sort of traumatic life examination-prompting events happen every few years, and I usually just eventually go back to existing and doing what I'm doing. I don't know if that is if either me getting over the trauma which allows me to go back to normal, or if it is me chickening out from a greater calling, choosing a selfish comfortable and non impactful life over trying to actually make the world better. I have had also many traumatic (in a different way) events in the past that have ended up making me scared about my ability to maintain my life as is, so striking out on something new (especially if I don't even know what it is) is extra terrifying to me.
Edit: Thanks for the replies so far, everyone! I'm trying to sort out my own feelings right now, and what I feel is impactful. I also agree with many of you, that it might be enough just to have a good life with family, and not hurt people. That's how I've generally lived so far, but what if I wanted to go further than just that? I guess maybe part of these traumatic experiences are making me believe that fostering (not necessarily romantic) love between people is the most important thing that I shouldn't lose track of, and extending people's lives so that they can feel each other's love as long as possible, or making it so that people can more easily care for others in some way. I want to do something that helps people live longer, or reduces suffering in the world by allowing people to better care for those they love. I don't really want to go into healthcare tech, though, because it's a total nightmare of legacy systems and red tape. Maybe that's just indication that there be dragons in the whole notion of "making people live longer", and it's not worth trying.
I too work in Big Tech and frequently have the same problem. Some vague thoughts:
Thinking "I will change and improve the world!" is not, generally, a good way to improve the world. Volunteering at a soup kitchen or similar hard work that must be done is more likely to be helpful and is much more achievable.
Similarly, spending more time with your friends and family - real, in-person time, not everyone staring at their smartphones - will probably make you happier and more fulfilled. This can be difficult, especially for people in Big Tech, but it's also incredibly valuable.
And finally, try making something physical with your own two hands. I've noticed that working with bits makes me feel tired and unmoored, while working with atoms makes me feel more satisfied and centered. I work with textiles, and it just feels good to make something beautiful and functional that I can touch and will be around for many years. Humans spent hundreds of thousands of years working with physical objects and we find it satisfying in ways that moving colored lights on a screen is not. So maybe give that a try.
Anecdotally, a similar feeling for me (common on weekends in college) went away once I got more regular exercise.
> I'm a very successful software engineer at a big big tech company
Unless you're doing something obviously parasitic (i.e. crypto scams), you are likely already improving the world more than the average person. Many problems of the past were solved more by gradually increasing wealth and automation than by people who set out to solve those problems explicitly. (E.g., consider the role of electrical appliances in women's liberation.)
It sounds like you have a nice, productive, stable, happy life. Don't throw it away just because your brain has some unscratched itch about the vast unexplored horizon. It's not up to you to fix the world. Learn to cultivate your garden.
If you feel that something is missing in your life, you shouldn't ignore that feeling. But it's not necessarily the first thing that comes to your mind that you are really missing. Often the feeling that something is missing is genuine, but the idea what exactly is missing is just a meme coming from your friends and culture.
Note that you can make the world a better place also by doing smaller things, and actually it might be better to start with smaller things and get some practice. (And by also donating some money to EA causes, so you can have both strategies in your portfolio.) As a software engineer, you also didn't start your career by trying to build the most complex software ever.
To achieve something, you usually need to cooperate with other people. But those will probably have ideas of their own. So maybe a good way is to listen to other people's dreams, and support them using your skills.
I've been going through something similar recently, so I can relate to a lot of what you say. I'm also a successful engineer in aerospace and was fortunate enough to live in several different countries and cultures. My thinking has been quite different though: I'm starting to feel that instead of trying to make the world better, I'd be happier and perhaps find more meaning if I just live with less big ambition and focus more on finding a lifestyle I actually want.
As for what you say, I can only advise that huge questions like this are impossible to ever answer in satisfactory way. It's better to instead ask what smaller changes you could make over the next few weeks and months. Instead of trying to change the world all at once, perhaps try changing something smaller first?
"But it almost feels like I'm filling my life with valueless hobbies, and wasting my time. These fill my time and keep me busy and somewhat happy, but they don't really make the world a better place or bring me closer to the people I love."
May I offer a counter? Don't try to "make a world a better place", there lie demons. If you strive not to hurt people around you, and mostly succeed, you are a good person already. Avoiding doing bad things is far more valuable and achievable than trying to "do good"...
Whichever action has value owing to impact, as you would judge, is not necessarily one that scales with your particular set of skills. Sites like 80000hours try to match skilled job seekers with "high impact" roles, so that may be of interest, but very often not if the desired skills don't match your preferences and experiences.
Giving to charity goes a long way. That's value, it saves lives. You may also volunteer locally, and as much as advocates say it "shouldn't" be about you, the predictor for whether one feels they're "wasting time" or not probably has to do with how much you like it. By which I mean: some people find tremendous value in receiving gratitude *in person*, in being around the people they help, and that's great, but it doesn't necessarily reflect the quantifiable impact of the work.
I think meaning and impact is the rationalization we use to explain our negative feelings, but that is rather abstract. Mostly I think it comes down to sense of social harmony. This is why if we're told that keypresses done miles away from everyone can save lives, our day-to-day still does not feel "meaningful", especially if the action involved is dull. The abstraction of people being helped somewhere out there is cold reassurance.
Maybe you just have unmet social needs. Speaking for myself, hobbies feel "pointless" when I'm too isolated, or if my actual job sucks. If you're a musician, start a band or join a jam group. If you're a writer, join a writer's group. Etc.
It may be worth spending time on the question, “what really matters to me?”
Maybe you don’t need to drastically change your life, if you find a cause that you’re passionate enough about that you can pour hours into work on it, on top of your existing job.
If you can’t find such a cause, maybe keep looking?
I think I'm in a similar situation to you (maybe less experienced), I'm out of university and a software engineer since 2018.
What you said resonates with me. Wanting to do good hit me like a truck in 2022 when spending a weekend with many people from LessWrong.
I've gotten involved with Effective Altruism over the last two years, and I'm happier than ever. I feel like I'm actually improving the world a tiny bit. Maybe check out 80,000 hours and see if their writings or podcast resonate with you: https://80000hours.org/
While you judge your options, you may find it worthwhile to make small talk with strangers. Because your concerned about making a better world, might as well get to know the space, the people.
Has anyone had the experience of learning and replicating what a normal brain feels like from a psychiatric medication? I have two examples.
1) I used to have really bad speaking anxiety (I would shake, my voice would crack etc). I got beta blockers prescribed and my talks suddenly went amazingly. But the weird thing was that I lost the anxiety completely because I no longer had the expectation of a bad experience. I ended up only using the beta blockers 3-4 times but have not had any issues for over a decade.
2) I was also diagnosed with ADHD a few years ago (standard forgetfulness, procrastination symptoms). I got prescribed concerta and was shocked at what it felt like to just sit down and do what I intended to for an hour. The adderal shortage eventually spilled over into concerta too and I haven’t managed to get medication in 6 months. The weird thing is though that I feel like I’m much more organized and able to stay on task than I was before I took the medicine. It feels like I’ve learned what a normal functioning brain is like and have somewhat managed to replicate that.
I’d be interested if there’s literature on the idea of training your brain by giving it the example of normality to mimic through medication.
That's an interesting idea, and seems intuitively plausible to me. An alternative explanation to your brain-training theory is that the person loses their dread of situations that used to cause them trouble, and no longer pictures themselves as someone who will end up in a swamp of confusion, and that alone is enough to keep them from relapsing.
On the other hand, in support of your brain training theory, here' are a couple of examples of brain training (though not brain training via drugs): After someone has had a first panic attack, they are much more likely to have further ones -- it's as though their brain has learned the way to that awful place. And a positive example: anorgasmic women who finally manage to have an orgasm have an easier time getting there from then on.
Later thought. On the other hand, there's actually research that tests your idea in one situation: People with phobias were given an anti-anxiety drug, and then presented with whatever they were scared of -- spiders, sirens, whatever. Those on the tranquilizers were in fact much less anxious and willing to tolerate higher and longer contact with the phobic stimulus. So the question was -- would that experience lead to their being less anxious around the phobic stimulus when they did not have an anti-anxiety med on board? And the answer was no. (I'm a psychologist, by the way.)
When I was first diagnosed with ADHD a decade ago, I went through three weeks of dose adjustment to dial in my Ritalin prescription. I still take it intermittently, but I’m convinced those three weeks of medication were enough to create lasting change (even more so if they had been combined with complementary therapy, as with ketamine and psilocybin - alas, I just got the pills.) There is clearly great value in experiencing a target state, as opposed to fumbling towards it based on verbal instructions. I literally did not know that it was possible to be calm and productive at the same time; now I cannot doubt that it is.
I’ve been on the fence about trying beta blockers for a while, with a vague hope that I might get experiential evidence to break the vicious circle of being nervous about being nervous about…
No literature to share, but this post has nudged me off the fence, so thank you!
You should look for a meta-analysis with a funnel plot - if studies show an average result of X, then the individual studies should follow a normal distribution around X, some higher and some lower. If this distribution is heavily skewed to one side (everyone publishes results above X, nobody publishes below), then you have reason to suspect the file drawer effect.
I am thinking of things where the literature points to a weak effect which smart people would assume is null, but actually there is a strong effect in the opposite direction.
I thought the funnel plot showed the relationship between sample size and effect size. Of course everyone publishes results above X for very small (possibly negative) values of X that never actually occur, the question is whether larger sample sizes give results closer to X or further away.
Ever since I started reading ACX a few years ago, there's something I've been finding a bit bewildering and a bit disturbing, that comes up now and then in Scott's writing, more often in the comments, and absolutely saturates any Less Wrong discussion that is linked from here: the obsessive reference to "status".
The first few times I saw this I thought little of it. Then it became clear that it's a pretty ubiquitous concept in this rationalist community. I've been kind of expecting that my issues with this concept would be addressed eventually as I read through Scott's old posts and bits of the Sequences (although I find the latter a pain to read and absolutely hate the writing style, but that's a separate issue that I've complained about before). But I don't think they really have been. I have three main issues with the way "status" is discussed around here.
1. Where does the idea of status, and the extreme focus on it, come from? I'm assuming there is some post or series of posts that lays out the concept, defines it, and argues for its pervasive importance, and that the community's obsession with the concept follows from that. But I don't think I've seen this post linked. The "blue tribe red tribe" jargon comes from Scott's Outgroup post, which is linked constantly. Other foundational concepts like "tabbo your words" are routinely linked to their founding post. Where is the founding post on status? All I can gather is that it seems to mostly come from Robin Hanson, but every post I've seen from him, EY and Scott, all just seem to take this concept for granted and not define or argue for it. And so does everyone in the comments who talks about it.
2. Following on, what *is* the definition of status (as people here are using it)? It strikes me as a weirdly useless term by being far too vague and far too broad to be of much clarity. Does it mean power? Respect and prestige from society? Having individual people personally like you? Being morally approved of? All of these are completely different things and "status" seems to sloppily lump them all together. One reason this is annoying is that more precise forms of status have much clearer definitions and are much easier to talk about. For example "power" has various clear definitions in political science; one I've often seen is "A has power over B if A can cause B to do something B does not want to do". That's a very clear concept that can be analysed in depth.
Another reason this is annoying is that the discussions about status can seem to be about one thing but actually be about another thing. The people talking about status often seem to introduce it as an important concept for the functioning of society, like they're basically talking about power. But much of the resulting discussion comes across as incredibly trivial, like a banal self-help book: how to be a boss, how to dominate people and achieve your goals, how to "achieve success" (vomit). Worse, sometimes it seems like what they're *really* talking about is sex, what with all the focus on reproductive fitness, and this makes it even creepier, like "wait, the whole time this was really just about how to seduce people?" (Note: I'm in no way calling it creepy to openly discuss sex, and don't want to endorse any kind of censorship of free discussion; it's only creepy or disturbing when it's done surreptitiously. If you want to discuss PUA-style "advice", by all means do so but do so *honestly*, and don't pretend you're talking about something else).
3. But the main thing that disturbs me here is that whenever discussions of status come up, all notions of morality seem to completely disappear. It's as if everyone becomes a moral nihilist (or an advocate of Master Morality or Objectivism) the moment they start talking about status. People talk about how this or that form of expressing romantic interest is high-status or low-status, or how X can be used to increase your status, or what behaviours can make you higher status than another person (even someone close to you) and I'm waiting for someone, *anyone*, to say that a person who treats all their interactions as struggles for status, even with friends and family and romantic interests, is, um, a bad person. Right??? Or, if they're consequentialists and have no concept of moral character, at least focus on using an understanding of status to do good, to prevent high-status people from getting away with their crap. Not simply to advance your own self-interest.
I get the sense that the attitude behind this is often a kind of cynical "everyone is *really* concerned with increasing their status, and if they think they're not they're just deceiving themselves". For one thing this radical claim requires, I think, *far* more evidence than is usually provided. But more importantly, I just can't comprehend the kind of person who responds to the revelation that almost everyone around them is a manipulative hypocrite, not with an angry "I'm going to expose these disgusting hypocrites", not with "let's try to create a rigorous rational method to keep people moral and honest", not even with a depressed "people are all horrible and you can't trust anyone", but with an enthusiastic "great, *I* can be a manipulative, dominating hypocrite as well!" Just...who thinks like that? That's how these discussions usually look to me, like I'm seeing a conversation among sociopaths. It's...kind of...completely terrifying. Unless I'm misunderstanding something fundamental.
(By comparison, there's a group of very prominent people who almost everyone agrees do everything with a sole concern for raising their status: politicians. The reaction of most people is to either adopt permanent distrust and dislike for politicians, or to advocate burning the whole political system to the ground. *Not* to happily become like a politician themselves.)
Can anyone shed some light on this rationalist weirdness?
> But more importantly, I just can't comprehend the kind of person who responds to the revelation that almost everyone around them is a manipulative hypocrite, not with an angry "I'm going to expose these disgusting hypocrites", not with "let's try to create a rigorous rational method to keep people moral and honest", not even with a depressed "people are all horrible and you can't trust anyone", but with an enthusiastic "great, *I* can be a manipulative, dominating hypocrite as well!" Just...who thinks like that?
You've already got a lot of good responses to other parts of your comment so I just want to concentrate on this particular part.
I am someone who tends to model people as status-maximisers but I don't think they're being manipulative hypocrites, I think they're being blind puppets led around by instincts they don't understand and aren't conscious of. They quite honestly think to themselves "I want to become a doctor so I can help people" instead of "I want to become a doctor so that I have high status in social interactions".
Or they quite honestly think to themselves "I should spend twenty thousand dollars on this watch because I find all the tiny gears to be beautiful" instead of "I should spend twenty thousand dollars on this watch so that I have high status in social interactions".
I know that my mind craves social status just the same way that I know my body craves sugar. By understanding how this works, I don't seek to conquer my desire, I just want to make sure I'm diverting that desire in good and healthy ways that don't hurt me or anyone else.
1. The study of status in this community came from Robin Hanson. Like David Friedman, he analyzes things from the economist's point of view. One of the key pillars of that point of view is signalling. A signalling based view of the world is far more understandable & useful to people like us (noticeably autistic) than the standard explanations for why normal people do what they do. E.g. from https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/13/book-review-legal-systems-very-different-from-ours/:
"Whenever I read a book by anyone other than David Friedman about a foreign culture, it sounds like “The X’wunda give their mother-in-law three cows every monsoon season, then pluck out their own eyes as a sacrifice to Humunga, the Volcano God”.
And whenever I read David Friedman, it sounds like “The X’wunda ensure positive-sum intergenerational trade by a market system in which everyone pays the efficient price for continued economic relationships with their spouse’s clan; they demonstrate their honesty with a costly signal of self-mutilation that creates common knowledge of belief in a faith whose priests are able to arbitrate financial disputes.”."
It's a very productive framework; you can apply it not just to other societies, but your own (which are paradoxically the hardest to understand, because you can't look at them with fresh eyes). And you learn something each time. E.g. Why do politicial movements on social media struggle with doing stupid & counterproductive things (e.g. infighting, unironically supporting positions beyond parody, being generally insane) almost deliberately? Perhaps because it actually pays off for the people being stupid:
"You are married, and want to take your spouse out to a romantic dinner. You could choose a place you both love, or a place that only they love. You choose the place you don’t love, so they will know how much you love them. After all, you didn’t come here for the food.
A middle manager must choose how to improve widget production. He can choose a policy that improperly maintains the factory and likely eventually poisons the water supply, or a policy that would prevent that at no additional cost. He knows that when he is up for promotion, management will want to know the higher ups can count on him to make the quarterly numbers look good and not concern himself with long term issues or what consequences might fall on others. If he cared about not poisoning the water supply, he would not be a reliable political ally. Thus, he chooses the neglectful policy.
A politician can choose between two messages that affirm their loyalty: Advocating a beneficial policy, or advocating a useless and wasteful policy. They choose useless, because the motive behind advocating a beneficial policy is ambiguous. Maybe they wanted people to benefit!
...
What these examples have in common is that there is a strictly better action and a strictly worse action, in terms of physical consequences. In each case, the protagonist chooses the worse action because it is worse.
This choice is made as a costly signal. In particular, to avoid motive ambiguity.
If you choose something better over something worse, you will be suspected of doing so because it was better rather than worse.
If you choose something worse over something better, not only do you show how little you care about making the world better, you show that you care more about people noticing and trusting this lack of caring. It shows your values and loyalties."
2: What is status then? We have why status, but what is status? Other people have given the technical definitions about Dominance vs. Prestige, but I'll give you the practical definition I use in my daily life: Status is Weirdness Points (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wkuDgmpxwbu2M2k3w/you-have-a-set-amount-of-weirdness-points-spend-them-wisely). The more Status you have, the more weirdness you can get away with. High status people can be themselves & be applauded for it, low status people get to pick between crushing peer pressure or crushing loneliness (or both).
(But this of course is the perspective of a borderline autistic person; for a stereotypical "Mean Girls"-style highschool bully, I'd imagine status is more of a weapon than a defence to them, something you use to beat up people rather than protect against being beaten. Or for a group leader, I'd imagine they'd view it as like money: everyone wants it, you can make people do what you want by handing it out, as the "government" you can print it out [but watch out for inflation!], and it tends to cause a lot of fights if you're not careful. Status is social currency, basically.)
3: So why does everyone talk so amorally when they talk about status? Because we're trying to understand people (well, normal people specifically, the most baffling kind to those like us), not judge them. It's the "Is-Ought" gap: this is how people behave, this is *why* they tend to behave that way, but moralizing about what they "ought" to do doesn't enter into it.
(Mind you, as far as I can tell basically everyone who talks about it in such horifically amoral terms does so because they disapprove of it and wishes life wasn't that way... but like Machiavelli, it does no good to criticize power the way it's been criticized a thousand times before. You have to dissect it so people can see for themselves what it's like on the inside. *Then* they can be horrified with fresh eyes.)
(Or if you prefer, us autistics are so bad at this sort of social thing that it appears to us as some sort of as some alien abomination you need to clinically dissect on the operating table, because it really is that alien to us. Dissecting it so is how we vent our frustrations & master our fear through the illusion of understanding & control... if you want to be uncharitable.)
I'm an undiagnosed but very likely autistic person without many friends, and I'm pretty sure that when I die, an autopsy will reveal that "most people intuitively understand that it's impolite to hold anyone to anything they say, ever. We don't say things because they are true, we say things to impress others and mark our territory and identify our tribe. Speech is not a contract; speech is a birdsong," was actually engraved on my bones.
That statement feels true on an almost scriptural level.
Obviously, it's a little hyperbolic, but on the other hand it also perfectly describes almost every conversation I've ever awkwardly excused myself from and also every time the conversation circle I was quietly a part of suddenly and mysteriously evaporated around me and then equally mysteriously recondensed a short distance away.
I'm kind of sitting here trying not to be actively furious that in 42 years nobody ever sat me down and explained this so concisely.
To me it seems that most people are obsessed with status, they just have a taboo against discussing it explicitly. People competing instead of cooperating even when there is little to win; celebrity gossip; people comparing themselves to others, feeling unhappy when they lose, and attacking the losers when they win; worrying about what the others will think of you; the instinctive desire to "worship" some leader or guru; unwillingness to admit a mistake even when the denial seems silly -- from my perspective, these are all weird and often harmful behaviors, and yet people seemingly can't stop doing them. And when you explicitly describe what they are doing, people get offended, and yet they can't stop doing it.
I want to understand how the world functions, and I see that I have a certain form of blindness, because these instincts are much weaker in me, and then people often surprise me, usually in an unpleasant way. The framework of "status" seems to explain a lot of that. Yeah, I am probably *talking* about it a lot more than an average person, but I am *doing* it much less. The only reason I am talking about it is to understand why other people are doing what they do.
A funny thing is that, politically, the right embraces the concept of status hierarchies, while the left in theory talks a lot about how hierarchies need to be eliminated... but in practice, if you look at a group of leftists, you usually see an obvious pecking order. People who just naturally treat others as equals are not really successful at politics.
Status has two basic forms, called dominance and prestige. Dominance is when you are afraid that someone might hurt you if you make them angry. Prestige is when you admire someone. High dominance: Stalin; high prestige: Einstein.
If you don't like talking about how to achieve success, how do you like the opposite, such as seeing good ideas rejected only because they came from the wrong person? I find the actual *practice* of status way more disgusting that debating the theory; and the practice is all around me when I start paying attention.
Status is not just about sex, although ultimately all human instincts are somehow related to reproduction -- otherwise, how could evolution have created them? By the way, "creepy" and "low-status" are almost synonyms, so you are using the concept of status to criticize debating the very concept. But I agree with your judgment -- people who discuss status explicitly are usually the ones who fail to understand it instinctively, which usually means that they fail to get it.
I think you may be confusing "promoting immorality" with "pointing out that other people are immoral". (Is/ought distinction.) It is definitely my opinion that people who treat everything as a status competition are horrible beings! I also think that most people are like this instinctively. And I am not different because I am a saint, but merely because my instinct is broken. I do not want to make a status competition out of everything. Heck, I suck at status competitions. But I have learned that it makes sense to assume that other people will make a status competition out of everything.
Being seen by others as low-status sucks. At worst, it means that they feel free to hurt you, and consider it quite funny. At best, it means that they dismiss all your ideas without even listening to them. The best option would be to stop doing that. The less people do this, the more I like them. The second best option is to make sure that your status is... at least average. Just avoid the worst mistakes. It is a stupid game, but sadly you sometimes play for real prizes, and it sucks to lose.
So many good responses, and I have lots to say some of which is to everyone (which the threaded structure makes difficult) and some of which is specific responses. I'll probably mix up the responses to some people's points in responses to others, so apologies in advance.
I'll start with you because I remember we've talked about status before.
First, (and this is a serious point not a joke) who is expressing higher status in a thread like this? Am I lower status by begging for an answer to a question, or higher status by bringing up a topic and causing people to discuss it, or a mixture? By replying to you first, am I giving you status, or recognising your existing status, or begging you for status, or something else entirely? It seems that if one is going to read status into every interaction there need to be answers to these questions. And I haven't got a clue which way this would supposedly go if we're not (as I'd naively assume) discussing as equals, or perhaps arguing as equals.
Second, following on from that, isn't thinking about status a bit of a potential infohazard? Like a postmodernist who starts deconstructing everything they see, or someone who takes determinism too seriously, or Marxism, or feminism, or Jewish conspiracy theory, etc etc? I can't imagine thinking like I did in the above paragraph, constantly every day, without going insane.
Third, some specific points, some of which apply to other people's responses too.
"To me it seems that most people are obsessed with status, they just have a taboo against discussing it explicitly."
Yes, this is probably true to some extent. But at the same time, this can so easily lead into "if you say you're not an X, well an X *would* say that!" that is the source of every extremist's thinking. Where X can be "racist", "serving the devil" or "maximising your status". I just think this kind of thinking should be approached with FAR greater care and caution than it often is.
"People competing instead of cooperating even when there is little to win; celebrity gossip; people comparing themselves to others, feeling unhappy when they lose, and attacking the losers when they win; worrying about what the others will think of you; the instinctive desire to "worship" some leader or guru; unwillingness to admit a mistake even when the denial seems silly -- from my perspective, these are all weird and often harmful behaviors, and yet people seemingly can't stop doing them."
I feel like half of these aren't necessarily about status at all, and the other half could just as easily be phrased as being about "pride". It seems to me that talk of pride instead of status would not only be more intelligible to the uninitiated, but would also signal much more clearly that these behaviours are (usually) bad. You could even say it's a higher-status way if talking about status!
"A funny thing is that, politically, the right embraces the concept of status hierarchies, while the left in theory talks a lot about how hierarchies need to be eliminated..."
This is definitely true of the far-right and far-left, but the centre-right is more likely to ignore status, and the centre-left to explicitly see it everywhere, to the extent of calling "free speech" and "free markets" positions not only things that in practice propagate status, but things one could only possibly support for status-protecting reasons. Which I don't think is a constructive way of discussing them.
"By the way, "creepy" and "low-status" are almost synonyms, so you are using the concept of status to criticize debating the very concept."
That's an insightful point. I agree that words like "creepy", "sleazy", "base" and so on are ways of saying low-status, and that's the point of them! A central part of the project of civilisation is creating moral taboos against self-serving animalistic behaviour that is bad for society as a whole, e.g. promiscuity. This involves shaming the doers of these things, originally in explicitly moral terms, but as shared moral principles unravel we're left with only vaguely defined status-based insults to discourage those things. Thus I (unconsciously) reached for one of the latter instead of a term like "immoral" which in the context of sex would likely cause people to dismiss me as a preacher.
I wonder: do you think further weakening these taboos (by explicitly identifying their status-basis, which is all that's left) is a good thing for society? What about for even more destructive behaviours like lying and cheating? If moral language has no pull with someone, and all you've got is status-language, is deconstructing the latter good on consequentialist terms? These are serious not rhetorical questions, and I don't know the answers myself.
"I think you may be confusing "promoting immorality" with "pointing out that other people are immoral". (Is/ought distinction.)"
As I said in a follow-up, I was never saying that. I only want more discussions like this one, explicitly talking morality, and questioning the moral and practical uses of the concept of status on a meta-level.
"Being seen by others as low-status sucks. At worst, it means that they feel free to hurt you, and consider it quite funny. At best, it means that they dismiss all your ideas without even listening to them."
I'm just not sure how consistently true this is. What looks like a total counterexample is martyrdom. The martyr accepts the absolute lowest status possible, is humiliated, rejected, tortured and killed...and both him and his ideas typically gain *unimaginably* high status in later years or centuries.
More narrowly, some of the most (eventually) powerful and renowned people are those who can genuinely say "for a long time they all laughed at me", which increases both their power and credibility. Wheras people who are clearly trying to maximise their status from the start get far less respect even if they win, and if they lose get *completely* despised and forgotten.
Basically, it seems like some people here are "discovering" that the world runs on Master Morality, which arguably hasn't been true for a millenium or two. Focusing on Slave Morality (as a positive thing, or if you prefer "Christian morality" in the secular sense) may be a better way of becoming a master, even if you don't see its intrinsic moral value. Or, if you want to actually follow Nietzsche, you should be rejecting *both*.
I'm not convinced that the martyr gains high status centuries later. More often, some caricature and associated bundle of ideas tenuously related to the original martyr gains status. Occasionally the caricature is less cartoonish, but even then the status seems to accrue mostly to the institution and its ends.
First of all, thank you for posting your question. This has been a useful clarifying discussion for me as well.
> I feel like half of these aren't necessarily about status at all, and the other half could just as easily be phrased as being about "pride". It seems to me that talk of pride instead of status would not only be more intelligible to the uninitiated
> it seems to me that pride is basically "claiming high status because of your (supposed) strengths"
I agree that use of "status" in the LW diaspora could sometimes be rephrased in a more familiar-sounding way with "pride" and other evaluative adjectives. An attempt at rough equivalencies (treating status as binary for ease):
-portraying yourself as if low status: humble
-portraying yourself as if high status when truly high status: self-assured
-portraying yourself as if high status when truly low status: pretentious
-portraying yourself as if high status, whether truly or not, in a way that is ignorant of norms/context about self-portrayal: arrogant
-portraying yourself as if high status, whether true or false, and deserving of that high status: proud
I also agree with B Civil (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-325/comment/54035285) that optimizing-for-community, with status following this, is a useful way of seeing a lot of status-related behaviors. Following this thread, we can then get ourselves confused about the relationship between status and identity - another would-be master concept for human interaction. (If anyone has written anything concise but useful about this, I would appreciate a pointer to where!)
One other point: status might have slightly more explanatory power in some cultures than in others (https://twitter.com/kaidi_wu/status/1778461270532047207). If true, this could be for long-term reasons and/or reflecting the length of time since scarcity was widespread.
> First, (and this is a serious point not a joke) who is expressing higher status in a thread like this?
Ah, I usually do not analyze these things in such detail, so I will try my best here but I have little practice.
As I understand it, we need to distinguish between the current *situation* and the *moves* that individual players are making. Imagine chess: we distinguish between which player has an advantage right now, which player made a good move, and which player ultimately wins the same. For example, you can make some good moves, but lose anyway, because your opponent made even better moves. And I suppose the moves can be mixed, like one could simultaneously show that they consider their own status to be relatively high, but not too high. (And I am aware that the more caveats you add, the less falsifiable the theory becomes. I do not claim to be actually good at analyzing this.)
So, you asking the question is a mixed signal. On one hand, it requires some courage to make a top-level comment on Scott's blog. Not much, but I can easily imagine a person too shy to do that. Someone who would be like "oh, it seems like some very smart people are debating here, and I am not one of them, they would probably laugh at me if I wrote something". By making the comment you signal that you are *not* this shy person, and you consider yourself at least equal to the people who are debating here. Setting the topic of the debate is a high-status move. You even go further and suggest that rationalists are wrong about something. I am sure you meant it completely factually, but the social norm is that saying that someone else is wrong is equivalent to claiming higher status than them. But you mitigate it by making it a question, instead of e.g. just saying that everyone is an idiot. -- I guess, the analysis concludes that you are claiming status, but not too much.
Similarly, I claim high status by replying to you, actually quite dismissively. (Sorry for that, it was a midnight post, I didn't have the capacity to reflect on that. Talking to someone else like that in a different context could easily get me in a conflict, where I would be surprised why the other person is suddenly so hostile to me. This is why ignoring status is not a safe option.) Again, somewhat mitigated by admitting weakness, but it was a status claiming move regardless.
You, replying to me, respectfully, and even taking my proposal seriously, are giving me high status. Moves are about (1) claiming or giving (2) high or low status.
"Discussing like equals" in practice means that our moves are balanced. The polite version is giving each other high status. But, technically speaking, two people hurling insults at each other at a similar rate are also discussing like equals.
> Second, following on from that, isn't thinking about status a bit of a potential infohazard?
It definitely is. Just reflecting on our discussion from this perspective made me feel bad. On the other hand, never reflecting on my interactions from this perspective could easily make me come off as arrogant (which would hurt me in long term; I have seen that happening to other people). So... I guess it is best to only think about these things sometimes (about the long-term trends in relationships), plus when something goes wrong? Also, you need to thing about these things more when communicating with people who are more sensitive to this.
> [claiming that people have a taboo against discussing status explicitly] can so easily lead into "if you say you're not an X, well an X *would* say that!"
Yeah, so the specific prediction is that when you start discussing status explicitly (in general, not talking specifically about people present in the room), many people will react with hostility (as opposed to mere calm disagreement or boredom). They will not just consider you wrong or the topic uninteresting; they will call you a bad person for discussing the topic.
> It seems to me that talk of pride instead of status would not only be more intelligible to the uninitiated, but would also signal much more clearly that these behaviours are (usually) bad.
Yes, talking about pride would be more specific, which usually makes the discussion more sane. But if we dig deeper, why are people proud, what is the difference between pride and factually talking about your strengths, etc... it seems to me that pride is basically "claiming high status because of your (supposed) strengths". This explains why e.g. people overestimate their strengths (because that makes the status claim stronger), why they get angry if you correct them even if you are right (because you just indirectly lowered their status).
> do you think further weakening these taboos (by explicitly identifying their status-basis, which is all that's left) is a good thing for society? [...] If moral language has no pull with someone, and all you've got is status-language, is deconstructing the latter good on consequentialist terms?
Deconstructing useful mechanisms is harmful, at least in short term; and in long term it depends on whether a better alternative is created. But sometimes the existing mechanisms hurt innocent people as a side effect. (I don't want to discuss Peterson's "chaos and order" here, but basically that applies here.) If some behaviors are harmful, I would prefer to call them "harmful". But I guess the word "immoral" basically means that someone in the past has concluded that certain behaviors are harmful and therefore should be suppressed.
It seems like specific words make the situation clearer to discuss. When you call something "harmful", the natural question is to ask what kind of harm is caused and to whom. Calling something "immoral", the natural question is... uhm, according to which moral system? If you say "according to the Bible" and I am an atheist, why should that be relevant for me? If you say "according to the majority of people", I can find examples where the majority was wrong, or where the majority has changed its mind. Discussing whether something is "immoral" quickly deflects the debate to something abstract and not closely related.
On the other hand, discussing whether something is "harmful" invites clever lawyering. (What harm is there if I cheat on my wife if she never finds out? Is it okay to commit crimes for the greater good?) Calling something "immoral" expresses the cultural wisdom that these things usually have bad consequences, even when people believe that they have a good excuse and "this time it is different".
> The martyr accepts the absolute lowest status possible, is humiliated, rejected, tortured and killed...and both him and his ideas typically gain *unimaginably* high status in later years or centuries.
There are two different forms of status: dominance and prestige. From the perspective of dominance, to lose and to be killed is to lose the status. From the perspective of prestige, this is irrelevant. Killing John Lennon doesn't make his music less popular. In case of religion, dying for the idea can be seen as a very costly service to the community, that's the thing that generates prestige.
I am not familiar with Nietzsche, so I am not sure about the connotations of the master/slave morality. There is an aspect of "service to others" in prestige, but... it doesn't feel appropriate to call a rock star a "slave", even if he serves the community of his fans by making the songs. Or how Einstein served humanity by discovering relativity.
1. Huh? I don't even see how you could call your previous reply dismissive. It was long and addressed respectfully many of my points. If there's dismissiveness there, I didn't and still don't notice it.
2. I think I see your point (and others' points in this thread) about the need to have an explicit model of status if your project is a proper analysis of implicit social phenomena. So I'm convinced on that.
However...I'm still very iffy about consciously considering status (that is, in terms of that word or similar words) while interacting with people (real, online or otherwise). Two problems. One--you risk legitimising the struggle for status (whether in your own mind or to your social circle, e.g. online rationalists) to an extent far beyond what might be considered morally legitimate when status is kept solely implicit. Two--it may be unnecessary: to avoid offending others, seen as arrogant, and so on, there are a huge array of explicit *moral* codes, theories, etc, to choose from. Some of them have existed for hundreds or thousands of years. They have a level of social respect that self-helping theories of status will never have. They have been refined and tested for a long time. And they have value even if they fail (at least if you're not a moral nihilist).
Using explicit status models for your interactions instead of explicit moral theories or codes, strikes me as like trying to play basketball by calculating the equations of the ball's trajectory, or trying to play chess by calculating every possible game from every position. For an AI, that may be the best way, and if we're talking about alignment then yes I definitely see the value of status models. But if we're talking about people, doesn't it seem like you (a) risk doing morally bad things and (b) risk actually losing status (by looking slimy and selfish) by using status thinking on an everyday basis?
3. Regarding people reacting with hostility...that just seems to me perfectly explicable for the same reasons as the other reactions. Assume people *aren't* motiviated by status, and there's no taboo because there's nothing to taboo: why wouldn't people get angry if you advance a cynical theory that most people are always seeking status? Why wouldn't they feel personally attacked, even if you're not mentioning them specifically? Why wouldn't they perhaps assume that by advancing this theory you're revealing nothing about other people's motivations (because you don't know them), but you *are* revealing your own something about your own (unpleasant) way of interacting with people?
4. You may be right about pride. I vaguely feel like there are other ways of defining pride without recourse to status, but I can't think of them and they may not exist.
5. I agree with you about the way social mechanisms can hurt innocent people, especially if they're not explicitly acknowledged. This reminds me of the reasonable!feminist claim that sexual moral judgements fall harder on women than on men. This is a good reason to be critical of existing standards. But the proposed change from both feminists and rationalists seems to always be to achieve equality (either between men and women or between high- and low-status people of either sex) by further liberalising or abolishing the moral standards. And never by toughening them so they constrain all groups equally. When you consider that high-status people are likely to do well in a free environment where they can leverage their status, and that rules are created often to constrain destructive high-status behaviour, I think there's reason to approach this with great care. (The "rules" here, of course, are implicit ways of making certain behaviours low-status.)
6. Regarding "immoral" I was pretty consciously thinking from a virtue-ethical perspective in my original post. There's a bit of circularity here: I say seduction-game stuff is "creepy", you say that's an appeal to status, I say it was meant as an appeal to morality and I could say "immoral" instead, you say that doesn't clarify what moral system I'm using, and now I say I was (in that context) thinking of virtue ethics, where morality just is the kind of person you are, which wpuld suggest I use character-based word like "creepy"! Or "slutty", or "sleazy". I don't much like these words, and they all have slightly different connotations, but how else do I get at something like "manipulatively hedonistic"? I guess I could say that, but that has a slightly different meaning again and doesn't necessarily express the same moral force. I don't know...this topic isn't easy.
Basically, there are vauge moralistic terms in the water supply that can be used unfairly and can also have useful ethical functions. Should we abandon them?
7. Regarding dominance and prestige, I'm just going to reiterate that, even if the concept of status is useful and important (and I'm willing to accept it is, subject to the caveats above), the *word* "status" is FAR too vague and broad. Dominance and prestige look like sufficiently different things that they should probably not be put under the same umbrella, for example.
I also want to ask you: do * you* think power is part of status? Because @catmint below says it isn't, which I find very surprising.
8. Sorry about not explaining what I meant with the Nietzschean terms. Honestly, I don't have a detailed knowledge of Nietzsche myself and I think I was worried about annoying someone who does, if I presumed to define these terms and my definitions were less than accurate. So I guess I was prioritising the concerns of high-status-qua-knowledge-of-Nietzsche people over the concerns of low-status-qua-knowledge-of-Nietzsche people! My bad.
My rough understanding (where anyone who knows Nietzsche well will almost certainly say every word of this is wrong):
Nietzsche's a nihilist, so there is no "real" morality. Morality and knowledge and truth are all invented by humans (he's one of the inspirations for postmodernism as well). Master morality is the invented morality of the ancient world (e.g. Homeric Greece), where strength and power and domination are morally right, and weakness is evil. With Plato and especially Christianity, comes a shift towards slave morality, where weakness and suffering are morally exemplary. This, according to Nietzsche, remains the orthodoxy of modern civilisation even as it secularises (God is dead, but the shadow of God will remain for a long time). Indeed, things like socialism are further elaborations of slave morality. His own view is that slave morality is as incoherent and destructive as master morality (I think he's often believed to support master morality but this is I think mistaken), partly because it makes people hypocrites who continue to dominate while pretending to humble themselves, and partly because people are instinctively cruel, and if denied the ability to inflict cruelty on others they'll inflict it on themselves (asceticism). Progress, if you can call it that, will come when man finally recgonises the reality of nihilism, casts off slave morality in the same way as we did master morality, and embraces a reevaluation of all values (whatever that means), via a quasi-mythical figure of the future (the ubermensch).
Again, this is all probably wrong, but my basic point was that western society continues to run on slave morality, in some ways more than ever (cf. victimhood complex), and weakness and sacrifice are valorised. So the rationalist approach to status strikes me as a highly innacurate model, especially when it emphasises dominance so much. There's an exessive focus on the evolutionary past, to the detriment of inconceivable changes in moral and civilisatiinal thinking in recent millennia. (Nietzsche was writing after Darwin but I don't know what role the latter plays in his theories). And if rationalists want to go Nietzsche's route and say that the official morality of our society is hypocritical and destructive, then following that route does not advocate a return to master morality, but an embrace of new explicitly nihilistic values.
This is getting very arcane of course. I just want to add, randomly, that I *do* see the likes of rock stars, athletes etc as kind of like slaves in a certain way. I think these roles (e.g. performers at Persian feasts, chariot racers in Rome) were literally done by slaves in many past societies. What this says about your theory of prestige, and how that relates to status and morality, I'm not sure.
> I don't even see how you could call your previous reply dismissive. It was long and addressed respectfully many of my points.
The reply was a long disagreement, with no compliment to mitigate for that. I am happy that you didn't mind -- I probably wouldn't mind either in a similar situation -- but among normies, such behavior could drive some people furious. (The strategy "act towards others the way you would like them to act towards you" sadly doesn't work for an aspie interacting with normies.)
Remember that normies do not care much about the truth value of statements. Instead, they mostly agree to express respect, and disagree to express disrespect. So from their perspective, I wrote a long wall of text repeating "you suck".
The standard solution to delivering disagreement to normies is the "sandwich method", where you put the negative information between two actively nice things. Like this: "Hey, thank you for your message; you seem like a nice person and I appreciate your interest in math! By the way, two plus two does not equal five; it is actually four. I wish you a lot of luck at studying math, you seem very talented!"
> Using explicit status models for your interactions instead of explicit moral theories or codes, strikes me as like trying to play basketball by calculating the equations of the ball's trajectory, or trying to play chess by calculating every possible game from every position.
I agree. I usually do not have the computation capacity to consider all status implications in real time anyway. Normies do that instinctively. Sometimes it helps if I think about an interaction in retrospective. Sometimes there are easy rules to remember, such as "never disagree with your boss" (at least without carefully considering how to deliver the message respectfully, preferably in a way that will make your boss think it was actually their idea -- as usual, this is easier said than done).
> risk doing morally bad things
I think the risk is relatively small. First, it's not like I would do anything only to increase my status. It's more like, I try to do the right thing, but also try to be aware of the costs. Second, low-status people often don't achieve their goals. For example, you are trying to prevent a bad thing, but you know that doing so will make you very unpopular. In your imagination, the options are "do the wrong thing" or "do the right thing", but in reality, the options are often "do the wrong thing" or "express your concerns, get laughed at, and then the wrong thing happens anyway". If situation gets this far, I usually try to avoid such people in future. But from the consequentialist perspective, not getting involved in problematic situations is not the same as preventing those situations from happening; they still happen, only you are no longer there. Consequentialist ethics is difficult, and I don't have a good solution.
Or perhaps you had a different kind of situation in mind?
> the proposed change [...] seems to always be to achieve equality [...] by further liberalising or abolishing the moral standards. And never by toughening them so they constrain all groups equally. When you consider that high-status people are likely to do well in a free environment where they can leverage their status, and that rules are created often to constrain destructive high-status behaviour, I think there's reason to approach this with great care.
That is a good point. However, high-status people also do relatively better in constrained environments -- they are less likely to be accused of breaking the rules, less likely to be convicted, and the punishment is typically smaller -- because ultimately all these decisions are made by humans who instinctively take status into account. For example, there are strict religious communities with lots of sexual abuse, even if the abuse technically contradicts the holy scriptures, because no one believes a low-status victim accusing a high-status predator.
Also, freedom is valuable per se. We may trade it against other values, but there is some natural unwillingness, unless the advantages are obvious. Especially if you are not a typical person, you are at risk that the rules may be tailored to the more typical ones. For example, the rules may require doing things that are difficult for you, and then you get punished for breaking the rules.
> I say seduction-game stuff is "creepy"
And yes, you are right. But "creepy" means "done by people with low social skills". But what are those people suppose to do instead? You cannot improve your skills without practicing them, and practicing clumsily gets punished. What other options are there? For normal people, they learn the skills as small kids, when all kinds of transgressions are forgiven, because they are seen as "cute". When you stay behind the curve, at certain age suddenly the lack of social skills becomes "creepy".
You should get good at seduction. Unfortunately, I don't know a way to get good without being bad first. Okay, maybe in a controlled environment, where you would interact with actors, who would then give you feedback, and you are only allowed to try it in the wild after the feedback is mostly positive. It would be nice if such training environments existed.
> the *word* "status" is FAR too vague and broad. Dominance and prestige look like sufficiently different things that they should probably not be put under the same umbrella, for example.
Mostly yes. Though there are some similarities, for example it can make sense to say "this person is likely to be excused if they break some rules, because they are at the top of a social hierarchy" without specifying whether it was a dominance hierarchy or a prestige hierarchy, because both have a similar effect.
> With Plato and especially Christianity, comes a shift towards slave morality, where weakness and suffering are morally exemplary.
I am not a Christian (nor a Platonist) but this seems like a strawman. Suffering, for the purpose of a greater good: yes. Obedience, to a lawful authority: yes. Weakness: no. The closest thing to criticizing strength would be something like "with great power comes great responsibility", which is not a criticism of strength per se. -- The only way you get from there to "weakness is good" is when you declare all authority to be illegitimate and oppressive. Which sounds like a leftist idea.
So I think that instead of "this [...] remains the orthodoxy of modern civilisation even as it secularises", I would say that this actually *appears* in modern civilization as it secularizes under the influence of left-wing ideas. It is a modern mixture of old ideas (sin, guilt) with new left-wing ideas (all power is evil). The God is dead, but instead of going full way to atheism, we replaced God with wokeness, and made power (both individual and systemic) the new sin, so now you can sin by being strong or by being white, and then you can flagellate yourself by constantly checking your privilege and buy indulgences in the form of anti-racist books that tell you how evil you are. (Nietzsche predates modern wokeness, but some forms of leftism were already there.)
> So the rationalist approach to status strikes me as a highly innacurate model, especially when it emphasises dominance so much.
Politicians are dominant, successful entrepreneurs are dominant, and attractive women fuck bikers. The dominance is not over, there is only much less of it socially allowed for the average man. Which perhaps makes it even stronger signal than in the past.
> following that route does not advocate a return to master morality, but an embrace of new explicitly nihilistic values.
I propose a fourth way. Rather than choose the one-sidedness of the "master morality" or "slave morality", or throwing all values out of the window, let's embrace the values (the ones we approve of, on reflection) and treat everything else instrumentally. The "master morality" is right about power being useful and therefore desirable. The "slave morality" is right about self-control being necessary for a civilized person, and in some way a form of our collective power. Become strong, use your judgment and self-control, and follow your (coherently extrapolated) values!
> Someone who would be like "oh, it seems like some very smart people are debating here, and I am not one of them, they would probably laugh at me if I wrote something". By making the comment you signal that you are *not* this shy person, and you consider yourself at least equal to the people who are debating here.
Interesting. This is why I have never posted on LessWrong, despite following it for years; I didn't realize anyone might perceive ACX the same way. Though I think of LW as "they would probably ignore me without answering", which would just be frustrating. Rather than the less bad (in my opinion) "they would probably laugh at me", which might at least be bundled with advice, insofar as pity fairly often comes with advice.
> The reaction of most people is to either adopt permanent distrust and dislike for politicians, or to advocate burning the whole political system to the ground. *Not* to happily become like a politician themselves.
This is incorrect. People adopt distrust and dislike for politicians that do not directly appeal to them, and for specific representatives like their local representatives, they are more positive than not.
And, if you take Bryan Caplan's Myth of the Rational Voter at complete face value, if you *refuse* the concept of status, there does not seem to be any way to explain:
1. Voters are ignorant about the political issues they talk about
2. Yet they hold very strong positions on those issues
3. Where they refrain those issues as others vs us, such as "rich people steal from us via trade" (despite the fact that people would happily go to the grocery store or otherwise buy some product) or "foreigners steal from us via trade, also it's much more suspicious that we trade with more foreign countries, like China, Japan and Mexico, instead of less foreign ones, like the UK or Canada".
4. There appears to be a constellation of instincts, which roughly seem to be in charge of evaluating social threats, or social opportunities, and that people seem to engage with far more often than their reasoning, and people seem to be more satisfied by indulging in them than not. Why would these instincts exist, and why don't we explicitly acknowledge them?
I don't think there's any way to make sense of the world without some notion of "status.
HOWEVER.
I do agree with you that just throwing the word status around is insufficient. It'd be like a bunch of social scientists throwing around the word "science" when it comes to engineering. "Oh, the space shuttle exploded because there wasn't enough science." Or "the study failed to replicate because it wasn't scientific enough" do not actually explain anything, yet could feel like they do, if you don't know any better about how science works.
When status "works" as an explanation, it's when you can point to the specific mental distortions that appear to happen, or you can start to simulate what's going on in people's heads by explicitly invoking whatever your own internal status instincts say.
You are correct that people do not make particular distinctions between the good examples or bad examples of status.
The "final" word on status, is likely the book Impro, I think the introduction to the book doesn't make any sense unless the word "status" is at least pointing at a shared accessible concept. The author talked about how everyone was stiff, stilted, and unfunny, until he said to pay attention to status, at which point everyone started being hilarious. Prompts for improv also got much better results when specific suggestions like "please play this scene with two people with similar status, except both think they are higher than the other" or "please play this scene with conventional social classes, except the low social class plays high and the high one plays low".
I think this is very hard to make sense of, unless you agree status is a concept that lots of people have access to, and is at least shared enough such that 20 or so unconnected actors can act in accordance with them.
I'll finally note that lots of American culture seems actively allergic to the concept of class or status, and that in Asian cultures, there's much much much more explicit talk about related concepts like face, and conflicts are often recast in terms of their social consequences instead of what an American would think of as their merits. Source: Me, my upbringing.
Thanks for the responses so far (is this a high- or low- status thing to say...?).
Let me clarify that I never meant to suggest that talking openly about status is at all immoral or sociopathic, though many seem to be taking it that way. Indeed, on pretty much any morality from standard virtue ethics to consequentialism, honesty would be a generally unalloyed good. I was trying to say that what comes across as kind of sociopathic is when entire discussions about status (and how to gain it and exploit it and so on) proceed without anyone mentioning morality! That, narrowly described, is what disturbs me. I want to see (and am often amazed I don't see) people saying "is this use of status morally right?", "I advocate using status to achieve this utilitarian goal" and things like that.
It's not like people around here (as everywhere) don't bring moral claims into every other kind of discussion, from politics to charity to whether a commenter is being annoying. But my weird impression is that the moment status is brought up, people drop all the usual moral language. That's what makes it seen so cynical.
We don't usually judge people for having preferences regarding who to spend time with, befriend or marry. Partially because the wish to do these things with desirable people stems from the (very understandable) fear of becoming undesirable and isolated.
Personally, I'm more annoyed that people bring morality into those other topics. It's far more interesting to analyze these situations from a top-down, sociological point of view, similarly to observing the behavior of animals. (Though, technically that's exactly what we're doing.)
I think you -expect- there to be moral language, which makes it seem cynical when it is missing.
But "status seeking behavior" is more like "sexual identification and/or attraction" than it is like anything else, it is inherent to the way people are.
"Most people like to be liked, some like to be feared, some like a combination of both." There's status-seeking behavior for you, in the language of "normies".
Most of the people here seek, at some level, an explicit understanding of what most people understand implicitly. For some, this is because they lack the implicit understanding, and explicit understanding is all they can get. Scott Alexander is absolutely fantastic at "explicit explanations of implicit phenomena", and I think disproportionately draws from this crowd; Robin Hanson's discussions about status are making things explicit that most people are uncomfortable discussing directly, but may be the only way a large number of people can come to an understanding of why people behave the way they do.
I appreciate the point about making implicit things explicit. I can definitely see its use in that regard.
I just find the concept overbroad; it could really use being broken down further. And I wish other ways of making social interactions explict, especially more consciously moral ones, were given similar consideration.
The subject is incredibly broad, so the concept necessarily must be. But also, to answer your request about making social interactions explicit, while also explaining why it "just isn't done", let's try to explicitly analyze the idea of romance.
So: Why do people find it un-romantic to, for example, ask what somebody wants?
Answer: Romantic behavior is fundamentally a demonstration of insight into somebody else. Giving somebody flowers is romantic, right? No! If you get somebody flowers they are allergic to, or otherwise hate, you're being negatively romantic! (They may appreciate the gesture on other levels, but not a romantic level) You are romantic when you get them flowers they like without them deliberately telling you what they like; you're demonstrating you have knowledge of their desires.
This is why things like "affirmative consent" are offensive to so many people - these norms undermine the basis of romance by trying to make implicit interactions explicit. "May I kiss you?" is, basically, an anti-romantic question; you're showing that you don't know whether or not they want you to. To the typical person, the chance of a "misfire" is the cost you pay for something they very much want, a set of reliable signals that a prospective partner actually understands them at some level.
Once you move entirely into explicit territory, you lose the ability to access or assess this. Implicit communication conveys important information that cannot be reliably communicated in an explicit fashion.
"Can't you just ask whether or not somebody knows what your favorite flower is?", you may ask - and the answer is, no. Because information is also carried in spontaneity - if somebody brings you your favorite flowers without prompting, this is telling you that they are thinking about you when they are not with you. You cannot get this information explicitly.
Implicit communication carries with it a lot of meta-information that is not contained in the denotative content of the communication itself, which is erased or at least devalued by explicit communication. By devalued, I refer to the idea that this information tends to have the quality that it is difficult or impossible to fake; I can't fake the thoughtfulness of getting you your favorite flowers without you asking, either I do it or I don't. (Ish - it's possible to have somebody else carry this mental load for you, or to outsource it in some sense to, say, a PDA. But that's a philosophical question about whether or not devices or people you utilize to augment your cognitive capabilities count as part of your cognition or not.)
Thus is the challenge in making implicit things explicit: Not all implicit information -can- be conveyed in an explicit manner, and even when it can, it may be very challenging to meaningfully replicate.
I agree with all of what you wrote. But I'm not sure what you're disagreeing with me on. You said status models are needed to make explicit the things that many understand implicitly. I said that other models, such as moral codes (I discussed this in my second reply to Viliam) could do that job as well. Just as well or better than cynical-sounding status ones.
Are you disagreeing with that? It seems trivial to construct an explanation of the romantic flowers in terns of virtue ethics. A person with the virtue of love (i.e. eros) will be thinking and obsessing over their partner, and paying great attention to them, and will thus know what they like, and will be wanting to get them things without being asked. That's a moral model of the same kind of thing, but this one doesn't sound at all cynical, doesn't encourage toxic behaviour, and isn't self-defeating to acknowledge: as has been pointed out, talking openly about status can lower your status, but talking openly about trying to be virtuous is generally itself a virtue.
So what disadvantages does my analysis of the flowers have compared to analysing them as a costly status signal?
"So what disadvantages does my analysis of the flowers have compared to analysing them as a costly status signal?"
One obvious one in this environment is that a card-carrying rationalist is a Benthamite and thus believes virtue ethics are wrong; consequently any argument rooted in virtue ethics will be seen to have failed on the first hurdle. Instead you need to analyze it as something more calculating and personal-util-maximizing so that it can be tabulated into the large, spergy moral numbercrunch. The "status" framing does this nicely, by postulating that you basically have a statusmeter whose level can be raised or lowered through the actions of yourself and others.
I'm not disagreeing, except with the idea that what is going on is cynical.
There are many ways of breaking things down; many maps of the territory. They're useful in different circumstances, for different people. Bluntly, if you have no trouble dealing with the implicit-communication-as-implicit-communication - the explicit breakdown isn't for you! It's for people who need the explicit breakdown in order to understand what is going on (or for people who find the explicit breakdown useful for other purposes, or for people who get an "epiphany experience" out of it, or any number of other purposes).
You're basically saying "Don't communicate this information in a way that a subset of the population needs to understand, communicate this information in this other way that they won't understand, because that other way is ugly." The purpose is to communicate with the people who don't understand.
But answering your question. Imagine, that you are a person who not only can and likes to reason about things on object level, but also generally considers it to be the only pure form of reasoning. Imagine, that every time someone appeals to emotions or makes a non-sequitur your mind either ignores it as substantionless or, on the contrary, violently pings, notifying you that there is a reasoning mistake.
And then you meet regular people. A lot of them are unable or unwilling to separate form from the substance, object level arguments from other concerns. What are these people doing? They are not optimizing for truth. And yet they are totally getting along, and are successful. When you try to correct them, they are looking at you as if it's you who is an idiot and missing the obvious thing. They seem to be optimizing for *something*. And "status" is what tries to capture this optimization target.
Could you give some concrete examples of these kinds of things?
It's not at all obvious to me that people who think emotionally aren't trying to optimise for a kind of truth (such as moral truth, or aesthetic truth, or "genuine" self-understanding), and even if they're not, surely they're optimising for things other than personal status, like social cohesion, or ideological goals?
I definitely see status as a useful concept, in light of what many of the responses here have pointed out. But I still maintain (at the moment) that people are far, far too quick to appeal to it (when other explanations would work as well or better).
Others have explained the theory and its origins, so let me elaborate a bit further.
The interesting thing about status is that status is *everywhere*, but not *everything*. All the time when we interact with others, we unconsciously track their attitude to us (approval, respect, etc.). That's the basic mechanism of status. When you see it that way, you can see that it's constantly operating. Ex. you gain status on ACX by posting insightful comments, and it feels good when others validate that.
But — and that's the part that status enthusiasts often forget —, it's not *everything*! As a motivation, doing things for status feels hollow. When it becomes the main motivation, others perceive it, and see that you are "status signalling", and then it doesn't work so much anymore. Status is just one socio-psychological mechanism among many. There are plenty of other reasons why we do stuff.
Rationalists like to separate description from judgment. You don't want your idea of how something works to be clouded by judgments about how it should be. That can sound quite cynical to outside ears, because in common discourse, talking about something without judging it usually means you actually approve of it. When it comes to status, the descriptive part is getting some understanding of how dominance and prestige work in yourself and in others. Then, if the theory makes some sense to you, it's your choice what you do with it. Ambitious types may decide to consciously pursue social status to better achieve their aims. Creative types may use this theory to consciously avoid status motivations to be truer to themselves. Lazy types may learn to selectively ignore or use status to optimize for an easy life. And so on and so forth.
There are also funny second order effects. A person who genuinely doesn't care much about status can be perceived as high-status, because the implicit communication is "I'm secure enough that I don't need your validation". Which means that caring visibly about status becomes low-status, hence the notion of "fake coolness". If you've ever found yourself appearing cool but nervous inside, this might be the explanation.
This is a comment on your parenthetical at the end.
Don't a large number of people accept that managing competing interest groups, allocating limited resources to unlimited demands for those resources, making laws, and so on, are extremely complicated undertakings, and our elected representatives being human and fallible do the best they can while failing often.
Imagine you are at a charitable event, for a charity you don't really care that much about, where all your friends and family are. Everybody else you observe donates $5 (to a cause you don't care a lot about). Attention turns to you; you are reasonably certain your friends and family will think less of you if you don't donate. Do you donate $5?
You're on Reddit. There's a conversation about a topic that doesn't matter, but do have some particular knowledge of. You can contribute a comment which will garner you a bunch of upvotes - the topic doesn't matter, mind, so your contribution doesn't add or subtract anything to the world. Do you make the comment, purely for the upvotes?
That's how status actually cashes out for most normal people.
I definitely stay away from downvotes (or at least ones that I anticipate) on Reddit. It’s fairly pointless anyway as your comment will be effectively hidden.
This comes mostly from Robin Hanson, but I think he knits it together from many pre-existing concepts eg in evo psych.
It combines things like "wanting to keep up with the Joneses", "wanting to be somebody", "wanting to be respected in your field", "wanting to be popular", "wanting to be a high-value romantic partner". Not all of these are exactly the same, but they're correlated > 0. Compare wealth, where there are lots of different kinds of wealth (liquid wealth, illiquid wealth, estimated future cash flows, etc) or intelligence (verbal intelligence, mathematical intelligence, etc) where they correlate enough to often be useful talking about as one concept, even though when we need to we can break them down.
I don't think this is sociopathic any more than talking about eg money is sociopathic. When you talk about the economy, you assume that people will generally try to make money, because even though some people want other things, it basically averages out this way, plus the people who do want money will be the ones who most move the economy. In the same way, not everyone is a claw-your-way-to-the-top sociopathic status seeker, but most people will prefer easy ways to get more status over less status, even if they think of this as "fitting in" or "being liked by my friends" or "being respectable" or something else non-sinister-seeming.
Mostly I find status talk useful as a corrective to models that assume everyone is just after money all the time.
First, I'll acknowledge an instance of apparent status-play here: I felt a strong obligation to respond to you much more than to others in the thread, which perhaps only makes sense in terms of you being the highest-status responder. (I do think there may be other explanations for this though, but drawing them out would take time and effort).
Second, it seems to me that the kinds of things you put under the umbrella "status" are much less clearly linked than different forms of wealth (which are all things you can use to get goods and services, subject to slightly different conditions) and different forms of intelligence (which are all things that tangibly assist in gaining or transmitting knowledge). Is there anything like a similar one sentence unifying descriptor for types of status?
Third, I don't know a lot about economics, but isn't one of the most pervasive criticisms of the entire field that it is built on assuming simplistic models of human behaviour for the sake of analysis, that quite clearly don't hold up in reality? I've known many people who hate economists precisely because they assume everyone only wants to maximise their wealth. Thus building a theory of status on economic foundations is already building on a shaky foundation, and risks introducing even more noise and unsupported assumption into the ultimate theory.
Fourth, that's a really good point about a corrective to models based on money. I think if theories of status-seeking were explicitly limited to being extensions of theories of wealth-seeking, they would be unquestionably useful (and introduce more accuracy and more nuance). My worry is that because status is vaguer and broader, people will be tempted to apply it to a far greater range of situations than they would ever plausibly be tempted to apply considerations of money. Which would lead in the end to a less accurate and more reductive theory of behaviour than the original flawed money-based one. And I think some of the discussions about status is in this community provide evidence of this happening.
"I've known many people who hate economists precisely because they assume everyone only wants to maximise their wealth."
This is just not at all an accurate description of what economists believe. (Well, I shouldn't speak for all economist's personal beliefs. But its not in Mas-Colell, Whinston and Green, and therefore is not canon.)
Yeah sorry, I meant to say that people hate economists because *they think* economists assume that. I wasn't saying economists really do assume that; I don't know enough about it.
"Mostly I find status talk useful as a corrective to models that assume everyone is just after money all the time."
That's a good insight; thanks. Simplistic models are always dangerous, but frequently necessary. And for a simplistic model of human behavior, "people seek money and status and can to some extent trade one for another" is still reasonably tractable in most situations but much more accurate than "people seek money".
I can't think of a third thing I'd want to add to that list offhand. Except probably security, in contexts where it is in serious doubt.
It's from Hanson, he pretty constantly brings up status/signaling a lot as an explanation for basically all human behavior. I agree that most human behavior is not motivated by status/signaling in any but the most perfunctory sense. This is the closest I could quickly find on his blog to an explanation of status: https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/actors-see-statushtml
It doesn't explain scratching your butt when it's itchy. I can't find the link to where he gave that as an example of an action which has least to do with status, in part because he's used it surprisingly often in different contexts.
I think that's precisely why Hanson chose it as an example. Although now I recall more precisely that he used it as an example of something not motivated by signalling.
We have to eat and drink, or we die. But the details of how we do those things, and when and where they are appropriate, are enormously wrapped up in status. How is scratching my butt (before I shake the President's hand) any different?
Eating & drinking are highly social activities. Scratching yourself is not. Among chimpanzees it is social to have someone else remove parasites from your fur though.
2. Status is Dominance and Prestige, two other hard to define words, but neurotypical humans are really good at measuring both very quickly. It is best to think of it in terms of Evolutionary Psychology. Neurotypical humans have an innate urge to gain Status, as in Dominance and Prestige, since both factors greatly improved evolutionary fitness. The most dominant and prestigious humans tended to have the most kids and those kids tended to live long enough to have kids of their own. Further, people that obeyed Dominant and Prestigious people also had slightly higher evolutionary fitness, then those that rebelled. Because of this, gaining status ended up as an innate urge, weaker but similar to hunger and a sex drive. This does not mean you have to be a slave to your status seeking urges, any more than you have to be a slave to you sex drive and cheat on your spouse.
3. I think the urge to have status is a really stupid evolutionary urge to follow, but knowing that most people do want and respect status is useful to achieving my other goals, money and helping people. Status is a part of every position’s compensation package, and it is the reason a lot of people take Low Pay High Prestige positions, like journalists and activists. I went the opposite route, and got a career in government HR, low prestige and high pay. But once I get to high levels, HR has a surprisingly high impact on how well an organization functions. If I can help get HHS staffed by EAs in key roles, it’s possible I can greatly improve our pandemic response. To get to a high level HR role, I need to cultivate HR Status and keep getting promotions.
This is probably why a lot of people here talk about gaining status; it is instrumental to achieving other goals, often just dates. It is best to think of it as a necessary evil; we are mostly consequentialists, so the ends literally justify the means. But if you want to try and dismantle the status framework, more power to you. I’d love to live in a world where status didn’t matter. I just worry that such a world couldn’t have humans.
Daniel Dennett obituary NYT
Daniel C. Dennett, Widely Read and Fiercely Debated Philosopher, Dies at 82
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/19/books/daniel-dennett-dead.html?unlocked_article_code=1.lk0.Zdew.tOISfV5SCPkC&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
At this point, nearly every industrialized country has total fertility rates below replacement levels. The US is doing better than many 1.7 births per woman. The situation is much worse elsewhere, with both Italy and Japan at 1.3, and South Korea at a disasterous 0.9. All of this is a problem because it tends to make the population top-heavy, with relatively few working-age adults supporting a relatively large pool of retired seniors.
Anyone care to make some predictions on what we will see countries doing to fight this trend?
I think it's a no-brainer that we will see a lot of money thrown at this problem. Pre-school child care will probably become highly subsidized. Quebec, Canada, for instance has a program where child care costs parents only CAN$9.10 per day. I also wouldn't be surprised to see subsidized housing for young families, although I don't remember seeing it yet. Medical fertility interventions like IVF might also be subsidized.
I also expect immigration to be permitted, and even encouraged, in many places. In some cases that may be temporary imports of labor though guest worker programs, but in other cases it will involve permanent residents.
Finally, I expect to see retirement ages pushed up. Retirement at 65 will probably become something of the past.
But what else might we see? And will any of this work?
Subsidize minivans, haha.
They'll simply import a billion Chinese to replace us. Chinese work hard and don't question authority, they make far better citizens than we do.
China's TFR is 1.2, so they have it worse than most of the West. I wouldn't be surprised if they started restricting emigration within the next generation or so, when the problem really starts to bite.
Anyone looking to cover this problem with immigration really needs to be a fan of Africans, since that's where fertility tends to be the highest right now. There are also a few places in Asia (like Kyrgyzstan) and South America (Bolivia) with high TFR, but they are small.
Africans can't fix the problem, because large scale, unselected african immigration can never have a positive fiscal impact. America needs more Americans - that is, people with the same distribution of characteristics as the American population or better. Unselected African immigrants will, in aggregate, only ever be a fiscal drain, even ignoring the myriad negative externalities they will almost inevitably bring.
We could legalize housing, and undo many of the other little things that each make parenting just a tiny bit more expensive and annoying. ("Car Seats Are Contraception," that sort of thing.)
Get rid of the expectation of higher education so people can get started on their careers and families four years earlier. Already seeing a little bit of that.
Coming at the problem from the other end, throw money into anti-aging research and then tell all the oldsters to get back to work.
>We could legalize housing
The most "YIMBY" countries of the world, in Asia, have the lowest fertility in the world.
Not only does it not help things, but population density seems to strongly predict against fertility: https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/fertility-questions-the-role-of-population
>Get rid of the expectation of higher education so people can get started on their careers and families four years earlier.
What do you mean "get rid of" as if you're talking about a government policy that can be repealed?
This is a massive cultural change that nobody can will into existence over any reasonable time frame.
>This is a massive cultural change that nobody can will into existence over any reasonable time frame.
The best time to plant a tree was a hundred years ago. The second best time is today.
> What do you mean "get rid of" [expectation of education] as if you're talking about a government policy that can be repealed?
Some jobs have some kind of education as a legal requirement. Makes sense for a surgeon, but much less sense for a hairdresser. The specific rules vary from place to place, but generally, formal education is usually required for many kinds of jobs. Software development is a huge *exception* in this aspect.
This also makes it more difficult to change profession, once you decide that the choice you made when you were 18 perhaps does not fit your current personality and situation. For example, once I seriously considered that maybe it would be better for me to walk away from software development, and become a plumber or a carpenter instead. No more meetings and Jira tickets, flexible working hours, doing something useful and relatively well paid using my hands while perhaps thinking about some open-source project I would do in my free time. How difficult could it be? I mean, there are YouTube videos for everything, I could start by doing things cheaply for the most desperate customers and gradually level up... Ha-ha, nope. Instead, it would be hundreds of hours of formal training (not even available in my city, so I would have to relocate or commute a lot), then a few years of practice working for someone else until I am finally allowed to work independently... nope, I am too old for that. (For the contrast, consider a former plumber who wants to become a software developer instead. If he has the skills, he could literally start the job tomorrow.)
Japan has no shortage of housing, and high school isn't even mandatory there. 1.26 fertility rate.
Well, it... okay, that's a fair point. We should do it anyway though, it certainly can't hurt.
The problem in Japan and South Korea is that while they let women get educated and work, they make it difficult for women with children to work outside the home. A lot of young women take a look at those options and say yes to the job and no to the kids.
Did you have some sort of proof of this? Some data? Surveys?
Sounds reasonable but it's also very easy to just say as a reason.
It probably doesn't help that Japan requires workers to stay late at the office and then go out drinking every night.
My last suggestion would also fix the Social Security problem. And George R. R. Martin might even live long enough to finish Game of Thrones (admittedly this one's a reach.) Though on the downside we'll never be rid of Trump and Biden.
There is, of course, one solution that is almost sure to work that nobody wants to consider or even mention. The root of the problem is that many women are pursuing careers, and are either too busy or are simply unwilling to have children (to be more precise, enough children to exceed replacement rate). This was obviously not a problem in the past.
Unfortunately, it seems that allowing women agency is not sustainable. But would any country actually be willing to reverse all of this social progress for the "greater good"? If the GOP does end up taking full control of the US, I could see them doing it. They're already being pretty gung-ho about the whole abortion issue. But I don't see it happening in any functional democracy. Though, all these western democracies do seem to be on the verge of collapse anyways...
<quote>There is, of course, one solution that is almost sure to work that nobody wants to consider or even mention</quote>
I'm not sure the post actually proposed a solution? Only identified a problem.
I read it as going back to keeping women barefoot and pregnant would increase fertility rate. Could be an incorrect interpretation though.
but that's not really a solution unless you say how you would achieve it.
'have more babies' is not a solution unless you say how you would actually get people to do that.
perhaps I can read between the lines, and guess that the proposed solution is to roll back equal rights, but if that's the case than I can toss it out, since that is not a feasible solution.
I did take it as rolling back equal rights.
With …
> Unfortunately, it seems that allowing women agency is not sustainable
and
> If the GOP does end up taking full control of the US, I could see them doing it. They're already being pretty gung-ho about the whole abortion issue.
… being my clues.
I don’t think it was meant as a solution, more of a lament at the perceived direction of the GOP agenda.
Another clue is anomie’s user name suggesting an anticipated breakdown of moral and ethical standards.
The tone seemed ironic so I didn’t give it a literal reading and that’s why I alluded to a Margaret Atwood dystopia in my comment below
But I should let anomie speak for themself.
Not sure where you are going with this but I don’t think we’re at defcon Margaret Atwood just yet.
Say what you will about Nicolae Ceaușescu, but his fertility program ensured that he didn't have to worry about post-retirement life...
The other one is cutting senior social support and letting the problem take care of itself.
This also works a lot faster than the other suggestion.
...That doesn't even do anything to solve the problem of declining population. Also, old people can vote, and some of them have a lot of money and power. And also there's the obvious fact that everyone becomes old eventually, and thus have an active stake in this. Even ending democracy might not be enough to get rid of support for seniors.
At least with the gender issue, most of the male population would be happy to enforce the patriarchy themselves.
There's a list of things I'd *like* to see them do. But I'm guessing the current industrialized-nation governments are not going to do anything effective, just pile on more of the same stuff that hasn't worked so far and probably never will.
Until a number of factors including but not limited to a top-heavy population pyramid lead to economic catastrophe. Which I suspect will increase TFR by reducing the *relative* cost of child-raising and removing some of the tempting alternatives.
Have you been talking to the Nybbler again, John?
Germany or Sweden seem to do much more when it comes to subsidizing families/children, yet families have less children than in the US for example. Is does't seem to be a lever we can use.
I would say the best chance of actually changing this trend is economic growth / technological change, in the way that we all work far less in the future (and therefore have more time). Another big impact could obviously come from artificial wombs, where women would no longer have to face any trade-offs. Life-extending medicine could also have an impact on demographics (because less people would die over a certain period of time).
Since 2009, Sweden's TFR actually seems to have tracked the American TFR very closely until the last year or so. https://countryeconomy.com/countries/compare/sweden/usa?sc=XE26
One could always argue that the TFRs would be even lower without those generous policies.
Since 2009, Sweden's TFR actually seems to have tracked the American TFR very closely until the last year or so. https://countryeconomy.com/countries/compare/sweden/usa?sc=XE26
One could always argue that the TFRs would be even lower without those generous policies.
Random thought: Christian Bale was drastically miscast as Patrick Bateman, he's too good-looking.
Patrick Bateman is a man who spends a lot of effort on his looks, but I don't think he's working with particularly good raw material, so he doesn't wind up looking like a movie star, just like an over-groomed average looking dude. I think that the deep sense of insecurity that Bateman has is not really compatible with natural good looks. Maybe he should look a bit more like Pete Campbell from Mad Men; not bad looking but not exactly lighting up the room with his smile.
He feels to me like an 1980s version of one of those guys who tries way too hard on Linkedin, but since it's the 1980s and there's no Linkedin he just murders people instead.
I haven't read the book, but...
It works for me. I don't think I have personal experience with Bateman's particular type of psychopathy, but my impression is that it doesn't depend on looks. Whatever it is about him that reads as "insecurity" is more like a gaping internal void that can never be filled; no amount of success or status will ever be enough.
I get to look at the semi famous face of Vincent Kartheiser - Pete Cambell - every time I stop for a beer at the corner bar. He shills for the joint in a photo because he was born across the river in Minneapolis. I think they might have paid him a few bucks too. Looking at his Wikipedia page I see he dropped out of school at 15 to ‘make money.’
They also have photos of a couple of baseball hall of farmers because they played high school ball at the Catholic school across the street.
No photos of Christian Bale though. Just a sign that says ‘No WiFi. Get drunk and talk to each other.’
I thought the exact opposite: He was too well cast. A great actor is by definition a form of psychopath, a charming camouflaged thing. The outcome was a cartoon of a cartoon-- one too many layers deep.
OC ACXLW Sat April 20 Childhood and Education Roundup #5
Hello Folks!
We are excited to announce the 62nd 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
(949) 375-2045
Date: Saturday, April 20 2024
Time 2 pm
Conversation Starter:
Childhood and Education Roundup #5 by Zvi Mowshowitz: A wide-ranging discussion of various topics related to childhood and education, including bullying, truancy, active shooter drills, censorship, woke kindergarten, tracking, homeschooling, the impact of smartphones on children's mental health, and more.
Text and Audio link: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7YuB25vu35ajfxS2/childhood-and-education-roundup-5
Questions for discussion:
1) The article cites a study that finds bullying has lifelong negative effects, including lower subjective well-being, increased mortality risk, and reduced job prospects in adulthood. However, Zvi expresses concern that the study's controls may be inadequate, as bullying is often a function of the victim's social status and response. How can researchers effectively control for these factors to isolate the causal impact of bullying itself?
2) Zvi discusses the case of "Woke Kindergarten," a controversial program implemented in a San Francisco school district that included materials with questions about abolishing work, landlords, Israel, and borders. The article also mentions that test scores in the district fell, with less than 4% of students proficient in math and under 12% at grade level in English. While the article does not directly attribute this decline to the "Woke Kindergarten" program, what does this case suggest about the challenges of implementing politically charged curricula in early childhood education, and how can schools ensure that educational content is both age-appropriate and academically rigorous?
3) The article presents data showing a substantial increase in homeschooling rates in the United States following the COVID-19 pandemic, with many families continuing to homeschool even after schools reopened. Zvi interprets this as a strong endorsement of homeschooling by families who tried it. What factors might contribute to this sustained shift toward homeschooling, and what implications could this have for the future of public education?
4) Citing survey data and time-use studies, Zvi argues that excessive smartphone use among children and adolescents is associated with reduced sleep, decreased in-person socializing, and worsening mental health outcomes. He critiques claims that the evidence is inconclusive, arguing that even the possibility of such significant negative impacts warrants serious concern. How can parents, educators, and policymakers navigate the trade-offs between the benefits and risks of youth smartphone use in an evidence-based manner?
5) The article discusses the potential benefits of student tracking and ability grouping, citing a study that found the introduction of flexible teacher pay in Wisconsin led to improved student outcomes by incentivizing the recruitment and retention of high-quality teachers. However, Zvi notes that tracking remains controversial, with some critics arguing that it exacerbates educational inequities. How can schools design tracking systems that maximize student learning while ensuring all students have access to rigorous, high-quality instruction?
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.
A possibly very stupid questions: Isn't Popper today more or less unimportant for social sciences like psychology? As you might know, every Psy student is taught about Popper: His critical rationalism is the key to our field. We don't validate theories, we falsify them. And for good reason: no matter how many white swans we find, we can never know, if all swans are white. If we find only one black swan, however, we can say with certainty that not all swans are white. Now, in the actual science, we find neither white nor black swans - at least not with a high degree of certainty. Small sample-sizes, failed replications, tests based on probability, internal or external validity, etc. make it questionable, what color the swans really have. And this discussion, the discussion about the real color, seem to be much more important than arguing that a black swan would be of a higher quality than a white one. What do you guys think?
Teaching "about" something doesn't make people actually good at it. Sometimes people answer the questions correctly in test, and then don't apply them in real life anyway. (I think there were experiments showing that courses on ethics or critical thinking do not make people actually more ethical or more critical thinkers.) Perhaps this could be improved by designing the course differently, with an emphasis on examples from everyday life, both professional and free time... rather than just "this is what Popper thought on the topic". I am not sure.
Probably more importantly, I do not think that Popper correctly describes what scientists (even in STEM) actually do. I think he proves too much... at least the version of him that most people on internet use, which probably lacks most of the original nuance.
Basically, Popper (as used by most people) seems completely one-sided. He argues against any feelings of certainty, ever; his approach is pure negativity. On one hand, sure, you should never be literally 100% certain about something; there is always a possibility of new evidence that will disprove things you thought were true. But he takes it too far, as if there is nothing positive a scientist could ever say about a theory, beyond "it hasn't been falsified yet". From that perspective, a theory that is supported by thousands experiments is no more certain than a crazy hypothesis I made up just now and no one had an opportunity to test it yet. Neither has been falsified yet... and according to (the popular interpretation of) Popper, that is all anyone can ever say about a scientific theory.
But we all know that this is *not* how actual scientists behave. They take certain things, such as gravity or evolution or relativity, as basically true. They may be open to re-examine them critically, if something new and surprising happens. But normally, they just treat them as true. Whenever a journalist reports that the speed of light has been experimentally exceeded (that used to happen quite often a few years ago), a scientist simply ignores that, because he knows that's pretty impossible... and usually a few weeks later it turns out that it was instead a mistake at some calculation. To act otherwise would be a waste of time. For most practical purposes, scientists act as if relativity has been validated.
A crackpot whose life mission is to prove that "relativity isn't true" will quote Popper every day.
Scientists should be open to the possibility that a new fact can make them reconsider the existing theories. They should even actively be looking for possible disconfirmations of the existing theories... of course, not all of them all the time; after the theory has been here for a while, most of the time they should just use it as a tool to derive new useful results. It is okay to take "all swans are warm-blooded" as a fact (unless something extraordinary happens).
The problem instead is that in fields such as psychology, the proper degree of certainty in existing theories should be much lower than in physics. Because there is less experimental evidence, few replications, small sample sizes, often people not even considering alternative explanations of the observed data, etc. Those are the actual problems. Falsifiability is a red herring, in my opinion. It is a one-sided weapon against all feelings of certainty, whether deserved or not. The problem is jumping to conclusions too soon, not making conclusions as such.
I completely agree! Popper is totally overused. His basic point (there could always be a black swan) is good and important, but in the scientific reality coming to a good valuation of a theory and deciding, how good an empirical study actually was (was that swan really white/black?) is much more relevant. Popper should be named in an introduction to the field, not as a user manual.
Is it actually true that 'sanctuary cities' policies against cooperation with ICE mean that they protect people suspected even of heinous crimes like raping children?
I am sure there is at least one tweet out there saying that it is true, and I am expecting you to post it here as a fact.
No, I saw a number of news articles recently and want to know if it's true or not: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/haitian-illegal-immigrant-charged-with-rape-released-back-onto-streets-in-boston-despite-ice-appeals
No. Remove your tin foil hat and take your meds.
No.
Do people have strategies for getting a good night's sleep for the nights they really need to? While I have sleep issues usually, they get especially bad when I have something big coming up/on my mind, which means I e.g. go to most interviews fairly exhausted and perform more poorly than I would otherwise. This is on my mind because I just had an interview on literally zero hours of sleep.
I'd like some technique/failsafe to try in situations like this to ensure I get a good sleep. I've tried a lot of the more standard advice like staying off screens and using melatonin which mostly hasn't worked but I'd be interested in hearing things that worked for other people in my situation. I'm fine with medication, but only if it actually leads to me feeling refreshed/alert in the morning and doesn't only knock me out for a while. If it helps for giving me advice, I tend to have issues both with falling asleep and with staying asleep, although my issues with falling asleep become especially acute before a big day.
A Benadryl in a pinch always works for me but I’m logy the next day.
I tend to cycle through 3 strategies:
1. Read something that's just kinda boring. For a while, Moby Dick was my go-to. I love the prose, but it's a style of writing that's hard to get in sync with in this day and age. Forcing myself to keep reading it was a good way to exhaust my brain.
2. Watch something kinda boring on my phone. This goes against most advice but it works for me (sometimes). Right now a good go-to is the Halo adaptation on Paramount. I like it just enough to keep watching but sometimes I find myself waiting for something actually interesting to happen and that's when I get sleepy.
3. The real trick, the one that usually works. I tell myself - and I actually believe it - that if I can't sleep, then just lying still with my eyes closed and thinking calm thoughts is a good substitute for sleep. I just try to do that as long as possible, and tell myself that it doesn't actually matter if I fall asleep if I can keep doing that instead. Almost invariably, I fall asleep.
I do something similar to #3: I lay perfectly still with my eyes close and don't move except for breathing and swallowing. I've never gone longer than 15 minutes before falling asleep no matter how awake i am.
It sounds so dumb, but it works. It's also way harder than it seems. You don't notice how many small movements you do all the time until you try to not do them. There is also a meditation/mindfulness piece to it: you'll get little itches and things all over and all you can do is focus on them and hope they go away. It often seems like your body will create this little irritations almost to "check if you are awake" - they will happen more frequently the closer you get to sleep.
I'll warn that I first learned of this as a technique to encourage lucid dreaming, which many people dont want. Its never produced lucid dreaming for me, though I have had lucid dreams by chance.
As far as reading goes, advanced math tends to work well as well. Or anything that requires mental effort.
The problem I've found with this is that you can be really sleepy while reading, and then instantly become non-sleepy once you stop reading and get into bed.
As for the third, that's a neat trick. I doubt I'd be able to delude myself into making it work, but it's a cool idea.
I've been pretty satisfied with CBD. As I've gotten older it's been harder to get through the night without waking up. Eating 5 Mg of CBD (in a gummy) before I go to bed have improved my sleep patterns considerably. However, not all the brands of CBD gummies I've tried have been equally effective.
Stay up late the night before. Then you'll be really tired the next day.
Sadly enough, for my most recent interview, I had also slept poorly the previous evening. Usually that is enough for me to sleep better the next evening, but this time it wasn't.
I'd recommend the opposite. If there's a chance you are going to miss a night's sleep - have as much in your sleep bank as possible in the week leading up. Knowing that also takes the pressure to fall asleep on the big night off a bit which sounds useful as a sleep strategy in itself in this case.
This makes sense. Sleep is most elusive when you really need it, really want it.
I've tried this, with mixed results. The most regular outcome is that I do sleep better on the second night, but not by enough. My body wants 8-9 hours, if I did nothing I might get 4-5, and by reducing my sleep the night before I end up with 6-7. So two nights in a row with 6ish hours instead of 8 and 4 - mixed results at best.
This doesn't work for me. When I stay up, my regular bedtime just gets later and later.
Don’t worry about it. Twenty year olds don’t even need sleep. You can sleep when you are 40. ;)
I don't have anything that works all the time, but a number of things that increase the probability of a good night's sleep: Most powerful on eis 30 mins or so of cardio in any form done earlier in the day, cardio that's intense enough to get me really sweaty. Another powerful one is to get in the habit of using the bed only for sleep & sex. If you read, watch movies, talk on the phone, browse online while in bed you associate bed with relaxed wakefulness. Relaxed wakefulness is just want you don't want if you're lying in bed trying to go to sleep, right? So do all those winding down things like movies and internet browsing in a chair or sitting on a couch. If you're bothered by noise, use earplugs (I recommend the Macks silicone ones) and a white noise machine. When it comes to drugs I find that benedryl 25 mg or so works well, and does not give me a hangover. Benzodiazepines work extremely well for many people -- but watch out, because you can develop a tolerance, so don't use the stuff more than once a week.
One thing that works for me is long academic discussion podcasts like The Dissenter or Mindscape. Stuff that’s interesting enough that I would want to listen even if I wasn’t trying to sleep, but not so important to me that I’ll object if I doze off in the middle of it.
There's a technique I learned from an online post that works decently well for me.
First, and this is probably well known to you, don't try to relax. Because trying to relax is just going to keep you awake. Instead, try to focus on seeing with your eyes closed. Keep your eyes closed but otherwise make an effortful try to see something in the blackness. It will seem slippery and weird at first, but keep trying. Eventually you'll catch a glimpse of something: dark shapes moving in the blackness. If you try to look at them too hard they'll slip away, but that's okay. Keep looking.
Eventually you'll start seeing dream imagery. These will be vivid images, but you aren't actually seeing them with your eyes. Keep focused on trying to see them, on examining the images that come up. At this point you'll be on the edge of sleep, dipping into unconsciousness. You might bob up and down on this border for a while, but when you bob up into consciousness try to stay focused on seeing. Watching for the next dream image.
Eventually you fall asleep.
It is not a perfect "works every time" technique, but when I can't sleep it's my go to and it is fairly effective. I used it last night, which was a pretty rough night for me, and I'd say it took about 15-20 minutes to work. Your mind will want to wander, but just keep herding your attention back to watching for images.
> It will seem slippery and weird at first, but keep trying. Eventually you'll catch a glimpse of something: dark shapes moving in the blackness. If you try to look at them too hard they'll slip away, but that's okay. Keep looking.
This sounds like the start of a creepypasta.
Not going to lie, some nights my subconscious will generate a stream of frightening images. I learned how to deal with that from listening to an interview with a guy who does guided psychedelic psychotherapy. He said that most “bad trips” happen because you start to experience something disturbing and then you mentally flinch away from it. But trying to run away from a frightening thing your own mind conjured up is as pointless as trying not to think a thought: as long as you’re trying, you’re thinking about it. So the key is to not flinch away, to look it straight on and then go through it. If you do you may find something better on the other side. I have found that this works with the sleep technique as well, though it can be difficult.
This is my go-to technique, either learned from you or another ACX or DSL poster sometime last year/two years ago(?) This alone has potentially made lurking around this whole community a net positive for my cumulative amount of sleep.
One other advantage: it has made it much easier for me to fall asleep even if my environment is not totally dark. With a little bit of ambient light, it is easier to attend to the phantom images I see when my eyes are closed.
We definitely got it from the same place, though I can’t find the source offhand. It was a link to a blog with a long post about it, someone must have put it in the comments a few years ago.
Do most people not put a second pillow on top of their head? That generally mitigates light issues.
I haven't seen a lot of people sleeping, but that isn't something I've observed.
For most of the year, it would be too hot for me to cover my head with another pillow, even partially.
One of my children does cover his eyes with a blanket that he claims is for light reduction.
Have you experimented with sleep podcasts at all? I particularly like The French Whisperer. He has a ton of content free on Spotify. Works both for falling asleep at bedtime and if I wake up in the middle of the night. YMMV of course but maybe worth trying.
Moderate exercise in the early evening, enough that I feel tired, but not enough that I'll be sore in the morning. Maybe followed by a warm shower, even if I also plan to shower in the morning.
Doing some things like dishes, cleaning, and sorting, which require a small amount of effort, and have clear end-conditions, so I feel like I've accomplished goals and am done for the day. Not things like studying or long-term projects which leave me feeling like there's always more to do.
Tiny amounts of alcohol, mostly smelled and slowly consumed, not enough to produce any real effect, but enough to trigger some of the pleasant associations in my mind.
Pleasure reading with a physical book, of something I enjoy that I've read before, in low warm light. I have a dawn simulator that also works in reverse, as a dusk simulator. But I can also turn the overhead dimmers all the way down, and turn on a side-lamp that has an old 40-watt incandescent bulb.
It's probably very individual. I get a good sleep after an exhausting workout, but my wife can't fall asleep after one. Sometimes white noise really helps, but not always. Same for reading in bed.
One thing I'd strongly advise against for this purpose is alcohol.
The German left trying to ban a popular political party, to "save democracy" or something:
https://archive.is/Vk14X
(WaPo: Once wary of extremist violence, Europe now fears extremism in politics)
This is not new, and also not really 'or something'. From the text you shared:
"Germany’s constitution does allow for parties that “seek to undermine or abolish the free democratic basic order” to be banned, but the hurdle to do so is extremely high. The country’s Constitutional Court has done it only twice — with the Socialist Reich Party, a successor to the Nazi party, in 1952, and the Communist Party of Germany in 1956."
I don't know if 'militant democracy' is the established translation (of 'wehrhafte Demokratie'). 'Fortified' (or: able to defend itsself) sounds to me like it'd represent the original concept better, though maybe it doesn't sound better in english ;).
Okay, and AfD cannot be remotely described as seeking to do this, which means that efforts to abolish it are not in any conceivable sense actually concerned with "saving democracy". So uh, yeah, the "or something" was actually very generous. Because really, these efforts are being conducted by anti-democratic lunatics.
Nothing in your comments here so far has indicated that you're well familiar with the AfD, with the inner-German debate on banning the party or with the respective procedures. Please feel free to add relevant information on any of those.
As you can read in the article you posted, while 'lunatics' may any time demand anything "the hurdle to do so ((ban the party)) is extremely high", and the process is taken quite seriously. In the past 20 years, efforts to ban another extremist-right-wing party failed two times, for very different reasons.
As far as the AfD is concerned, in three of the German states their state-wide party organisations are classified as 'definitely right-wing extremist'. This is in contradiction with your verdict of 'cannot be remotely described as seeking to do this'.
There was an interesting essay I read a few months back about how the mechanism for keeping actual dangerous far-right parties out of power in Germany was for the milquetoast establishment center-right party to move right _just_ enough to steal whatever issue they were harping on, and that worked beautifully for decades. It only fell apart once it was somehow decided that certain positions, immigration restriction in particular, were beyond the pale, and instead they would just suppress the far-right parties and somehow the voters who wanted those policies would just fade away. We're seeing that fail now, as it always does.
> somehow decided
... is not a very clear term. The far-right was strenghtened when the center-right party being in government decided to let in several hundred thousands of refugees mostly from Syria. The original and most influential decision was taken, when refugees who were already in Europe were both mistreated and being actively pushed westwards by the Hungarian prime minister.
I think there is something to it, though the way this is described sounds more like a narrative / good story, than the actual events. A couple of far-right parties tried since re-unification, but could never establish themselves. The current far-right party started as a mix of right-wing/libertarian/very-far-right persons and over the years, the latter won the internal fights (although there are still *some* differences among regions). The party also gained enormous momentum, when we had many refugees enter the country in 2015/2016, under the government of a conservative chancellor.
What would have been or would currently be the right strategy against the now popular far-right party, is a matter of much debate. What is not in doubt is however, that
a) this party is much stronger in the eastern states of the country and
b) the multiple crises of the past years (Covid-19, war in Ukraine, related energy crisis and inflation) have also contributed to a growing number of people overall dissatisfied with 'the state' or 'the democratic/ mainstream parties'.
Large parties do that anyway -- copying popular policies from small parties. That's how the UK conservatives became greenish, when they were.
LOL, those are amateurs.
In Slovakia, in recent elections, the ruling party realized that the war in Ukraine will be a divisive topic, so before the election it split into two parts-- one strongly pro-Russian and anti-Ukraine, the other strongly pro-Western and anti-Ukraine -- both got a lot of votes, and after the election they de facto merged again.
This is an interesting take. Do you have a longer source or text on when and how exactly this happened?
Sorry, I have no longer text that would describe it all together.
Fico's position on Ukraine is documented on English Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fico%27s_Fourth_Cabinet
> Robert Fico is widely seen as pro-Russian, and his government has stopped militarily supporting Ukraine, saying he "will not send one bullet" to Ukraine. Fico has been opposing sanctions against Russia, with his standpoint on Ukraine being compared to that of Viktor Orbán. In an RTVS interview, Fico questioned Ukraine's sovereignty and independence, claiming that Ukraine is just a US puppet, sparking outrage in both Slovakia and Ukraine. He has also stated that Slovakia will veto Ukraine's NATO membership, and has pushed for a peace deal, even if Ukraine suffers territorial losses. His words regarding Ukraine have been described as "heartless", "vulgar" and "disgraceful".
Pellegrini described himself as pro-EU and pro-NATO. I don't have a good link, because it was a very recent thing and only aimed at voters in Slovakia before the election. I assume he will probably not mention it again (until maybe right before the next election).
And, as you can see on the linked Wikipedia page, today they happily rule the country together.
Thanks for the information.
Honestly? I'm not even upset. That's brilliant. Regardless of how much I disagreed with their position I'd be honored to be led by people that devious.
I don't think they actually have a position, other than "steal as much money as possible". They certainly do say a lot of things, but practically everything is like this, saying whatever their polls suggest most people want to hear (which is typically some form of "social democracy", except this time this one question was too polarizing to have a single best answer) and then doing their own thing regardless.
The same thing will happen about Ukraine -- as long as EU or NATO offers some money they can steal in return for sending some weapons to Ukraine, they will. Otherwise, they will not. It's as simple as that. The story they will tell their voters... either they won't mention it at all, or they will say that someone else would have sent the weapons anyway so at least it meant more jobs for our people. Slovakia is a small country, so on any issue they have the excuse that they were forced to do so by the big bad Europe, but at least they were clever enough to derive some benefit for our people.
I also admire the skills (and I am deeply disappointed that the opposition is sorely lacking them) on the technical level. But the money is really missing in the economy, things are slowly falling apart, to do anything important you need to bribe someone connected to the governing party, and young people are leaving the country.
Okay, I guess I was too flippant, that does suck. In the US we're so starved for even remotely functional leadership that any foreign leader capable of speaking in complete sentences looks like Metternich to us.
Incredible
Hm, I posted on comment on Rootclaims blog (https://blog.rootclaim.com/covid-origins-debate-response-to-scott-alexander/) which was actually very friendly and constructive but it seems like it didn't get through moderation. Did this happen to anyone else?
Scott, Is it possible to make every 4th open thread have a ban on linking to personal substacks or yt pages? would be a fun experiment to run.
Once upon a time, linking to personal webpages was a reportable offense.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-283/comment/18019038
Wish it would still be enforced.
There's been way more of it lately. Feels like too much to me. I'd prefer it if there was some rule of thumb like not more than twice a year.
I guess I can't really blame new posters for self-promotion when the top of the page reads, "Post about anything you want."
I searched out that old "twice per year comment" about two weeks ago, intending to link it (and the general policy*) on the next Hidden Thread, hoping it might help other long-time readers who want to police the comments. (You're doing God's work Shaked Koplewitz)
*https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/register-of-bans
I have to say, I really like the "symbolically banned for one day for interacting with trolls" policy. I wish that were enforced more consistently, even though I might eat a few myself. But Scott is probably doing the right thing by spending more time with his family, and less time policing trolls on his corner of the Internet.
My big fear in the move to Substack was that working for pay would cause Scott to experience the Over-justification effect. So I try not to complain if he avoids unpleasant chores.
From past experience here: a huge proportion of people skip over any header text of an "Open Thread", including unusual rules that apply to that thread.
I think we just need a general rule, something like don't plug your blog more than twice per year. Then the group here would need to remind posters who violate it, because Scott was never good at staying on top of that or on top of reports of incivility, even before he became the father of twins.
Elementary school age children in the passenger seat of cars with advanced airbags (that is: airbags with a weight sensor that are supposed to deactivate for small passengers): is there a real risk here?
It's easy to find breathless warnings that allowing your child into the front seat before they are thirteen is dangerous, but I was unable to find much in the way of actual data. A few studies from the 90s back when the problem with airbags and children was first being investigated, but nothing about modern cars.
Does anyone have any good data?
I havent seen any about airbags, though i read a blog post a while ago about how car seats for kids above like 5 don't really reduce injuries (can't find it now, sorry). I'd like to see some data on front seats and airbags too.
Perhaps a pressure sensor in the lower half of the front passenger seat would solve the problem, combined with the weight sensor in the seat itself. Either that, or make the kids carry a hundredweight sack of potatos on their lap! :-)
Banned for this comment.
Makes the whole 'global celebrations of Oct 7' look kinda silly now, doesn't it?
Hello Hammond. Not exactly sure what you mean by that. I tend to agree with you and others who prefer Europe closes its borders.
https://substack.com/profile/198296034-hammond/note/c-50060425
I just feel we should extent the same to the natives of Palestine who also did not welcome refugees from europe and in hindsight were probably correct to do so.
Yeah, how's that rejectionism working out for them?
It's really the soaring height of scum and villainy to pick a politics that you don't like, a downtrodden people who advocate for and/or support it, and then smugly ask "And how is X working out for Y?", before sauntering off cockily.
What's funny is how utterly symmetric and ideology-neutral this is, it's one of the most low-effort celebration of evil that someone could possibly do.
Uh huh. So seriously though, how's that rejectionism working out for them?
Cartoonishly vile and moronic, even by the standards of the pro-Israel camp.
Glenn, as a Pro-Palestinian on your side I'm not pleased with a lot of the phrasings you use in this and other post. Let Me Explain Why (^TM).
Nearly 4 months ago I wrote in reply to a certain Pro-Palestinian commenter who was (and substantially more than you) quite aggressive and displayed very uncharitable behavior [1], in order to advise him/her on how to gradually back off from some of this behavior, this commenter was banned about 3 weeks later. I'm not saying I'm pleased he/she was banned or that I'm hopeful that you will get banned, I'm just saying that, had they listened to even a subset of my advice, they would probably not have been banned, and there would be another Pro-Palestinian voice here, which is ultimately a good thing for Palestine and Palestinians, however indirect and minor the effect of posting walls of text on a textbox hosted on a shitty server is.
Being banned on ACX is **hard**, I was banned twice here before under different (unrelated to Palestine/Israel) usernames and believe me when I tell you, I had to **sink** to deep lows to trigger the Benevolent Libertarian in charge of the comment section. The 2 comments I was banned for are some of the cringiest things I wrote since middle school love poems, and one of them still makes me feel guilty at night as it was full of very mean and flagrant insults. When Scott was banning me for this comment that would get you insta-banned by auto-bots anywhere else on the Internet, he said he was "on the fence" on the actual comment, and only banned me due to an **additional** comment that I wrote in reply to someone who reported the original. I'm just saying this as encouragement, you know. This is basically witch land [2]; you have to be an active demon to be persecuted. A persistent, unrepentant, proud demon. Don't be like this.
The link I posted has 7 pieces of advice in a huge wall of text, I hope you will read it.
I specifically want to comment on your use of the term "Zionist". Zionist is, by and large, an exonym, and is a name mostly used derogatorily to refer to people who do not call themselves by this name. I'm not saying that there aren't unrepentant and proud Neo-Zionists in the modern day who dick around and ramble on how important it's to "redeem" Eretz Israel and establish a Jewish supremacy from Gaza to the Galilee and beyond, they do exist. I'm just saying that the word "Zionist" is a rhetorical trick where you group those scum with less evil people who *merely* think that Israel should stick to its current border but also fully support the war in Gaza, and **then** group all of those with much better people who think that Israel **is** evil and that it **is** treating Palestinians badly and engaged in an unjust war but that it shouldn't be disbanded or destroyed because that would imply certain things about its Jewish population.
In short, "Zionist" is a so-called "Suitcase Word", a term coined by Marvin Minsky to denote confusing words that mean plenty of very different things, they are confusing because they trick the reader into thinking things that are true of a certain subset of the things denoted by the Suitcase Word and then generalizing those things to all the denoted set.
So, to all the advice listed in [1], here's an 8th (or Shemona, in Hebrew):
(8) Eschew the word "Zionist". More generally, eschew words that your opponents don't use among themselves to call themselves. If it's necessary to call someone a name they don't call themselves, make it clear that it's you calling them this word "Xs are what I call 'Y's, let me explain", don't use an exonym uncontroversially as if it's established facts.
More wall of text follows in the reply.
[1] https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/open-thread-307?r=3evauj&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=45847539
[2] https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-centralized-web/
I'm fine with skipping the term Zionist, though I did qualify it as "genocidal Zionist." I agree there are more mild Zionists I happen to know them. But it seems when an issue becomes ethnically/tribally related the lizard brain pops in and the guy who is your co-worker turns into a crazed supremacist. Most of the moderate Jews I know in real life and online seem to just reflexively defend Israelis no matter how progressively worse the atrocity is. I call it the deny, downplay, then distract method. It's not always done in this order.
"There is plenty of things to be said against Israel, browsing goddamn Haaretz will give you a lot of ideas, that's how bad Israel is. "
LMAO yes haha. Haaretz isnt perfect by any means but they've done a lot of good.
" conversely, that's how awesome and selfless some Israelis are, to publicly criticize their state and their people"
I agree and I admire them for overcoming the tribalistic impulse although this is an small percentage of the population. I think I'm a lot more moderate on the ethno-nationalism than I was before. Ethnic/tribal conflict seems to be a pretty consistent theme in human history and its unfortunately backed up by dna evidence. There is a phenomenon known as Y chromosomal replacement where one tribes' men annihilate the other tribes. There are other instances of just complete massacres. At the same time, if we are to transcend our lizard brain and be more than marauding tribalists we have to treat laws and norms around human rights consistently, not just shit on them when its convenient, or for our more impressive/pity-worthy ethnic groups. I was a little bit pro Israel before I turned fully against it so I guess I should be a lot more charitable than I am.
Since you are right about the atrocities being undeniable at this point, I think there are maybe a few claims they still make that need to be addressed and maybe this is the one that gets to me the most so it will be my Final Comment whenever I get around to refining it. I see advocates use this excuses a lot online as a way to dodge criticism. The screeching atrocity deniers are so far gone it is not worth engaging with them.
But the tactic I am talking about is to assign Hamas and Palestinians a quadrillion malintent points, and Israels a quadrillion excuses so no matter what an IDF is doing to a 6 year old Gazan girl, Hamas is just always worse by default "because they would do worse if they could and how dare you suggest otherwise". If Israelis don't deny what they're accused of, they'll downplay it "its a rare instant, hamas is worse" or they will just distract you from the issue like carateca here, who clearly does not want incidents being discussed and would rather attempt to rile you up and I supposed I fell into this individuals little trap and wont be doing so.
I don't think we disagree about anything on the actual matter-of-fact bottom-line which is that Israel is a genocidal state engaged in merciless and unprecedented murder of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians. We probably **do** disagree a lot on how culpable each individual Israeli are (my view: Not very much if they're a non-IDF person living inside the green line) and how diaspora Jews should react and believe regarding the war (my view: too complex and half-baked to summarize in a pair of parentheses), and we probably disagree a lot and lots of things related to Religion, Politics, etc.... Regardless, "Israel is killing lots of Palestinians and a lot of rabid Pro-Israel commenters are justifying it" is not a particularly contentious point between the two of us.
My long pair (or triple if you count the December 2023 link) of posts is purely an objection on **how** you present your views, not the actual content of your views.
Imagine you and I are both Christian pastors/preachers, in actual fact I'm an Atheist ex-Muslim but that's why I said "imagine". Both of us are tasked with telling people about the fire and brimstones that Yahweh - the Jews' God that billions of non-Jews are inexplicably worshipping - is going to rain down on them if they don't repent. Imagine that:
- You had the idea of actually finding someone who died of first-degree fire, and presenting their charred coal-black body to the congregation as an object lesson in what would happen to them
- I had the idea of merely touching a burning match with my finger, and then telling the congregation to do the same and contemplate the fire and brimstone that Yahweh will bring on us if we disobey.
If this was true, I might then object to your way of presentation NOT because I'm not a Christian, and NOT because I don't think that the ancient Levantine God is indeed going to rain down fire and brimstone on people who disobey Him, but because it's a really over-the-top brutal way of getting your points across. It's a bad idea to make an example out of a dead body, it's a bad idea to display a horribly mutilated human then argue and make a point (the people who saw the horribly mutilated human will be shocked into non-articulacy and no amount of reasoning or argument will reach through). All in all, it's just a really bad idea of making the point.
That was a bit of an unfair and over-the-top example, but I hope you get what I meant by my posts.
In certain Hollywood productions there is a cliche where someone who lost a loved one in a war tells another loved one who is fighting a possibly different war "I don't want to lose you too", cue the crying and sniveling and perhaps some sexual kissing. This cliche is very cringe and trite and Hollywood in general is very cringe and facile, posting on ACX is not a war even if you're posting about an actual war and being banned from ACX is not Death.
Regardless, I want to be that someone (minus the sexual kissing): I don't want another Pro-Palestinian commenter to be banned. Your job is... honestly not that fucking hard. There is plenty of things to be said against Israel, browsing goddamn Haaretz will give you a lot of ideas, that's how bad Israel is. (and conversely, that's how awesome and selfless some Israelis are, to publicly criticize their state and their people for all the countless millions to see and for the all the internet to remember, because that's the right thing to do.)
There is a trap that is very easy to fall for when you're angry about an injustice, that trap is to mistake discharging your anger for correcting the injustice. What I mean is: Suppose you saw an Israeli soldier do... whatever the fuck they have been doing in Gaza for the past 5 months, their TikToks speak louder than anything I will write. You get very angry at this clear injustice, who could blame you? What unfeeling piece of rock would not? But then you feel that you have to do something, and Israel is some X thousand kilometers away and it's very unlikely you can get to this particular soldier or his boss or his boss' boss and it's very unlikely you can do something to them when you're unarmed and not an Israeli, so you go to a random Jewish guy in your neighborhood - X thousand kilometers away from Israel - and yell some racist thing in his face, or comment a mean thing under a YouTube video featuring a random Israeli.
What happened here? What happened is that you mistook your own anger as the injustice itself, the injustice that you witnessed in Gaza hadn't changed a single bit by your actions, the only thing that changed is that you are now less angry because you insulted or threatened someone that you perceive as similar to the one who committed the injustice. Those are not the same thing. That's your own ego talking, it's not about Palestine or Palestinians or helpless people, it's about you.
That's enough wall of text for now, I hope you will read it and get something out of it, Cheers.
You're completely unhinged, dude. Hopefully someday Scott will get around to looking at his report queue, which I'd wager is 90% you at this point.
Normally Carateca would be banned for this comment, but I just got around to looking at my report queue which was 90% this guy, so whatever.
Are we returning insults now? I distinctly remember calling *you* unhinged a while ago. Very creative.
Report away, I'll be reporting you.
I'm not "returning" anything, dude. I barely recall anything else you've posted other than how it seethes with wild-eyed, foaming hatred for the Jews.
You are literally the cue in. Incredible.
I'm not even in this conversation, but I am also unfamiliar with the term "cue in". If you have a few free minutes, would you please explain it? Seriously, as someone with a bit of a linguistics background, I'm curious about what it means and where it came from. I'm familiar with the usage "to cue someone in", but this is completely new to me.
i just mean, "you are the person being cued in"
Not a native English speaker, but English has a famous habit of freely transporting words from one linguistic category to another, right? The most famous instance of this is verbing non-verbs: "I will google this", "They should email us", etc... The reverse is also true, searching for "nouning verbs" on google (or **googling** it, hehe) yields the fancy name for this, Nominalization. Among the famous examples listed are "Throw" and "Smile".
"The cue in" is just an instance of this, "cue in" is a phrasal verb. It's a bit more unusual to noun phrasal verbs, but I found a lot of examples after a bit of searching and following dictionary suggestions:
1- A giveback: An agreement between employees and employers to surrender benefits in return for other beneifts
2- A payback: Revenge
3- A pushover: Someone or something who is easy to "push over", to coerce or persuade to do what you want without much difficulty. This one is so famous that the verb itself is relatively obscure relative to its nominalization.
4- A getaway: An escape
5- A handover: Infamously [over]used in corporate contexts, meaning when someone hands over jurisdiction and/or responsibility for something to someone else, typically (in corporate contexts) when the person doing the handover is about to quit or be fired. Googling "The Handover" yields as the first result the Wikipedia page about the handover of Hong Kong from UK to continental China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handover_of_Hong_Kong.
Judging from 5 examples, the only mistake that Glenn seems to have made is that he didn't append the 2 words together to make the nominalization. It should have been "The cuein" not "The cue in", but that would have made it incomprehensible.
I have no idea what a "cue in" is.
In response to the comment that you deleted: yes. I did in fact have a perfectly civil conversation with Glenn on one subject, even though we disagree on another subject.
Really do report me, it will mean attention to you're comments I've reported and I would like this. You are the case in point commenter who defaults to denying, downplaying, or just flat out distracting from anyone who criticizes Israel. It is a pathetic method of sabotaging debate and reeks of insecurity which is natural I guess. You are not different from other atrocity deniers. I actually think you are more rabid and nasty than online communists who defend stalin and pol pot.
The people that I'm supposed to think are superior to Hamas because Hamas as infinity malintent points or something.
https://twitter.com/zoe_sottile/status/1779948428803395723
The kind of investigations the IDF does into their own crimes when the evidence is damning
https://x.com/jsternweiner/status/1778725035370295343
As someone who has come around to the view race is real, but who also believes human rights is also real, this is showing me the former is going to be trumping the latter worldwide. Because the descendants of the Holocaust decided to open that door.
https://x.com/BeckettUnite/status/1779574790669406577
Murdering people as they try to return to their homes.
Literally terrorizing little kids.
https://x.com/GozukaraFurkan/status/1779220248844968325
And when they decided to go ahead and snipe those kids
https://x.com/leloveluck/status/1779570958132543734
You're reposting stuff written by Muslims.
There's two groups whose opinions on the current conflict need to be absolutely and totally disregarded: Muslims and Jews. I don't want to read anything written by one of them on this subject, there's too much ingroup bias.
Found something not by Muslims. Although a better approach would be try to listen to literally everyone and discern the truth from that, muslims, jews, christians especially palestinian christians, etc.
https://x.com/evanhill/status/1780293554629194163
https://x.com/ggreenwald/status/1780253058389123321
https://x.com/LongTimeLefty/status/1780252359764934896
"The Zionists slaughtered children in their hospital beds, dumped them in pits outside and drove over them with bulldozers. Many kids bodies were found with their drips still attached."
I mean not exactly the worst approach I guess but most independent observers sooner or later observe the IDF are unhinged killers. I know I was I guess more on the pro Israeli side (a little) before learning a lot more, listening to both, and and turning more and more pro Palestinian the more I listened to either.
Question for Americans: how important is housing space to you?
I am quite aware that Europe is considerably poorer than the US, a topic that comes up frequently in US-Europe discussion, other through Americans triumphantly explaining this fact to Europoors. There are quite a few indicators that can be used to show this, from incomes to wealth levels to various owned appliances.
However, one of the most common things to come up is something that seems less important than all those: Americans consider Europeans to live in pitifully cramped houses with little space. Take this tweet (https://twitter.com/scottlincicome/status/1779635261661417518) and its reactions, for instance.
I, personally, live with my wife and two kids in an apartment that's a bit smaller than the average size of housing for Finland. If I had the choice I'd take those few extra square meters and put them in the kitchen, since I like to cook and a bit more space for appliances and shelves would be nice. Other than that, I don't really have a problem with the size: there's four rooms and a kitchen, enough for the kids to have their own rooms and for me to work quietly in the bedroom when I'm working from home.
When living in America for a few months in 2008, I visited ordinary American houses, and it was of course evident already then that the house sizes are indeed bigger than here. However, this particular difference aroused no envy in me; I mostly remember thinking that it's just more room to vacuum and mop. There are, of course, people who bitch about how houses are too small, but they are mostly concerned with the amount of rooms, i.e. "Why are they building all these two-bedroom places where you can't fit a family?", rather than the square meters, as such.
Is it one of those things where if you are used to comparatively compact houses, the bigger houses don't really seem that different, but if you are used to bigger housing, the compact houses and apartments immediately come off as hopelessly cramped?
I think there's something buried in the American mythos/dream, going back in Anglo-American history to before the Revolution, where we want space to do our own thing. With enough space, we can have privacy, we can do what we want without other people telling us "no", we can get away from "all that bullshit". The response to people getting in your face, telling you what to do, is to go somewhere else, somewhere on your own, and be free. This even applied to runaway slaves - the solution was to gather up the people you loved, and get the hell out of there.
I suppose it gets laid at the feet of the "germs" part of "Guns, Germs, and Steel".
It's kind of important to me that my house has a dedicated home office, a library, and a guest bedroom. The extra storage space and the big kitchen are also nice, as is having enough room for two indoor cats to do their thing. And the two-car garage is turning into a workshop; I can still fit one car into it if I need to, but I basically don't.
I could downsize my life to fit into a smaller space, but the things I'd be giving up are things I would miss. Being a Rich American(tm), I don't have to and I'm fine with that.
Large houses are nice. Having a spare bedroom for guests and bouts of flu, an office space for working from home, a large kitchen with a big stove, a workout space, and a garage for the two cars (no public transport and two working adults) is… I can’t complain?
Having space to exercise at home (lift weights, stationary bike) is hugely convenient.
As a single person in a city, not very.
As a teenager in the suburbs, very.
I agree with Ghillie’s hypothesis.
If you were a billionaire, would you have a larger house? I know I would. When you remove financial constraints, people tend to choose much larger houses. They don't choose arbitrarily large houses (nobody lives in a house the size of an airport terminal even if they can easily afford it) but they tend to choose houses that are several times the size of a normal person's house.
Conclusion: larger houses are better, and any argument to the contrary is just poverty cope.
A few years ago we sold a flat in central London and bought a rambling great eight bedroom house in Devon, with a large garden. Although it is hard and time-consuming to keep on top of the cleaning indoors, and weeding and maintaining the garden, a big advantage of larger houses generally IMHO is that, all things being equal, the occupants of one have more exercise just making their way here and there round and about the house than people in more compact dwellings. It all adds up, if you think about it.
As some evidence (perhaps) for that contention, consider to the British Royal family, whose various members have reached very old ages in recent and even not so recent times, Queen Victoria for example, despite having more than a dozen children (I think). Then there was the late Queen Mother, 101, and nearly 100 for the late Duke of Edinburgh, and late 90s for the late QE2. Besides having the best medical care of course, I suggest that at least in part it is simply the extra exercise they gained trotting around in their vast dwellings, and the grounds outside!
It is true that some monarchs of recent times, such as Edward VII and George V died quite young. But that may have been due more to over-indulging in food and tobacco products (certainly in Edward's case) or just bad luck I guess, like King Charles having cancer.
No I wouldn’t and didn’t. Because I could afford a much bigger house - but there’s just the two of us. Wouldn’t mind a pool though - but I live in Ireland.
All else being equal, larger houses are better (with qualifications).
But all else is not equal. Larger houses (or houses at all as opposed to apartments) lead to lower population density, and that comes with its own drawbacks.
I prefer to live in an apartment in a walkable city with good public transport, instead of living in a house while being car dependent. And that's not poverty cope, that's just understanding trade-offs.
It would be great if we could maintain higher conversational and discussion standards than accusing (?) people with different perspective of "X cope" rather than steelmanning their position properly.
Man, talk about generalizing from one example. Have you considered that people have different preferences? During one vacation back when I was a kid, we rented this really big three-story house for absurdly cheap because the owners liked my dad for some reason. We all ended up hating it by the end. There's just so much god damn space that had no point in being there. It was like... the opposite of claustrophobic, whatever that's called.
Hypothesis: the median American has fewer available out-of-the-house spaces (especially if you only consider those that could reasonably be walked to) than the median European, such that space *in* the home is more important to Americans.
That definitely applies to Japan, particularly Tokyo.
Or, you know, the reverse is true.
It's relatively common for Americans to have a roomba or other robot that will vacuum and mop for them. So that often isn't perceived as a major issue.
I've begun to suspect I'm somewhere in the autism spectrum. I've never been able to pick up on the subtle fluctuations in emotion/vibes that normies instinctively pick up on, and a friend told me recently he feels like I'm behind a wall (I've been reading neurotypicals can't pick up on the emotions of autistics), and also, reading and interacting with other autistics is like my whole life suddenly makes a lot of sense (I also got 26 out of 30 in an online test). I mean it's either that or I have enormous subconscious emotional repression (how would I be able to tell the difference?).
At any rate, I suspect there is a higher amount of people on the spectrum here than elsewhere on the internet, and I was wondering if there is anything they would like to say about thriving as an autistic in the social/romantic domain, which I hear, can be done.
I'm curious to know what Internet test you took. I'd like to do a trustworthy test (if there is one).
I took this one:
https://www.clinical-partners.co.uk/for-adults/autism-and-aspergers/adult-autism-test
Can't tell you about validity.
thanks, looks like I passed :)
One thing that helped me was that, when I was a little kid (1st grade ish), for one summer my parents had me attend some sort of junior theater class. I got a lot of practice there in emoting, and over the years, it helped.
It's like: there's me on the inside, and then a surface on the outside, which is my face and body language. Normals have a connection between them, so that what they feel on the inside is shown on the outside, but I don't. However, I can consciously work on dredging up feelings while making the appropriate facial expressions, and eventually they start working together, like the whole "hand-eye coordination" thing.
And so the next step is that my face shows my feelings, kinda like normal people. But after that, I can also brute force empathic mirroring, by using my imagination. If I can find the sadness in someone's sad story, even if I don't care, or find the humor in someone's joke, even if I find it boring or distasteful, I can project back the right emotion and make an appropriate response. (Tabletop roleplaying and LARPs can be good practice for this.) And the thing is, at some point it stops being a conscious artifice, and becomes real empathy. I interact with people, and see in them things I like, and respond to that automatically. The emotions are there, the patterns are built in, even if I have to thump the engine a few times before it catches.
It's tricky with romance. First, because in the times when I've been head-over-heels, my head is somewhere else and so it stops working, leading me to be less good at flirting with the people I most want to flirt with. Second, because the mirroring means that I wind up reflecting back other peoples' interest, and like I said the feelings are real: other people being interested in me is not the primary criterion for whether I should be interested in them. Plus, I've noticed that I tend to have a lot of emotional inertia, whereas most other people seem more changeable. And third, building on the previous, because while flirting can be very fun, it's only appropriate if both of you are on the same page: it's unethical to lead someone on and engage their emotions, if your emotions are not similarly engaged.
> But after that, I can also brute force empathic mirroring, by using my imagination. If I can find the sadness in someone's sad story, even if I don't care, or find the humor in someone's joke, even if I find it boring or distasteful, I can project back the right emotion and make an appropriate response. (Tabletop roleplaying and LARPs can be good practice for this.) And the thing is, at some point it stops being a conscious artifice, and becomes real empathy. I interact with people, and see in them things I like, and respond to that automatically.
Holy crap, oh man, did this ever describe my experience - but not as a product of ASD.
Someone in the classified thread speculated that some of my personal quirks could be a product of ASD, but I don't think so. I don't have most of the notable ASD traits, and never did. The ones I identify with tend to be borderline cold-reader-ish ("Do you get obsessive about stuff you like?" etc). I just took an ASD quiz linked above and was on the low end of "you have a few traits."
No, I suspect my identification with your internal experience generates from a whole other "disorder," one having to do with a deficit of involuntary (eg, "normal") empathy. I hesitate to use the "p" or "s" words here, because they specifically describe an *antisocial* behavior which I don't engage in - but "brute forcing empathy via imagination" was indeed something I had to consciously do in my young adulthood until it became the mostly automatic process that it is today...assuming I've judged someone to be worth of it, and almost everyone is indeed worthy of it.
Yeah, I've wondered about that in myself. Twice it's happened that I've been woken up in the middle of the night, and the "nice" part of me wasn't online. It was just a cold reptilian thing that wanted to fix the problem and get back to sleep, and would say whatever was necessary for that, while the "nice" part of me was way back somewhere, screaming "oh, no, this will wreck everything!" I had to do some serious damage control the following mornings, but both relationships did survive.
FWIW, I think it's possible for people without our particular internal setup to learn it, at least for certain situations or classes of people. That's what I tend to call the "s" word. And I've run into one of the, well, other "n" word, let's say, and it seemed in retrospect that what was inside was alternately a roaring black void, or something like a 2.5-year old. (I'm not good with child ages, but I have some friends with a 3.5-year old, and 2.5 seems about right from that one example.)
This study is a very small sample size of people at the very extreme end of the (very criminal) "p" spectrum, but some of it felt familiar: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-empathic-brain/201307/inside-the-mind-psychopath-empathic-not-always
I often hesitate to refer to that article because only one tiny part of it resonates, but the *capacity* to opt in / out of empathy at all and perhaps even moreso a willingness to admit to it, seems to freak people out regardless of how pro-social the opt in / out behavior looks in practice.
I absolutely agree that prosocial behavior can be developed absent "normal" empathy. My chief values are fairness / justice, a result of decent parenting plus a love of storytelling (where fairness and justice are generally the guiding principle of the universe).
So in practice, I "opt in" to empathy in order to be maximally "fair" to people while I'm making a judgment about how to think/feel/interact with them. I have enough experience with both fictional and biographical stories to know that people's behaviors are usually informed by things which might not be apparent to an observer, so in order to be "fair," I am almost infinitely more ungrudging and patient and forgiving of certain kinds of unpleasant behavior than a "normie" who reflexively feels entitled to unexamined anger when they perceive an intrusion or slight. I am always ready to be "wrong" about someone "harmless" that I merely dislike.
My empathy only shuts off in response to unambiguously predatory victimizing behavior. And even then it's never reactive anger, the way it would be for a normie, but rather a sense of righteous pragmatism about wanting the threat stopped.
And, like, sorrynotsorry, but I think this framework results in a way more prosocial way of being than the normie empathetic reactivity.
But I can absolutely see how not having the framework (or some other framework of guiding principles) can send the empathic opt in / out in some truly monstrous directions.
> It's like: there's me on the inside, and then a surface on the outside, which is my face and body language. Normals have a connection between them, so that what they feel on the inside is shown on the outside, but I don't.
Haha, similar here. No matter what happens inside, good or bad, by default my face remains neutral. I need to consciously give it a little push to also show the emotion on the outside. (Or, with people who know me, I just express the emotion verbally, sometimes using a scale from 0 to 10 to express the strength of the emotion.)
Sometimes people compliment me for staying calm in situations where internally I feel I am falling apart. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. It's only my face staying calm, but my thinking is impaired by stress.
Huh, my face tends to run on autopilot these days, unless I get into a particularly grim mood. I sometimes wish I could add a little interrupt switch in, since it would make my life a bit easier if I didn't show what was going through my mind. I console myself that I like the enforced honesty, but it might be sour grapes. :-)
I wonder whether it would make sense to imagine normies as autists whose obsession happens to be humans... instead of trains or similar things. Just like an autist interested in trains will tell you thousand details about them, and would immediately notice that a picture of a train contains a wrong kind of wheel, a normie can tell you thousand details about celebrities, the birthdays of everyone around them, and will immediately notice a new haircut.
Autists can be shocked by strong sensory inputs, normies can be shocked by explicit discussion of things, or by thoughts that their social group would disapprove of. (Note that the social group does not necessarily refer to the mainstream. A normie rebel is triggered by thoughts that their fellow normie rebels would disapprove of.)
You need to start paying more attention to humans, no matter how boring that sounds. They *are* important, so the time invested here will pay off. But ultimately, you will never learn the same amount of information about humans (or trains) as someone who is naturally obsessed with them, so you need to focus on the most important parts. And maybe find normies who are more tolerant of someone who does not share their obsession.
Autistic women are often less visible than autistic men, for reasons that are not obvious to me. Maybe there is something about male/female brains which makes the expression of autism different. Or maybe it is different social expectations, which makes different parts of autism more or less visible. For example, in romantic relations, men are expected to approach women. So the autistic men typically screw up by "approaching in a clumsy way" and sometimes it gets reported in newspapers. Meanwhile autistic women typically screw up by "not noticing that they are approached", which means a lost opportunity for them, but does not get reported by newspapers, because from outside it seems like the normie way of rejection (i.e. not responding to subtle signals).
So.... I am out of the dating market for more than a decade, but my recommendation for a heterosexual male on a spectrum would be like this: Find an interesting girl (someone who has hobbies other than celebrity gossip). Say hello. Talk to her about her hobbies. If she refuses to talk to you, find another one. Find a moment with her alone (e.g. invite her for a walk or for a coffee/tea). At the end, tell her that you really like her and would like to spend more time with her... no pressure, it's okay when she tells you whether she likes you the next time you meet; goodbye. The next time, at the end, ask "so, this means we are dating?". (In the meanwhile, learn how to do massage and how to dance, those are basically cheat codes for progress from "no contact" to "full body on body contact" without being awkward.)
Though I've never been officially diagnosed, I'm pretty Aspergery. I had shitty social skills growing up (and some on ACX may say I still do). I'm very bad at reading facial expressions and social queues. And because we are bad at reading people — i.e. we're not picking anything up from their facial expressions and social queues — we pay attention to things that may provide us with more interest. That makes normies uneasy if you don't look like you're paying attention to them. Even though I'm bad at reading people I learned a few tricks along the way to disguise my neuro-atypicality — so normies will take me for a normie (which is half the battle). And this is advice for a cis straight males. YMMV if you're female or gay.
They are:
1. Look at people's eyes when you speak to them. Normies take that as being interested in them. Even if you're not interested in them it puts them at their ease. There are some caveats, though, and you'll need some practice to navigate them.
1a. Males may take eye contact as a threat if you hold it too long. So, if you're being introduced to somebody new and it's a male, only make eye contact while shaking their hand or fist-bumping them (as is more common in these post-COVID times). After the intro you should discontinue eye contact but look in their general direction while they're talking to you. Nodding your head will help put them at ease, even if you're thinking about something else and not paying attention to them (because, let's face it, a lot normies are pretty boring to talk to).
1b. Hold the eye contact longer with females. Don't forget to smile. Hold their gaze for a couple of seconds after you greet them. If you're attracted to them, make a point to reattach yourself to the gaze every so often during the conversation. And remember to smile whenever you catch their gaze again. If they brush their hair back with their hand, they're likely interested in you. I have no frigging clue why that is, but I had to be taught that. Normies seem to pick it up naturally. Human courtship rituals are weird. I cannot say I fully understand them. After the initial greeting ritual, when it comes time to look away DO NOT look down! — because women are likely to think you're looking at their breasts even though you aren't.
2. Remember to smile occasionally during your conversations with people. Not a big grin, but learn to curl your lips upward slightly. I found that very difficult to do. I had to practice in the mirror to not overdo it or underdo it. But after I learned to half-smile properly, I realized I could identify when other people were doing it — which gave me some more insight into the other person's internal psychological state.
3. Train yourself to keep your posture upright. Don't slouch. Normies read people who have upright postures as being confident. Even if you're not confident you want look like you're confident.
4. How's your sense of humor? Making people laugh is very important. I can't tell a joke worth shit, because I don't have a normie's ability to pace the joke (which requires a successful joke-teller to be sensitive to the vibes that other people are putting out). But I am quite good with logical absurdities. If you want an example of humor that's full of logical absurdities listen to Jerry Seinfeld's material. Don't steal his material though, because other people have probably already heard it.
5. Ask people about trivialities. As you get to know them, you'll get to know that people each have unique concerns and obsessions. If they're into gardening, ask them how their garden is doing. Try to look like you're sympathetic to their problems (even if you have no clue as to why they're getting upset about something).
5a. This is very important for dealing with female humans. They seem to be very sensitive to slights from their own sex (and they seem to be much more socially competitive than male humans). Nod a lot. And learn to make sympathetic noises and comments.
5b. Males are generally easier to socialize with because they tend to be less socially competitive than females — at least at the inter-individual level. However, males seem to be more socially competitive at the group level. You're either part of "the team" or you're not. If you are on the team, all sorts of slights and faux pas are ignored. If you're not on the team, well, you're likely not to be invited to the next BBQ or out to happy hour. Try not to talk politics, because that tends to trigger more primal emotional responses, and that will bring out the competitive team instincts in the males. Best to learn something about sports (yawn!). Make a point of knowing what the favored local sports team of the tribe is, so you can at least ask what they think their tribe's team chances are.
There's a lot to digest. Good luck. Hope I didn't piss off the normies with my advice.
You really think you're Aspie? Jeez, you don't come across that way at all to me, and I spend 10 hours a week or so talking with smart male Aspies (patients, mostly). Here's a test of facial expression reading that's pretty well thought of: https://s3.amazonaws.com/he-assets-prod/interactives/233_reading_the_mind_through_eyes/Launch.html
Got 24/36, but after extensive cheating: the "multiple choice" thing of eliminating two or three options, and taking a protracted "System 2"-type approach to choosing answers. There may be a couple (possibly but not very likely slightly more) of pictures where I could guess the answer instinctively. There were also some answers where I remained confused after being shown what the right answer was: e.g., a woman being interested or having desire is not something I can make sense of as reflected in the eyes, even after seeing the picture and being told the answer.
25 of 36, but I felt like I was guessing about half the time.
Everybody feels like they're guessing. The version of the directions I read said "if you're not sure, just go with your feeling." I felt that way when I took it too. Not quite like I was taking wild guesses, but more like, well, these eyes look irritated to me, but I may just be talking myself into that so I'll have an answer, but I guess I'll go with it. I think some of the accurate responses come from parts of us we don't have introspective access to -- like when somebody asks you how it is you angle your key jiggle & it a certain way to make your finicky lock open, and you can't tell them -- only your hands know. Same with reading faces.
I've got a response to the original comment, slightly above this, and I'd be curious to hear what you think. :-)
About half of my responses were just me looking at the words and clicking the right one without any conscious thought. The other ones, I'd be staring at the eyes, and have no clue, and I'd do the multiple-choice-test thing where I rule out one or maybe two answers, and randomly pick from the remaining answers. I guess I did a bit better than chance, so probably my proportions are off, or I still had some unconscious instinct pulling me toward the right answers.
Oh you did way better than chance. 27 or maybe it's 28 is average, so you're in the average range. I think everybody has a feeling of guessing a lot of the time, at least everybody I know who took the test. I only missed 2, and I was astounded that it was only 2, because I'd felt reasonably confident on at most 1/3 of them. If you feel that way on the SAT or a multiple choice test in a course you can be sure you're going to get a bad score, you know? I find this test fascinating because almost everybody feels very uncertain, yet most of those uncertain people I've given it to come out average or above.
13 out of 36. Many of them were just wild-ass guesses on my part. Actually, I've taken a similar test before and I scored less than random (go figure!).
Recently, some friends set me up with a nice lady. We went out a couple of times, and I was attracted to her. On our second date, I told her that I was on the spectrum and if she were interested in me she'd just have to outright tell me because I was crappy at reading signals. And I didn't say this, but I didn't want any #metoo misunderstandings (I've made a few embarrassing unwanted passes in my day — not because I was a predator but because I misunderstood the signals — and I have too much self-respect to cause women to be uncomfortable). Anyway, she didn't believe me, "but you're so sociable and funny!" That seemed encouraging, so I asked her out on a third date.
When I was younger, I'd go out on three dates with women I was interested in, and if it didn't click physically, I'd just stop calling them (because I figured further attentions from me would be unwelcome). We went out on a third date, but no kiss goodnight — but she talked about a restaurant that she wanted to try. Okay, I thought. I'd try a fourth date with her. Nothing happened on the fourth date. I dropped her off at her house. She didn't invite me in for a coffee. I figured, "Oh well, nothing ventured, nothing gained," and I wrote her off. Then she called me a couple of times and asked when we'd get together again. And she said, "I love you." Because I've learned to be cautious with my emotions, I've trained myself to dampen my feelings if I'm not getting anything back from women. Though I found her attractive early in our dating cycle, by the fourth date I figured it wasn't going anywhere, so I had fallen out of limerence with her. For some stupid reason, I went out on a fifth date with her! She was all very snuggly in the Uber to and from the restaurant, and she was very touchy-feely all through the evening. But I no longer had the spark. I was uncomfortable the whole evening. I didn't even make a token effort to kiss her good night. I didn't call her again. I'm sure she may have been puzzled and possibly hurt, but now I felt that I was being pushed into a relationship that I no longer was comfortable with. Normies are frigging crazy.
Wow, Beowulf, I don't know what to make of that. You do come across sociable and funny. And if you were that deep into Aspie-land I'd expect your sociability and humor to both be a little off, sort of overdone or underdone or, wait, how does that joke work? But none of that is the case. And I can't think of times when your responses to people here have seemed odd -- and they would if you were bad at reading people's affect and intention, unless you're better at reading people when you have their thoughts in writing, and can read between the lines. And if you're performing *below*( chance on tests like this one, that suggests that you know more than you think you know, right? Like you know the right answers some of the time, but refuse to go with them. (Though on here you performed better than chance.). Or could it be that you have prosopagnosia, and difficulty reading faces comes along for the ride with that?
Anyway, it's fine. There's something quite odd about me too. Not every oddity has a name, you know? Was wondering today what my oddity was. Looked up schizoid -- close, but no cigar.
"unless you're better at reading people when you have their thoughts in writing, and can read between the lines."
I would have thought that was obvious. Words are designed to facilitate clear and unambiguous communication, because often "Darmok and Jelad at Tanagra" has to give way to "Hand me the spanner, please - no, not the crescent wrench, the 9/16th inch spanner". And sometimes we, the normies in particular, *want* ambiguity, so we've got ways to use language for that. But ultimately, the speaker is trying to be understood and they're using a tool that's designed to facilitate clear and unambiguous communication, in a language that both parties are fluent in.
That limits the scope for misunderstanding, in a way that "communication" where 70% of the information is conveyed by intonation and microexpression and body language doesn't. Particularly when one party isn't fluent in body language.
BTW, that test was very helpful in that it gave me immediate feedback about which were the correct emotions. The other tests I've taken were paper tests, and they didn't give me any real-time feedback. Although there were some eye-expressions that I had no frigging clue about, a significant number of my mistakes were due to overthinking. If I had gone with my first choice, I would have scored significantly higher. This is an important clue to understand what's going on in my brain. Thanks!
I've bookmarked the link. I'll wait a week or so (to let the memory of the faces blur) and retake it again — but I'll go with my first choices. I bet I'll score a lot better. But damn! I wish I had this test back when I was an adolescent. If this is really all about not going with my gut feelings, I could have trained myself to be more sensitive to them, and I think I would have had an easier life (because a lot of the stress and failures in my life were due to my not having a good theory of mind when dealing with my professors, thesis advisor, bosses, and girlfriends). I'm tearing up now and it's getting hard to see what I'm typing! Shit.
Sent you an email.
I hate that sort of back and forth. It's like sine and cosine, never quite in sync.
My thing in dating situations is that I can tell when they like me, and I would like them too except that I have a bad bad feeling that it's not me they like but some construction in their mind, which they built using some parts of me as legos. And I distrust and resent them for having done that, so I don't really like them, but I maybe act like I do because I know my doubts about their view of me are sort of silly so it seems unfair to let them rule my behavior. Good luck finding a way out of that one.
I did notice sometimes where romantic interests had an idea of me in their head, which only loosely corresponded to reality. I never really managed to put that together with how I felt when infatuated, in any way that gave me anything useful to work with. It more felt like something where we all had to push through it, from both directions, over time, and eventually our models of each other would converge on reality.
Or not. :-(
So you're bad at something. Is it better to conceptualise this as a disease, or just as a skill you happen to be bad at?
If my vibe is that I'm behind a wall, is that something I'm bad at? What about all the other stuff? But sticking to the wall, I mean, I don't feel like I'm holding anything back in my interactions with this guy, so what am I supposed to do about that?
W
Maybe there's not anything in particular you can do, and that's fine. Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.
Not autistic myself, but have many psychotherapy patients who are. Two have partners who are also autistic, and those relationships seem to be solid and long-lasting. In both cases the people found each other not on dating apps but in college. Downside of having an autistic partner is that both parties are inclined to be avoidant of the new, and of socializing, so there's a danger of their lives contracting to hanging out indoors with the simpatico other.
Request for content: I originally found this "AI Parable" when someone asked for the same thing quite some time ago in the ACX, no idea if the same people still frequent but thought I would give it a shot.
There was some short story on some blog(?) somewhere where the premise was "everything is completely crazy and makes no sense, lots of random chaos in a world similar to ours but somewhat cyberpunk/dystopian". The closing line was something to the effect of "The machine had been talking, and I was the first to hear it speak." Or something like that. The premise was that the insanity and chaos was the work of an AI that was intentionally causing it in order to confuse people so that it could break human pattern matching and assume control/demoralize them or something similar.
I thought it was really well done, and there have been several times I'd liked to have shared it but of course I didn't bother to bookmark it and now it is lost to me. Figured I'd throw out a line just in case anyone has an idea what the heck I'm talking about!
Thanks!
Can someone link to some well-written piece that argues that yes, AI WILL take our jobs? Like doctors, lawyers, programmers and so on. From what I see most people argue to the contrary.
I think the question is not whether AI will take our job, but which one. ChatGPT-4 will not. If you ask people, most of them will assume that the currently most advance AI is as good as it ever gets, so of course they will say no. They will keep saying so, until one day they get replaced.
Important things that AI currently cannot do:
* read your company intranet
* participate in meetings, communicate with colleagues
* be legally responsible for screwing up
Connecting the AI to company internet and making sure that sensitive information will not leak is a technical problem that will be solved at one moment. Afterwards, as a software developer, I expect that soon most of my job will consist of sitting at meetings and checking what the AI did. I will be the person to yell at in the 1% of cases when the AI screws up.
Note that "taking our jobs" does not necessarily have to mean that companies will fire their existing employees. (Though yes, in the extreme case, it would mean exactly that.) It can also mean that companies stop hiring new people, especially ones freshly out of college. And what previously did 3 people, now will do 1 person supervising 3 AI agents. The salaries may even slightly increase temporarily, especially for people who can juggle more AI agents at the same time than the others. (In other words, out of 3 people, 2 may lose their jobs, and the remaining 1 may get a 50% raise.) So the reports may be inconsistent even as the loss of jobs happens.
Rich people may be willing to pay extra for human service, just because it feels instinctively better to be communicate with a human, or to be served by a human. This applies to doctors more than it does to programmers. The AI is unlikely to replace e.g. a homeopath.
Fwiw, connecting AI to company intranet is already possible (Copilot for Microsoft 365). Whether you trust Microsoft's promises that data won't leak is another matter.
I suppose in future we will expect this, and maybe have two company wikis, one that the AI can read and one that it can not.
The company source code in my experience would be mostly useless for a competitor, except as a general learning resource for software developers. A lot of code is handling company-specific processes and integrated with other software the company uses; a competitor would have to rewrite all of that, so it would probably be less work to make their own solution from scratch. A possible danger could be asking the AI to find possible exploits.
I'd like to read one too. Just googled around, mostly found clickbait and spokesman for various high-status professions saying Naw, AI will be our bitch. You know where there probably is something? One of the good Substack blogs about AI and society. But I don't think google searches return the titles of individual Substack posts. Maybe somebody here can suggest one. Actually, I can suggest a blog I like, though nobody here but me seems to follow it or take it seriously: Garbage Day, by Ryan Broderick. He's a young guy who sort of grew up on the internet, and knows all about memes and other internet phenoms that don't mean anything to me. But he's also quite smart and knows how to do all kinds of search inside of social media. Had a post a while ago where he traced the sources of some new and weird fad on Facebook - - I think it was photos of gross food, things like a plate of frozen raw egg -- and was able to tell who most of came from, and what the benefit to them was of posting this stuff. His overall view of AI is that we're fucked. Oh, remembered something else he said that I thought was smart, that I hadn't seen elsewhere. He was talking about how it's looking like search engines may soon yield AI summaries, rather than sites the content appears on, and pointed out that many people and businesses that post useful content do it as a way to advertise, or to increase their public visibility. For instance today looked at some text posts and videos explaining how to do a certain thing in Photoshop. Most of them were on sites selling related services -- become a paying member of our site, and you'll have access to our entire library of Photoshop how-tos, that sort of thing. If Photoshop queries do not drive people to their site, but instead bring an AI who sucks up their content along with that of other sites and summarizes it for the searcher, why would these sites continue to put up free useful content? The internet will come to contain fewer sources of direct info. Maybe in the future AI's will be summarizing whatever they cherry pick from summaries by earlier AI's. Reminds me of what I read about dust mites: they prefer fresh food, such as human skin flakes, but on the absence of that can eat their own feces and extract some nourishment for up to 3 cycles of feces consumption.
Well, the arguements to the contrary are not always about practical capabilities of AI. Here's Zvi arguing that AI should be replacing jobs, but it won't because those jobs will just be replaced with bullshit ones. https://thezvi.substack.com/p/escape-velocity-from-bullshit-jobs
Edit: Oh, and he has a follow-up post about cases where AIs are actually taking people's jobs, but it's not even the employers doing it, it's the workers themselves. https://thezvi.substack.com/p/the-overemployed-via-chatgpt
Who among us doesn't believe, or know in their bones, that our government at all levels, local, state and federal, fails on a regular basis. Overpromised and underdelivered. Big idea and great promises, the consequences of which they bury as they carry on. We pay a price for this, even for their small blunders. Also, don't ride a motorcycle in Michigan, or most other states for that matter. Among the dead in deer and vehicle accidents, the cyclist is over represented better than 2 to 1. Here's my writeup: https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/my-attempt-at-fairmindedness-soundly
"Who among us doesn't believe, or know in their bones, that our government at all levels, local, state and federal, fails on a regular basis."
I know this. I've known this for forty years or so, and I've been thinking about it off and on for forty years or so, and I've been talking to and reading the works of a lot of very smart people who have been thinking about it for longer still. At this point, almost every insight just downstream of "our government, at all levels, fails on a regular basis", and every proposed solution to the problem, is something I have heard many times before and dealt with as best I reasonably can.
Sometimes someone comes up with something new. But rarely is it going to be someone who thinks "Hey, did you notice that our government keeps failing us? I've got a substack where I talk about that!", is adequate reason for anyone like me to read their substack. You're going to need something more specific, and you should probably let people know what that is in your pitch.
My good fortune justfor thispost answered your comment below. This person apparently believes that more government is always the correct solution, for reasons I don't completely understand, but be that as it may. I understand I am not changing the world in any dramatic way, but I still think it's important to help people understand the government entity that created the deer problem is the one asked to manage the deer problem. There must be a connection there? 60,000 vehicle and deer accidents a year is unbelievable. And almost nothing is done about it because it would mean admitting that there management has created the problem.
"Have you considered that perhaps more government is not the answer?", does not lead me to believe that you are offering any insight that is at all novel here.
novelty? I have no novelty to offer. Just to raise awareness of the issue is my point.
I think your statement is absurd. It sounds like libertarian cant to me — so, I'm sorry, but I'm not going to be suckered into reading your substack. Government as a bureaucratic entity can be tremendously successful. Look at how successful China is at taming the anarchistic Chinese social order through their social credit system. ;-)
As for functional benefits of governments, depending on the bureaucracy, government orgs can function as well or better than corporate bureaucracies — and I've worked for some very effed up corporate bureaucracies in my day! — but also I've worked for a few excellent ones. For instance, I just got involuntarily retired from a very effed-up bureaucratic corporation. It was a nightmare just to get them to direct-deposit my severance check (even though they had been direct depositing my other paychecks for the past five years). And I needed 2 months of COBRA to hold me over before I turned 65. That was all sorts of hassle (mostly because I couldn't find anyone who could answer my questions). But the month before I turned 65, I signed up for Medicare — no fuss or bother. They warned me it may take as long as 30 days to process my application. I signed up on Friday. Got my Medicare card the following Wednesday (!). Medicare Part D was a different story, though. Because private insurance companies handle that, they're competing for your business. Sales people outright lied to me. Getting the formularies was next to impossible from some of the providers. What a pain in the ass! The government part was efficient and painless though.
OTOH, do you really want governments to be too efficient? If you're a libertarian, I bet in your heart of hearts you don't. But I'm OK with the US government when it's been efficient. For instance, they've done a bang-up job rounding up and charging the January 6 coup rioters. More than 1,250 people have been charged with federal crimes. And more than half have either had their trial or pleaded out. Last I heard, the FBI is only still looking for 80 of the bastards. Damn! That's efficiency!
Absurd, eh? 60,000 deer and vehicle accidents in 2023, last year I could find the stats. This after millions of man hours 'managing' the deer herd. All the numbers in the article are real. And it's not a question of efficiency. You are hired to manage the deer herd, so the bigger the herd the greater the job security, the greater are the career prospects. I spent many years not believing that people respond to perverse incentives, but I can't argue against the idea any more. Glad you have your health care setup, at any rate.
Back when I lived in New England (35 years ago) hoof rats were becoming a real nuisance. My state's wildlife department hired professional hunters to cull the herds. Popular outrage was so intense that they dropped the plan. So the conflicting wills o' the people prevented anything from being done ("stop the deer from eating my garden, but don't kill them!") AFAIK, Uncle Malthus is still providing herd control and they're starving every winter. But I hear that cougars, bears, and possibly wolves have been spotted in my old neighborhood. Now its "OMG there was a cougar in my backyard! Please get rid of it, but don't kill it!"
(Tangentially, I remember a few decades ago when I was laughing at a story about people in some town (or suburb?) in the Rockies-area who were complaining about wolf sightings. I was laughing because the town was called "Wolf Creek".)
I do, but I struggle to come up with alternatives.
We can't ask government to run everything, to solve every problem, to manage every detail. We just open up the door to a never ending cascade of rules and regulations that have made life ridiculous. The administrative state is the issue, it's first and foremost goal is to enlarge the administrative state.
As opposed to what, the non administrative state? go back to feudal relationships?
Some fucked up form of corporatism, where you replicate all the problems of the state 1000 times inside 1000 little states that compete in markets externally but operate as dictatorships internally?
Face it; the reason the state is everywhere and everything to everyone is that all the competitors have been killed and eaten. Fitness is fitness.
Big changes coming to manifold. Probably at the end of this month, full details not yet announced. What we do know is they're trying to reduce the availability of mana, in particular by removing the loan system. This just confirms what I've been saying for a while now: giving out loans doesn't work. It's extremely expensive for them, and doesn't really increase the prediction accuracy of long-run questions, as people on both sides just keep shoveling mana into popular questions.
The only thing loans achieve are to overleverage everyone, with no risk-of-ruin for the users: If my predictions don't pan out, I can just walk away from my account. I don't owe manifold anything for having a negative balance, since mana isn't a real currency. And I do think we'll see more and more such bankruptcies as some of the larger markets start resolving.
I'm sure you have posted this elsewhere, but I think providing a link to your prior (correct) prediction that this obviously sucked would be incredibly impressive, especially if you happened to use the same wording as manifold's announcement. At least having it available to crow about when the change gets made is good.
People often say things like "I predicted this" and then, when you look at their past writings they had something really vague and you're extremely disappointed, which is why being on record is great.
8 months ago: https://manifold.markets/market/will-manifold-lower-the-loan-rate-f?tab=comments#ykUTZRVml8wYzec48b0q
"""
For less careful users, this just means that a bunch of them wipe out way into the negative, and a small amount shoot up to balances in the millions. Since manifold doesn't charge users for negative mana, this means they'll be giving away a lot of mana.
For reference: starting from 1000 and reinvesting into the same market every day, a user will have a position in that market of 91K after a year, 314K after 2 years.
"""
Some more comments 2-3 months ago:
https://manifold.markets/market/in-2028-will-an-ai-be-able-to-gener?tab=comments#hI5n7NrwB7fgZhgFao9Q
https://manifold.markets/market/will-the-ai-movie-market-reach-25-f?tab=comments#3guxdud3UgP6URfwBoUs
Does Slavoj Zizek have a speech impediment? Or is it an accent?
His S sounds are sort of slurpy, like he is making them with his teeth and tongue at the sides of his mouth rather than the front. You can hear it very clearly here:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Sq3wkkX_lbo
The way he pronounces English /s/ and /z/ doesn't seem to be a part of the standard Slovenian accent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2oB5SdLQ18
Both.
I remember a science fiction short story which consisted of a conversation between two people far in the future about the planet from which Man originated.
They don't know which one it is, and can't figure it out, but they ask a computer, and the computer brings up a readout.
At which point they're both disappointed at how unexceptional it is.
This feels wrong to me; they should have been able to find it themselves, with virtually no effort. That readout is going to say things like:
orbital period: 1 year
daily cycle: 1 day
surface pressure: 1 atmosphere
surface gravity: 1 g
I also have my doubts about a setting where, even though Earth is still inhabited, and information about it is readily available if you know what to ask for, and the historical information is still recorded that it is the origin of humankind, it might nevertheless not be well-known to everyone. A more plausible version of the above readout might be:
𝗘𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗵
orbital period: 1 Earth year
(...etc.)
Physical units change meaning while retaining their names all the time, the meter was once defined as some fraction of the distance between the north pole and Paris, this is substantially more mutable than the current definition of the meter, some fraction of the distance that a light travels in one second (the second, in turn, is defined as some multiple of the period of the electrons of some chemical element, or something like that.)
Old school units were based on standard objects, X is the unit of mass which is the amount of mass in this cylinder, Y is the unit of length that is the length of this rod. All those objects require maintenance and storage, it also requires widespread communication, communication that won't exist in a galaxy-wide humanity (to say nothing of the enforcement of those standards).
It's worth noting that over a sufficiently long timescale all of these parameters are subject to change. Orbital period is increasing, as is the length of the day, and surface pressure varies wildly depending on atmospheric conditions. The only thing that's relatively fixed is surface gravity and even that could be altered with some mega-engineering projects.
Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky does something related/
A spacefaring civilisation, time is no longer tied to the rotation of any particular planet.
it's just a count of seconds since 1st January 1970.
And the characters have forgotten the real reason why/ (They think its the apollo moon landings, but really its Unix epoch)
As others have pointed out, that's The Last Question by Isaac Asimov. You can read it yourself here: https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html
By the time that conversation happens it's so far into the future that humans have spread beyond the Milky Way, Sol has reached the end of its lifespan, and no one even has physical bodies anymore, let alone lives on Earth.
Given a big enough space empire, they might start using another planet's measurement systems. Or they might give in to rationality and the metric system, and stop basing units on accidents of geography. So you could end up with something like:
Orbital period: 1.21 imperial years
Daily cycle: 0.91 imperial days (9.1 imperial hours)
Surface pressure: 101,325 Pa
Surface gravity: 9.8 m/ss
Minor spoilers for Asimov's Foundation series below.
This wasn't the entire point of the story, but a throwaway conversation between two characters near the end of Asimov's "The Last Question" comes pretty close. The two characters actually ask which is the original _galaxy_, then star, but the computer tells them the star has gone supernova long ago.
Also by Asimov, in one of the later Foundation books (probably "Foundation and Earth"), the main characters are searching for the (long-abandoned) earth and find it exactly because of these units (the year, at least) and the moon, but it turns out there was an independent actor deliberately obfuscating its location. (At this point in future history no one really knows where the year came from, and months are completely out of use.)
Funny how memories get distorted over time. I read the Foundation series many years ago, and I remember the search for Earth very differently:
The galactic empire mostly erased knowledge of Earth because they felt it undermined the capital planet's specialness, and it stays erased after the empire's fall. The protagonists manage to find a description of the solar system, but they don't believe it; too many unusual features in one place.
They find it by reinventing archeology. They investigate planets where human habitation was short-lived, and figure out how old the ruins are. Just as they'd hoped, ruins closer to Earth tend to be older. They zero in on a star named Alpha, which as far as they can tell means First. It's Alpha Centauri, and the locals there know where Earth is.
They go there, and are surprised to find the description they found was accurate. Sure enough, there are Saturn's rings, and Earth's huge moon that looks the same as the sun when you're on Earth. (Even if they had believed the description, they couldn't have just looked up which star system has those features; there's no database will all that information.) Also Earth's day and year are pretty close to the galactic calendar (the empire dropped leap years at some point), but, again, that's not how the find the place.
You might be thinking of "The Last Question" by Isaac Asimov.
That aside, your objection is that the characters in the story should be able to figure out which planet the Earth is, but... they _did_ do that: they basically asked ChatGPT, which is what people would do today.
I'm currently stationed within a (small) stone's throw of The Pyramids and trying to figure out where to spend Passover.
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/new-extensive-footnote-theres-nothing
Sticking around these parts isn't ideal for rhe most obvious of Passover related reasons. Particularly when the REALITY of what the Exodus was all about hits hardest when you're surrounded by the extensive extant evidence of the slavery-based society that Judaism was created to oppose.
Israel would be most comfortable for me physically but as I am in strong opposition to the reigning leadership I consider it spiritually discomfitting to throw my lot in with the nation in its current state.
So I'm thinking Sinai. Unfortunately, the Bible's take on the situation of the Jews who left Egypt is that there was a great series of miseries. They left the most comfortable society on earth (even for the working/enslaved classes) only to find themselves enjoined to TRUST that they'd be taken care of in a land without fresh water and with murderous raiders.
I would feel uncomfortable celebrating where they suffered.
"Elim" (where they enjoyed 12 wellsprings and 70 date trees, whatever that means) seems ideal, the area they lived for most of their desert stay seems second best, and the area around Mount Sinai is high up in the running too.
I'm open to other suggestions as well.
My own biblical geographical knowledge is acceptable but very very far from expert so if you know more about the most likely locations of these regions or have other suggestions I would be very pleased to hear from you!
Exodus is complete nonsense - total fairytale
Wow. You know so much!
Ancient Egypt had slavery but was not a slavery-based society. The pyramids were built by well paid workers. Jews and palestinians are partially descended from canaanites and they were never slaves in Egypt. Judaism was not created to oppose slavery.
Although my information is four decades old, when I returned to university as a middle-aged student my Near Eastern studies instructor declared the monument-builders were paid laborers, not slaves.
Slaves would have had to been provided food, housing, and medical care, etc., while paying laborers -- even in salt or grains -- kept daily survival the workers' own responsibility. So, while their subsistence level was still rough and marginal, they weren't slaves.
1. Slavery of the sort where the enslaved could be killed without repercussions has been rare. When I speak of slavery I am 100% including our own society as I published this morning. Any society where one man must clean another man's shoes else he suffer shameful, painful, and dangerous privations is a society built upon slavery. Moses, Amos, Isaiah and Jeremiah have not yet won. Judaism was indeed created in disgusted opposition to the slavery of Egypt, a slavery that is still with us. (What about the Torah's allowance of slavery, etc, etc. I'll be glad to discuss that in a videod conversation if you or anyone is interested but everything to do with this subject is too intricate and requires addressing too many presumed priors for it to be feasible in a comment.
As for your middle claim, see above. You seem to have presumed that I am speaking from a middle school level education or something. Anyhow, I was hoping for advice from someone who knows more than me on a particular subject, not to address misapprehensions of irrelevant aspects of the comment. The video conversation offer is available.
You're limited in options to Egypt, Gaza, and Israel if you want to be in a place related to Passover. If you don't want Sinai and Giza, consider the entire Red Sea coast, Hurghada is the cliché destination here but there are plenty others as well, Google Maps is the limit. The Red Sea is related to Passover because, uhmm, that's where the whole thing started, **if** we believe the Hebrew bible and the Quran that is, which I don't, but whatever. Of course, it's strongly implied in the storyline that the particular place on the coast where the sea was parted into 2 is somewhere on the stretch opposite to Sinai, Hurghada is a bit farther to the south than Sinai's triangle tip but not too far really. Suez is more northern.
If you want anything generically Jewish, consider Jordan. Lebanon and Syria geographically qualify but they're literal war zones, Abraham was born in modern day Iraq so make of that what you will.
I needn't state the obvious, which is to avoid mentioning that you're Israeli or Jewish to anyone speaking Arabic or English with Arabic accent. You probably already know this if you toured Cairo and Giza safely, but just to re-state the obvious: avoid the Israeli flag, avoid talking in Hebrew, including taking phone calls from someone speaking Hebrew or listening to Hebrew music or opening your phone browser to a Hebrew website while someone is sitting next to you. Avoid the kippah, the star of David, the mezuzah or the menorah. Really, imagine you're playing a game where you will lose a $10000000000000000 bet if someone guesses you're a Jew or from Israel, and act accordingly. The stakes are not really that high in Egypt, it's very unlikely you will get anything more severe than dirty looks, if even that, but I'm assuming you want to play it safe. Notice than anything you leave in your closed hotel room will be seen by the room service.
The only thing I have tonadd here is that I have already lived in Harran, and if you accept the iffy Turkish claim to Snliurfa as Ur, then in Ur as well.
Harran: https://youtu.be/xGL412vGl4s
Urfa: https://youtu.be/iyTMLpZcYU4
Also, though these videos don't include my email address in their descriptions, I hope you will contact me via the other ones (and of course your YouTube comments would be welcome as well) because you and I are good examples of humanity winning over presumptions and while I've had some success in winning over individuals and small communities I've thus far failed entirely at reaching enough of the world to obviate the (genuinely kind and true) necessity of warnings such as yours.
I don't really think you should get to celebrate Passover while supporting Hamas, a movement whose core ideology supports murdering Jews. I'm generally for being inclusive but there are limits.
I got interested in this entire spat so I read the parent poster you're replying to, and I read and read and re-read, top to bottom, left to right. Not a single word mentions Hamas, Gaza, Palestinians, War, Famine, Genocide, 33K dead, or anything really. It's like this John Travolta meme where he keeps looking right and left searching for something that is not there. There is an edit label on the post but it's timestamped 11 hours, the same timestamped on the post so likely a typo fix, your comment is from 8 hours ago as of now, so the comment wasn't edited after you commented.
The only mention of Israel is:
> Israel would be most comfortable for me physically but as I am in strong opposition to the reigning leadership I consider it spiritually discomfiting [...]
Which, if counted as support for Hamas, would have the hilarious implication that the ***families of the hostages taken by Hamas*** are Hamas supporters, as most of them feel much more extreme versions of this.
This is one of those things like "Commie" and "Red" in 1950s America, right? "Khamas" and "Anti-Semite" are just the generic bad guy label that you accuse others of when you are very angry at them, quite similar - now that I think of it - to how some more extreme Pro-Palestinian commenters use "Zionist".
You are of course 100% correct. My assumption is that he read that sentence as referring to "Israel" writ large and cavalierly decided to take a public dump on someone based on that hasty conclusion because that after all is the sacred way of the internet.
I see you actually offered suggestions in a separate comment so I'll respond to that one there but I liked both of your comments.
You may not recall but we corresponded shortly after October 7th when everyone around here was all fiery. I don't recall the precise nature of my comment but I recall that it was long and based on the the as-yet-unproven assumption that you were a fine fellow whose seeming hook-line-and-sinker loathful approach to Jews and Israel spoke more to a misperception that you had based upon not interacting much with original sources rather than from some inbred antisemitic evil as many others were accusing you of.
I am extremely pleased to see that I judged you accurately! My presumptions of innocence are too often disproven so thank you for providing yourself as a counter example to bolster my faith in humankind.
If I may return the favor, I am super duper well aware of the dangers here but thus far, despite words getting out among a populace that generally believe (at least among the classes in which I move) that Jews are literally biologically different than others, condemned by Allah, and evil in accordance with the explanations offered by the familiar book Mein Kampf, I have been here for around a month and still live.
That isn't to say that I'll necessarily make it to the morrow. All it takes is running in to one incorrigible person or me being too tired to play saint until someone (or god forbid a group of someones! 😂) can get to know me well enough for their humanity to wrestle their priors into doubt, but thus has been my life for many years now (prior to Egypt having lived in an all black neighborhood in Brooklyn https://youtu.be/h-BOkIuOKCA ) and my experience has been that - face to face - humanity is reachable and society's tribal and personal paranoias and personal enmities can be overcome so that, perhaps even in a single wildfire wave of understanding we can be overcome by a new spirit and everything can change.
Hell, I even believe that the ruling class suffers from the system they preside over. See my Purim video (you'll dig it). https://youtu.be/yOFGF7PqzLY
If you would like to consider joining me (and I think you would 😉) get in touch via my email which is included in the description of most of my videos. Perhaps you and I can pull off some monster sized miracle before this month is passed.
How fucking dare you.
Scott, I never do this, but this piece of shit just publicly accused me of supporting Hamas. Please give him a time out and if it helps any, I'll take a time out too.
Fuck you SK.
P.S. In addition to ignorance being no excuse not to make a public accusation of that kind, he can't even claim ignorance, my two videos directly addressing the conflict are there beneath his lackadaisical epithet. I have ZERO doubt that I have saved mkre lives - and more Jewish lives - than that piece of shit has. A few nosy fellows who dislike the fact that SSCers choose to follow me each time I share a personal link on an open thread have found themselves unable to simply bypass the comment they dislike and have been vocally insisting I cease and desist. If it will socially aid putting this ugly weasel SK in his place you have my blessing to throw dirt in my direction as well. I can't abide a forum where somebody whose grandparents survived Auschwitz and who himself is AT THIS VERY MOMENT risking his life for the sake of his tribe (and others) should have to accept such a disgusting statement from an ignorant buffoon.
I suggest Gaza strip.
I agree.
ad hoc: https://youtu.be/m1xYrtEWNSU?feature=shared
fleshed out: https://youtu.be/XJZ920oq6h0?feature=shared
EDIT: If you have the patience to actually watch those videos and can realistically help me succeed at this I am ABSOLUTELY open to taking immediate action and literally going to Gaza for Passover.
Yes, I doubt that you have such abilities for they are rare and mighty but it doesn't hurt to ask.
I don't have any particular issues with your politics, but I genuinely don't understand why you'd think it's a good idea to go to a literal war zone run by a literally genocidal terrorist group whose primary target is literally you.
The videos you are in theory responding to literally address that.
I know this has been asked many times across the internet over the years, but I figured there's at least a chance that this blog might be frequented by Netflix engineers who know something about this.
Why on earth does Netflix always only recommend the same 20 shows forever *most of which you have already watched*? Why do they recommend things you've already watched at all? Given this is the most obvious possible improvement to recommendations and trivial to implement, they must be doing it on purpose, but WHY?!?!
Some people have suggested that they recommend things you've already watched in order to cover up the lack of content, but even now they still have vastly more content than they show on the homepage, and while it may not be perfectly matched, anything would be better than just making the home page a static list of shows you've already watched. Doing this makes Netflix look *more* like a ghost town rather than less. So what gives?
The history is instructive. Maybe even an agentic systems takeaway way at the end, if you make it.
Back in 2006, Netflix launched the Netflix Prize, a competition inviting the public to improve their recommendation algorithm. At the time, people were waiting for DVDs to arrive, and if you got a dud, it was pretty disappointing because with round trips you wasted multiple days of your subscription with one less good movie from the service. The prize was famously won in 2009 by a team that improved the algorithm by 10%. This was a significant improvement for a recommendation engine that was already tuned by the company.
(Future Netflix prizes were canceled for fears of the Video Privacy Protection Act, which is a whole different story...)
And the recommendation engine was good. Sometimes it just agreed you'd like movies you knew you'd like, the genres with all the actors you like. But sometimes it would throw a curveball from a completely new genre, and if you took a chance it could be sublime, like having a friend with eclectic tastes who knew you better than you knew yourself.
One problem was... most people didn't like to rate things on 10 point scales. Or even 5 point scales. Or rate anything at all. So the ratings system became as simple as possible to avoid turning people off from rating completely, they kept trying to get more signal from less information.
And also the product changed. Streaming meant no more two days wait, so you can cater more to the mood of the person in the moment rather than trying to target some objectified ideal of the person's favorite movie.
Also people often highly rated things they didn't often watch. There were famous lists of the longest kept DVDs, with wrenching Academy Award winners just sitting on coffee tables for a month before returned. In general you might rate art films higher, but right now you just want to turn off your brain and watch something with explosions.
As people defected from ratings and wanted movies catering to specific moods, Netflix tried an era of hyperspecialized categories, to target those sub-sub-genres you liked or wanted to try. There were jokes about it, because you could filter on categories like "critically-acclaimed romantic dance movies" or "romantic crime movies based on classic literature" or "raunchy mad-scientist comedy" or "mistaken-identity movies for ages 5 to 7" (each of these had exactly one entry).
This worked a bit, and gave useful data to Netflix on what shows it might want to produce to fill some of these gaps.
Then someone realized internally that with streaming, the ideal metric wasn't watching a show that changed your life, it was just time on site. If you want to max time on site, you find filler content. Opiates not psychedelics. You don't find a series of profound life changing films or spectacles that people need to go digest and think about before even attempting another film because they know somehow nothing will ever come close. You want empty calories. Something cozy and familiar, so Netflix can become like a fireplace in your living room, always there, always on, always watching your decisions and learning about how to encourage you to keep it on.
So the recommendation engine stopped trying to be a recommendation engine. It is now providing a plausible default for somebody who just wants to put something on and doesn't care too much what. It's not trying to help you find the next great film you will love, it's just trying to be a digital comfort blanket and send you something familiar, on repeat, forever. And if that is not really your passion then you might not really be the target audience anymore.
The system started out targeting the sublime, making people watch a movie they would really remember for the next week as they waited for the next one. Eventually it started targeting satisficing, just keeping people plugged in. The general numbers go up, but I think at the expense of moments of profundity, revelation, and self-discovery.
If you want an overwrought analogy to AI, maybe it's a cautionary tale that illustrates that you don't need to maximize for paperclips to destroy human value. Even if you just shift slightly what aspect of human welfare you're prioritizing, you can end up with a radically different trap and arguably much worse outcome.
Huh. It almost sounds like the mailing delay was the key there. We went from thinking ahead about what we want, and prioritizing based on limited resources, to feeding whatever mood we happened to be in.
(And yes, excellent post, thank you!!!)
Excellent post.
The guy who does the recommendation algorithm for Netflix has the world’s cushiest job. And it’s a $300k job at least, I mean it’s Data scientist type stuff.
It might be frustrating though - he has this genius algorithm but his code has to sort first by newest releases, or promoted releases and then and only then can he apply his algorithm, if and only the hard coded recommendations don’t exceed 10. But that never happens.
A lot of people do rewatch shows, and a lot of people just put on Netflix as white noise while they're doing some task or falling asleep. And while they could easily separate the "watch again" section from the new recommendations, I guess it's easier for the customer to navigate it you don't.
So in addition to the reasons mentioned by others, maybe it's also something people legitimately want.
There is a recurring discussion on Hacker News on the topic "when I buy [a refrigerator] from Amazon, why do they then continually recommend that I buy more?" (where [a refrigerator] could be any large, expensive object of which it is obvious that you're not going to need a second one).
In one case, there was a response from an Amazon engineer who didn't work on the recommendations team, who said "I've asked them about this in the past and they always swear up and down that a previous purchase is the strongest signal of likelihood to buy one of these objects. I've looked into a few different examples that caught my eye and in every case I was able to show that the pattern was spurious (for example, that these "repeat purchases" were actually returns, in which the customer was sent two [refrigerators] but only paid for one), but it's not worth the effort of correcting the team product-by-product".
> anything would be better than just making the home page a static list of shows you've already watched. Doing this makes Netflix look *more* like a ghost town rather than less. So what gives?
I'm not sure I agree with that; my primary objection, when I look at what Netflix has to offer, is that none of it is even remotely attractive. It's hugely embarrassing to them. Displaying shows that I've already watched neatly sidesteps the issue that they've lost all the licenses for content that someone might actually want to watch; the average quality of that display is going to appear high. Any time I try to look for something new to watch, that's when I get a strong sense that Netflix has died.
The explanation I've heard for appliances is that sometimes you buy one and you don't like it so you get a different one. The odds of this happening aren't particularly high, but they're higher than the odds of you buying the appliance in a random month.
I think they’ve generally gotten a pretty good standard of new shows. Obviously they won’t have the Disney stuff anymore, or the newest movies. To be fair to the company they realised that quite a few years ago.
Even if it were the case for physical purchases, you wouldn't expect the same pattern to hold for watching movies.
But I'm observing that it isn't the case for physical purchases, and yet the recommendations team treats it like it is, because they're looking at some behavior that isn't relevant to their goals for reasons that don't show up in the data summaries they work from.
This can easily also be true for Netflix.
For example, I find it easy to imagine that two people share a Netflix account and one of them watches a show, likes it, and recommends that the other one should watch it too. Netflix has a tool specifically to combat this problem, distinct personal accounts within a family account, but not everybody's going to bother with that.
My guess is that the team that wrote the module that recommends shows is different from the team that wrote the module that tracks what shows you've watched. Perhaps there's some intermediate phase where they look at your viewing history, try to reduce your complex human personality into a few buckets and bits, and then pass that along.
Alternatively, maybe people actually do re-watch shows a lot, and the recommendation engine is doing its job well? I know some people like to have the TV playing in the background.
Maybe those shows are owned by Netflix, so it's like putting the store brand toilet paper in a prominent spot?
I guess I've always assumed that Netflix's "recommendations" are little more than paid advertisements -- aren't they ?
I have found that "recommendations" nowadays generally are what the company wants you to do, not necessarily what would be best or even good for you.
Wouldn't that be Netflix paying itself? I don't see where the money could be coming from.
Hm. They want you signing up, and maintaining a subscription. But actually watching anything is going to be a cost for them, both in use of technical resources, and in royalty payments. I'm assuming they're ignoring the technical resource side of the costs, but it's amusing to speculate that they aren't. ;-)
What is the opposite of "leaving money on the table"? "Taking money off the table" might make sense, but I'm looking for something along the lines of, "driving too hard of a bargain such that a deal doesn't even happen in the first place".
(Something something pareto, abundance curses, etc.)
Getting paid.
Not leaving money on the table.
"Taking money off the table" is already in use in an unrelated meaning.
"Negotiate yourself out of a deal."
Edit- Weird. Google returns few results for this phrase, but my father used to use it all the time.
I think "talk yourself out of a deal" might be a more common variation.
I think we have a winner. Bonus points for being a "Dad"-ism!
Overfishing?
"Making perfect the enemy of good" is something like that, but more general.
As some of you may know, I recently founded the company Open Asteroid Impact (openasteroidimpact.org) on April 1st. Some people complained that there was too much text. While a bit on the late side, we now have a video! It's an interview that covers our company's strategy, safety plan, DEI policies, windfall clause, and more!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCzaE9sklrI
A very cogent presentation of your organisation, and I appreciate your commitment to supporting neurodivergence!
Short and to the point!
There's still too much text and now there's too much video, too. I suggest you remove, hmm, about 100% of each.
I think the date might be important here.
[out of character]
Clearly the guy just didn't think I was funny, and sought to make his displeasure known. It's a bit ruder than what I'm used to but hey. That's one of the costs of being on the public internet.
It's possible to make a point with a joke, you know, and the OP clearly was doing just that.
Are you ok?
Fine, though I'll be better once you get on with that editing I suggested.
What's fun to do in Redwood City? I'm moving there soon
What’s fun is leaving it. By which I mean take 84 over the mountains.
Believe it or not, Downtown Redwood City will actually be top 10% "fun" in the Bay Area. There's a few walkable bars and I love Sandwich Spot. You'll soon find yourself travelling to SF or downtown Palo Alto though... For more natural amenities, you'll be pretty close to the beach in Half Moon Bay and a few hours from skiing in the Sierra Nevada mountains
Downtown RWC is really quite nice.
Make fun of the dopes who bought property in Foster City, since they'll be underwater any day now.
But seriously, what's fun in Redwood City may be the wrong question. Redwood City is part of a continuous strip of suburbs reaching from Millbrae to Santa Clara. It might make more sense to ask what's fun to do in central Silicon Valley.
Well, Redwood City has a DMV office, which is more than most of those suburbs can say. I had to go there once to renew my driver's license, which is one of the most fun things I've done in Redwood City.
Woah, there. I hope during your wild adventures in the big city, you stopped to refuel at Redwood City's many fine dining establishments, like Panda Express, Taco Bell, and Burger King.
Hi everyone, I am currently writing about psychiatric advanced directives, particularly for bipolar disorder or other types of disorders that may involve involuntary treatment; if you have any experience with these kinds of advanced directives, either in issuing them as a patient, or enacting them as a practitioner, and you're open to talk about them, please contact me, I'd like to feature original sources rather than just look at all the metastudies about this. My gmail is hiphination.
I just want to say I love your podcast!
Love you back Nihal.
I wrote a longer thread about the figure that I adapted from Pekar 2021:
https://twitter.com/tgof137/status/1778584767619043415
I captioned it accurately in my blog post:
https://twitter.com/tgof137/status/1778584788036890803
But I pared down all the text for my debate slides so that ended up not being clear. Sorry for any confusion there.
Let's hope I don't end up in jail for this:
https://twitter.com/breakfast_dogs/status/1778169418419478714
And at least they're not threatening to execute me, yet:
https://twitter.com/AGHuff/status/1725715568874135694
I also think this is all kind of funny because Saar explicitly responded to that slide by saying he doesn't care about any dates:
https://twitter.com/tgof137/status/1778584795163119748
And we later ended up comparing epidemic models where Saar/Yuri proposed a late September introduction with half the doubling rate, as compared to my proposed late November introduction at the market.
It would be an interesting debate to go over various models with sufficient detail to compare Pekar's 2021 and 2022 models, evaluate the impact of the first ascertained case on start date, build confidence intervals on case numbers at various dates, decide on a range of values for epidemic growth rate parameters, and so on. But that is certainly not the debate that we did have.
The long-awaited final version of the Independent review of gender identity services for children and young people (aka the Cass Report) was released this week. It's a ginormous meta-study and it makes recommendations for the UK's NHS about what the optimal healthcare approaches for treating children with gender dysphoria should be. In her intro, Dr Hilary Cass writes: "This Review is not about defining what it means to be trans, nor is it about undermining the validity of trans identities, challenging the right of people to express themselves, or rolling back on people’s rights to healthcare."
The report is written in a low-affect style that may disguise the seriousness of its salient points. But it's clear from reading it that a lot of what some people in the debate declare is settled science is not settled at all — for instance, treatments such as puberty blockers are being prescribed with little good data about their long-term effects. I haven't heard if any similar comprehensive review like this is being done in the US. Cass makes various recommendations, the most important of which (to my mind) are to get better long-term data on intervention outcomes.
This BMJ editorial doesn't mince words, though...
"The evidence base for interventions in gender medicine is threadbare, whichever research question you wish to consider—from social transition to hormone treatment.
"For example, of more than 100 studies examining the role of puberty blockers and hormone treatment for gender transition only two were of passable quality. To be clear, intervention studies—particularly of drug and surgical interventions—should include an appropriate control group, ideally be randomised, ensure concealment of treatment allocation (although open label studies are sometimes acceptable), and be designed to evaluate relevant outcomes with adequate follow-up.
"One emerging criticism of the Cass review is that it set the methodological bar too high for research to be included in its analysis and discarded too many studies on the basis of quality. In fact, the reality is different: studies in gender medicine fall woefully short in terms of methodological rigour; the methodological bar for gender medicine studies was set too low, generating research findings that are therefore hard to interpret. The methodological quality of research matters because a drug efficacy study in humans with an inappropriate or no control group is a potential breach of research ethics. Offering treatments without an adequate understanding of benefits and harms is unethical. All of this matters even more when the treatments are not trivial; puberty blockers and hormone therapies are major, life altering interventions...."
The complete report can be downloaded here...
https://cass.independent-review.uk/home/publications/final-report/
The link to BMJ editorial is here...
https://www.bmj.com/content/385/bmj.q837?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
I wish to make a general point about clinical trials in medicine.
In general it is very reasonable to expect that before any drug is widely prescribed, we have strong safety data that it will not cause harm.
This is the case even for conditions that are life threatening, which can be controversial. For example in the 1990s there were promising drugs for HIV/AIDS coming through the clinical trials pipeline that most people couldn't access, causing widespread frustration with the FDA which spilled over into protests.
The same is true for cancer - this is the space that I work in. I recommend friend-of-ASX Jake Seliger's blog for anyone who wants to hear how incredibly difficult it is to get access to experimental drugs even for young, well-informed, well-connected, terminal cancer patients. It's even more difficult for everyone else. It is the case, for example, that a competent adult terminal cancer patient will not be able to get access to an experimental drug, even if they are willing to sign a bevy of legal consent forms, if they have a condition that may predispose them to have a serious side effect.
It is not readily apparent why the evidential threshold should be so much lower for medications in transgender medicine.
That is all.
Agreed!
A key difference is that none of the standard drugs used for medical transition are newly developed for that purpose. All of them are secondary uses for drugs developed and approved to treat other conditions. In general, there is much, much less scrutiny applied to new uses for already-approved medications than for initial approval of new medications.
While this is true in general, giving these drugs to kids in development is a whole different ballgame. There are plenty of medications that are safe for adults but not kids - even common ones like aspirin and doxycycline.
Puberty blockers were specifically created to give to developing kids (the original purpose was to treat precocious puberty), so I don't think that objection applies here.
You’re saying the exact opposite of the earlier commenter and I regret to inform you that she is correct. They’re drugs that are widely used for other conditions, such as androgen suppression in prostate cancer, that have been repurposed. In any case, the argument of “this drug was created specifically for this purpose” does not absolve us for the need to make sure the drug is safe! We do this routinely for drugs created specifically for other indications.
There are at least three different GnRH analogues medications that can be used to delay puberty. Leuprorelin and Triptorelin indeed appear to have been developed to treat hormone-sensitive cancers. But Nafarelin was developed to treat precocious puberty.
And that doesn't contradict what I said earlier: "precocious puberty" refers to when puberty starts much earlier than normal, and as such is a medical condition that cisgendered people get.
Anti-androgens used for adult trans women (e.g. spiro, cypro, and bica) were developed for other purposes (high blood pressure, hormonal birth control, and prostate cancer, respectively, if I recall correctly), but I think they're generally reserved for adults and older teenagers.
Sometimes, it;s basicallly impossible to do a plecebo controlled study/
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy has this issue, because you actually know if youve had therapy. This doesnt mean that we should ban CBT on principle as being impossible to evaluate. (Though, some care in interpreting trials may be in order)
Similarly, you cant plecebo control hormones, because the subject is aware of the effects/
There is also some discussion on different types of placebo effect that could be had...
a. some people randomly get better with many medical conditions. need to show tteatment is better than people getting better anyway
b. experimenter pleasing. patients are, effectivly, coerced inro saying the tteatment worked when it didnt. need to reduce the piossibility of this form of coercion
c. some kind of theory that the immune system uses information about your mental state, and believing you are being treated somehow kicks the immune system into overdrive. nb. there asre reasons to suspect this would be evolutionary advantageous
Rougly, theory is that mammals have to budget calorie expediture between running away from pedators and fighting off infection. An adaptation that throws more energy into the immune system when your not otherwise needing to expend calories on not dying would be evolutionary advantageous.
And large placebo effects with antideprssants might be a different mechanism.
it courred to me a while ago you could just tell yourself youve taken an antidepressant wihtout actually needing to get them preescribed. I mean, if the effect is almost entirely placebo, sugar pills are great.
How can you in principle conduct longterm double blind study of a treatment that has very obvious and well known effects several months in? I suppose, you can still make it double blind on paper, while in actuality everyone knows perfectly well whether they are in a control group or not, but what's even the point then?
On a related note, puberty blockers have been in use for decades for precocious puberty. How were the studies conducted back then? Were they double blind somehow? Do we accept their quality? Can we extrapolate the results of these studies for the new application? If no, why not?
It really seems that whatever long term side effects puberty blockers might have they should have already been discovered during their research and continuous use for treatment of precocious puberty. Theoretically, there may be some class of side effects which, for some reason, is not expressed specifically in patients with precocious puberty but the expected disutility of it appears quite low.
Presumably the puberty blockers are used with different timing in the two cases. It is entirely plausible that a puberty-blocking drug would have different side effects when used to delay the onset of puberty to the normal time versus delaying it until much later than usual.
Two things can be true
1. Gender dysphoria is a real phenomenon where people feel they are inside the wrong body and hormones/surgery can cure this
2. The majority of people, especially minors, these days who consider themselves trans or gender non conforming are not actually gender dysphoric. Many are gay, on the autism spectrum, or have other mental health issues. A few have narcissistic personalities and enjoy the attention. We need to be a lot more careful about how we prescribe these treatments to ensure that we target only the people who would really benefit.
Trans people have been around forever but the frequency of diagnosis has just gone through the roof. Obviously there’s a cultural component
Agree completely
It would seem that a large fraction of gid cases are a type of autism.
it is not "they have autism, not gid" but rather gid is misclassified in the DSM and should have been been put with the pervasive developmental disorders.
We had the lesbians who only have sex with men discussion last week. it seems everyone here thinks it is nuts to explain all gid cases as homosexuality, given that a significant portion arent attracted to thier assigned at birth sex.
I agree, but saying this just means you get excommunicated by *both* sides.
Already happening lol
Fortunately we still get to hang out here.
>Many are gay, on the autism spectrum, or have other mental health issues.
None of these things are mutually exclusive. Autism in particular strongly correlates with gender dysphoria in both directions for reasons that are not well understood. And the most common other "mental health issues" are depression and anxiety symptoms, which may actually be caused by gender dysphoria in many cases.
For example, I have formal diagnoses for gender dysphoria, ADHD, depression, and anxiety. The depression and anxiety symptoms have almost completely gone away since I figured out I was probably trans, got diagnosed, and started medical transition. The ADHD seems to be more or less independent of dysphoria and transition.
That being said, there are diagnoses that can mimic the presentation of gender dysphoria and should be ruled out as part of the diagnosis process: specifically, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder type 1, and certain presentations of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Ruling these out is part of the WPATH-8 process.
Yeah I have friends who are trans, they had mental health issues for ages, then they transitioned and seem to be doing a lot better. I have nothing against trans people. I hope you are living your best life. I just think we shouldn't confuse "let's support trans people" with "let's pressure people to transition who may regret it later" or "let's ignore possible side effects of puberty blockers given to minors."
I do keep wondering if all of these conditions that are comorbid to autism have a shared cause. I actually do agree with Anon below that the current rise in ASD and gender dysphoria diagnoses can't just be chalked up to past underdiagnosis, there would definitely be more written record of cases describing at least the symptoms. And it's not like dysgenics is going to suddenly cause a sharp rise in cases across the world... Which leaves us with environmental factors.
If it does all turn out to be because of pollutants, the resulting outrage is going to make the current generational animosity look like a joke in comparison. ...Not that the younger generation wouldn't have done the same thing in their predecessor's position. I personally wouldn't hold any resentment against the older generations, though that's mostly because I have no respect for humanity and don't expect anything from them.
These are my pet hypotheses on the correlation between dysphoria and autism:
1. Autistic people may experience what might be termed "gender incongruity" at roughly the same rate as the gender population, but they find a given degree of gender incongruity much more distressing than neurotypical people do, for similar reasons to why autistics tend to be a lot more bothered by unpleasant sounds, tastes, and textures than neurotypicals are.
2. It seems like a core feature of autism is being at least somewhat lacking in both the ability and the motivation to conform your identity and preferences to social norms. It seems plausible that an effect of this is that neurotypical people would have gender identities that are at least a bit more socially malleable.
That's what I used to think too, but there's just too many other conditions that are comorbid with both ASD and gender dysphoria that aren't even psychological. I'm pretty sure this is what Scott is trying to figure out with all those survey questions about hypermobility and EDS.
> It seems like a core feature of autism is being at least somewhat lacking in both the ability and the motivation to conform your identity and preferences to social norms.
I hadn't thought of this before. I once dated someone who was only slightly on the autism spectrum, but when in intense emotional situations, they would revert to a very binary view of truth: statements were either true and good, or a lie and evil, and there were no exceptions for falsehood or imperfect knowledge or just making a mistake.
I am going to be very cautious about treating this as more than a theoretical potential contributing factor. But wow, the more I think about it, the more it seems to explain. :-/
I have a number of psychotherapy patients on the autism spectrum, not all of them so close to the mild end that they would fit right in in a setting with lots of "nerds." None are happy, and some are very unhappy. Re: the lack of joy and enthusiasm, my intuition is that a certain emotional flatness may come with the territory. But also, most are grievously deprived of companionship because of their social skills deficit, and also lead very restricted lives because of an aversion to novelty and a craving to know in advance exactly how something will turn out. I work to help them improve social skills, and become aware of their inner script of when-in-doubt-do-the-usual-thing and override it more often.
Also, am impressed by work being done by a Calif. researcher on using a brief, structured therapy incorporating 2 MDMA sessions to help people on the autism scale become less socially anhedonic. Can find links if you are interested.
Depression and anxiety is an obvious result of being autistic while living in non-autistic society, where people are mostly unable to straight communication and instinctively consider you rude and weird.
Non cis-genderness and general gender-non-conformity seem to have something to do with autistics being less susceptible to social rules. The fact that people still manage to twist it into "social contamination of transgenderness" is hillarious.
> If it does all turn out to be because of pollutants
On the other hand, imagine how ironic it would be if it turns out that polutants have serious contribution towards transgenderness. That the side which was actively worried about their children becoming trans was actually contributing towards it by supporting oil industry.
Why would it come from the oil industry specifically? There are lots of pollutants, and in fact if there was something we typically consider anodyne that we found out caused gender dysphoria, we would reclassify it as a pollutant.
>Autism in particular strongly correlates with gender dysphoria in both directions for reasons that are not well understood
Correction: it strongly correlates with gender dysphoria _diagnoses_. There's no particular reason to think that gender dysphoria diagnoses strongly correlate with actual gender dysphoria.
Is it your coherent stance on all diagnoses, or are you making an isolated demand for rigor in gender dysphoria case, in particular?
Gender dysphoria is an unusually politically sensitive issue and you'd expect on priors for its diagnoses to be mush less trustworthy based on this. And psychiatric diagnoses for many illnesses or issues are pretty fuzzy in the first place.
Something being a politically sensitive issue has a much worse signal to noise ratio than getting a diagnosis from a medical professional. I can understand some amount of extra caution, but there is that, and than there are claims that diagnosis have no strong correlation with an actual condition.
"Trans people have been around forever"
This is not actually true, as I will apparently have to keep pointing out for the rest of my natural life. There is – in stark contrast to homosexuals – *no record*, not *one*, of a transsexual person in the entire West between the emperor Elagabalus (approx. 204-222 AD) and the mid-19th century. There are a number of eunuchs and crossdressers whom activists *choose* to spuriously reinterpret as transsexuals ex post facto, but an examination of these cases proves them wrongheaded in each instance. (Elagabalus is also a unique; there is no other instance preceding him either.)
Please stop repeating this false factoid. Trans people did not meaningfully exist before the industrial revolution. I have no idea why, but that's how it is.
Gender dysphoria as we recognize today has certainly been documented. The most famous example is the 14th century poem "On Becoming a Woman" by rabbi Qalonymos ben Qalonymos. The rabbi refers to maleness as a "lasting deformity" and laments to God to be made female. You can read the poem online if you'd like, it's quite moving. It makes no direct reference to attraction to men.
Examples of people who lived as the opposite of their birth sex include the surgeon James Barry (born 1789), stagecoach driver Charley Parkhurst (born 1812), and more recently, the Countess or Pauline/Arthur Berloget of 1850s France, who wrote, "I, who had so desired to be a girl, have triumphed over natural law." There is also the Quaker preacher Public Universal Friend (born 1752) who explicitly identified as neither male nor female, and requested their followers avoid gendered pronouns when referring to them, saying "I am as I am."
There are also many culturally-specifc third or fourth genders, yes, even in Europe: the femmenielli of Italy, and Balkan sworn virgins. These are social roles that fulfill social purposes, and not merely individual declarations of identity, but social roles develop in response to individual psychology. There are far more examples, of course, outside of "the West."
I take issue with your requirement of "lack of other motivations" to characterize a historical figure as transsexual, it is asking for too much. In a society with highly distinct roles for men and women, going from one category to another, or shunning both, will require taking on a drastically different lifestyle and career by definition. Any "legitimately transsexual" historical figure would also need, at the very least, to be able to cope with the demands of their chosen role.
It is one thing to say a woman crossdressing temporarily to fight in war or inherit an estate is not an example of a transsexual, and another to claim someone like James Barry, who lived his entire adult life as a man, and wanted his sex to be kept secret even after his death, is not reasonable evidence of a trans person, even if he originally transitioned to get into medical school.
If you don't think these examples are sufficiently "pure", I'd be curious to know what your standards are, and whether your standards are in fact similar to typical trans people today.
This is exactly the kind of disingenuous argumentation I mean. Most of your examples are trivially easily dismissed, and you probably know this, yet you repeat them anyway because when given in a group they have the appearance of truth and this allows you to trick others.
The femminielli were simply crossdressing homosexual prostitutes; this we have ample evidence of from late-medieval and early-modern Europe. In France they were called berdaches, and in Venice there exists a bridge called the "Ponte delle Tette", Bridge of Tits, because the city's ordinary prostitutes successfully sued to be allowed to display themselves there in order to compete with the crossdressing male prostitutes. It's strange that people are so keen to make much of these types of obvious drag performance when, in the modern day, conflating drag with transexualism is seen as a big no-no by the same people, and they clearly understand the distinction to be clear and sharp.
Sworn virgins are even worse and more disingenuous an example than this, of course, since they're exactly a case of a social structure existing to allow women to take on the social rights and duties of a man in case of necessity or (rarely, it seems) inclination. The fact that it took a lot longer for most people who are not Albanians to establish analogous forms of elective or universal emancipation doesn't make the sworn virgins transexual, any more than having her own bank account makes a woman transsexual today.
As for the individual persons named by you:
The rabbi Kalonymus is an interesting case, but I will point out that he is conventionally described as a satirist and that the Even Bochan "has long been acknowledged as a masterpiece of Hebrew satire" intended to make fun of Judaism's ideas about men's superior position in society and before the Lord; you know, presumably, as well as I do that the end of the poem is a reference to and paraphrase of the Orthodox Jewish man's morning prayer, in which he thanks God for not making him a woman. Nor indeed is this the only satire of this kind that Kalonymus wrote (Masekhet Purim is the other I can name offhand), so it's hardly strong evidence of *anything* in his personal life.
Margaret Bulkley a.k.a. "James Barry", as you point out yourself, crossdressed to get into medical school, another typical example of the opportunistic crossdressing I adverted to already. The evidence concerning her is also contradictory, with, for example, no indication of any relationships with women, a possible relationship with a man who was in on her secret, and the possibility that an early sexual assault and subsequent pregnancy led her to feign being a man as a form of traumatized self-defense. It's also worth noting that even if we accepted Bulkley/Barry as legitimately transexual, this would merely move the first appearance of transsexualism back by two or three decades, hardly a massive hole below the waterline to what I'm saying.
Charlotte Parkhurst is substantially the same; she crossdressed for protection (I hardly need to tell anyone that the western frontier could be notably fucked up for teenage girls traveling alone), had at some time a straight relationship and (non-surviving) baby, and, being born two decades after Bulkley, is even closer to the time in which I already agree that transsexuals were surfacing.
The PUF was brain-damaged by a fever, decided she had died and her soul had been replaced by that of an angel, and that since angels were understood (by various persons, anyway) to be sexless, she must therefore also be; her condition is much closer to what we would modernly term schizophrenia than to transsexualism (although, be it noted, it was clearly also not schizophrenia as typically understood, proceeding as it did from a severe physical illness. A stroke?). Frankly the PUF is almost the canonical example of a widely cited but obviously "fake" transexual, in that nothing whatsoever about her case resembles the generally accepted modern understanding of transsexualism.
Strangest of all is your use of Arthur Berloget, transexual of the 1850s and forward, as an example *against* my claim that transsexuals first appeared in the mid-19th century! Berloget is indeed precisely one of that handful of indisputable cases which do occur with no predecessors in the mid-19th century! There is indeed little question that Berloget is what we would modernly conceive of as a transsexual! Why would you concieve of this as an argument against me? I am frankly baffled by this, unless it merely shows the rote, copypaste nature of your response.
Incidentally, your use of terminology like "transitioned" is the worst kind of question-begging. Not only are you assuming that which is to be demonstrated, you're violating your own definitions, since you know very well that if it were decided today that transition should be a wholly non-medical issue and transexuals should be content with crossdressing, you would immediately raise the hue and cry about it.
I am interested in knowing your definition of what may fairly be described as "transsexual" (I will generally use the more common term transgender person) so that I can consider how it fits to some other historical examples. This seems better than potentially coming up with a list of historical examples to then work through on an ad hoc basis.
Maybe one way you could express this would be to look at examples you deem spurious and characterize why those examples don't fit with the definition you endorse.
I will put forward a modified version of the Wikipedia definition as my starting point: "A transgender person is someone whose gender identity differs from that associated with the gender that their family, community, and/or society identifies them with." And then "gender identity is the personal sense of one's own gender, which can correlate with a person's assigned sex or can differ from it."
Kind of a weird definition - does it imply that in a maximally trans-inclusive society, nobody would be trans? Since there would be no societal gender identification from which to differ
"I will put forward a modified version of the Wikipedia definition as my starting point: 'A transgender person is someone whose gender identity differs from that associated with the gender that their family, community, and/or society identifies them with.' And then 'gender identity is the personal sense of one's own gender, which can correlate with a person's assigned sex or can differ from it.'"
"Gender" as a concept is also ideological hogwash; most languages don't even have two words for this and English only does because Victorians were too prudish to say sex, so they used a grammatical term as a euphemism. The idea of a sex/gender distinction existing is itself false, enabled only by this accident of the English language. I also don't think that others' views are materially relevant. I would thus prefer to define a transsexual simply as "someone whose sex identity differs from their actual observable physical sex".
This being settled, allow me to begin in the way of examples with the two I already used elsewhere: the famous Chevalier d'Éon in the 18th century, and the castrato priests of Cybele in ancient Rome. These are two figures (or rather a type in the latter case) which are *frequently* claimed by transexual activists in our day as predecessors; there should therefore be no problem in using them as examples of the tendency, I hope you will agree.
d'Éon, despite engendering widespread dispute in his own day about whether he was in reality male or female, did not meaningfully have a sex identity different from his birth sex; of course, due to the controversy just mentioned it would be either impossible or inevitable for any sex identity he had to differ from that which others identified him with, depending on how you look at it, which strikes me as an example of where your definition is not adequate. Either way, I hope we can agree that the existence of letters from himself where he begs to be allowed to resume male clothing in France because he feels humiliated by having to dress as a woman makes it clear that he was in no way confused on the point. Granted, it was decided to require him to dress as a woman in the first place because in previous letters he claimed to be a girl who was raised as a boy to inherit his family estate, but given that that claim was made entirely for personal gain, well. It's also reasonably well established that d'Éon began to crossdress for the purposes of spying, as he was a member of the Secret du Roi, the Ancien Régime's intelligence agency and secret police; evidently in his youth he was able to pass for a woman, but every portrait of him from later in life makes clear that he thoroughly lost this ability with age.
Next, in the case of the priests of Cybele, the so-called galli, the idea that they were transsexual seems to me to crumble on every point where we have any evidence. First of all, "gallus" is the Latin for rooster, cockerel; the *whole point* is that they're *men* who have made the sacrifice of their manhood to the goddess; a costly signal if ever there was one. If they believed themselves to actually be women, there would be no sacrifice and they would not be able to function as priests. Secondly, in those periods when castration of Romans was illegal, the galli were evidently foreigners, which indicates that the animating impulse was religious piety or fervor, not a desire to change sex, which presumably would not have increased among Roman men just because a law changed. (Similarly to what I said in a previous comment, if people suggest this happened, I would like to know what law changes they think would cure/prevent transsexualism in our time and why they aren't advocating for this simple, effective, wholesome, socially nondisruptive, and evidently permanent one-time fix instead of complex medical interventions with significant residual suffering.) Thirdly, there is no sensible reason why Roman transexuals would have all, without exception, formed a religious cult to the point where there isn't a single known example of someone just doing the eunuch-and-women's-clothing part and staying out of the religion – not even Elagabalus, who AFAIK did not castrate himself. This is just asking for far too much acceptance of ludicrous coincidence, particularly considering how crass Romans were about matters of sex in both senses, especially if they could get a laugh out of it. Finally, as a sort of aside remark, I might point out that there were a reasonable number of eunuchs in ancient Rome, and vast numbers in other especially Eastern societes later; none of these are typically considered transsexual by modern activists, so it can't be the case that castration is inherently transsexual or evidence of transsexualism. Effectively nothing about the galli and their manifestation pattern-matches to how we're meant to understand the modern transsexual etiology or experience; therefore, it is reasonable to state that these are two different phenomena. (Note that many things about the galli *do* pattern-match to the behavior of adherents of other weird religions.)
I'm sort of dashing this off off the cuff and reading it over it seems a bit muddled, it could probably have been argued more forcefully with more time spent than I'm willing to dump into an individual comment, but hopefully this can form some reasonable basis at least.
"There are a number of eunuchs and crossdressers whom activists *choose* to spuriously reinterpret as transsexuals ex post facto"
How do you distinguish between a crossdresser and a transsexual, in an era where the word "transsexual" hadn't been coined yet, there was no social support for or acceptance of the thing we would later describe with that word, and the medical technology for a transsexual to do anything more than dress and pass as the opposite sex didn't exist?
Evident compulsiveness, lack of other motivations, presence of the comorbidities now known to us, voluntarity, expressions of distress. Those are just the most obvious criteria off the top of my head. But for example, transexual activists keep citing the Chevalier d'Éon as a historical transsexual even though autograph evidence (in the form of a letter from him to the relevant legal authority, I forget who) existed at least into the early 20th century, and probably still exists today, that he was appalled by the legal decision that required him positively to dress as a woman in France and wanted permission to stop. Or again, (a certain type of) people keep citing the Roman priests of Cybele, even though they're blatantly obviously self-castrati out of religious fervor and piety, much like a number of Christians later, natch.
These behaviors are, *at the very minimum*, sufficiently distinct from the modern transsexual that claiming them for that movement is the iffy angle, not refuting it.
(Also, you seem to inadvertently suggest here that if *we ourselves* were to remove all social support and acceptance of transsexualism, the observed presentation would then disappear and be reverted into other, largely more benign forms of crossdressing; do you really believe that? Given that "crossdresser without significant psychological distress or ailments" is clearly superior to even the outcomes of many hormonally and surgically treated persons, who report significant continued morbidities, that would if so be a forceful case *against* tolerance in this instance. I'm not sure I'm prepared to go there.)
Couldn't it be that the concept of being trans didn't exist, and that people who would now call themselves trans then thought of themselves homosexual? Also, my impression (based mostly on life experience and stuff Dan Savage has said) is that for most gay men wearing drag is a playful thing, done for parties or parades or the fun of feeling outrageous, but not a way of feeling more like a woman. So maybe crossdressers in the past were what we would now call trans? I.e.., maybe they were crossdressing so as to come as close as they could in real life to being the gender they felt they were.
My understanding is that most modern transsexuals are not even homosexual (with reference to their actual sex, that is), so it's hard to see how that could be possible for more than a portion of the group in any case. But also, the references we do have to crossdressing mainly suggest that it was opportunistic for access to male advantages in the case of women (e.g. the famous lady-pirates of Calico Jack's crew) and for men, either to hide from one thing or another (the Chevalier d'Éon, any number of French aristocrats escaping the guillotine dressed as washerwomen, etc.) or exactly the same sort of joking/party thing you describe. The best example of the latter would be a joke in Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazusai, which I started explaining here, but the digression was so long that it was of a size with the rest of the post, so look it up if you really want to know; in any case, that was written in 411 BC in Athens.
Either way, there's no sign or record of anything like what the current regime describes as *distress* around sex or gender, and there is not in literature any example of someone even asserting the impossible desire to switch, except on the pattern of Beatrice's lament in Much Ado About Nothing, where a woman wishes that she were a man so that she could behave like a man, or avenge herself.
<My understanding is that most modern transsexuals are not even homosexual (with reference to their actual sex, that is),
Well, yeah, but you know the thing about Eskimos have 15 (or whatever the number is) words for snow, while English has only one? Well maybe in other eras there weren't words for all the manflavors gender identification and sexual preference, so some word like "homosexual" or "queer" would have been used to cover all forms of being atypical with respect to gender and sexual preference.
As for personal accounts -- there are probably a lot of things we don't have personal accounts of from early on. Many people couldn't even read and write, and even for those who could it's unlkely their diaries and letters would survive unless they were famous. And if being sexually atypical was stigmatized, that makes it even less likely we'd have personal accounts of it. Do we have personal accounts of a taste for BDSM, or water sports, or fellatio? I dunno, maybe we do.
"Well maybe [...]"
I realize that absent concrete knowledge this seems like a credible and rational line of reasoning. However, in practical fact: no. Some single vague term would not have been used to cover all sexual deviance, let alone consistently during all of 1500 years in the entirety of Europe. It's unlikely that this would have occurred *even in one country* for any period longer than a few generations. Rather, it's unlikely that if transexuals *had* existed, they'd have been conflated with gays other than in exceptional cases; the two concepts of "wanting to fuck other men" and "a strange misapprehension about one's body" are not intimately conceptually connected, however natural the connection seems here and now. It's more likely that they would have been associated with other kinds of lunatics who believed other absurd but largely harmless things.
"Do we have personal accounts of a taste for BDSM, or water sports, or fellatio? I dunno, maybe we do."
Yes, we do, actually. Tons of them. The Romans had separate words for giving head and facefucking. The fragmentary novel Satyricon is, as far as we can judge from the remaining portions, about two guys dragging their twink around due to a sex curse cast on them by a priestess of Priapus for spying on the secret rites. In The Golden Ass, a woman is sentenced to get screwed by the titular donkey; this is played for laughs as the donkey finds it repugnant to bed a criminal. There is any amount of graffiti in Pompeii and elsewhere describing the specific charms and skills of named women, wholly without euphemism. Again, this is Rome alone (starring Macaulay Culkin as the emperor, I guess). I understand that it can be tempting to attribute a sort of naivete or puritanism to the peple of the past wholesale, but they were literally just like us, often less inhibited. I would advise you to let go of this way of thinking, even if you don't feel like hitting the books (which I recommend, however; many of them are very entertaining).
There's some pretty explicit stuff that's survived from antiquity, including literal restroom graffiti. If the modern concept of trans had existed back then on the scale claimed by advocates we'd likely have something to back it up.
Yeah this seems plausible. Given there was no such thing as gender reassignment surgery for most of the history of the human species, gender dysphoric individuals in the past have had to find alternative methods of expression.
It feels like someone should mention the following theory:
*********
No one is transgender *by nature*,
BUT, also
No one is cisgender *by nature*.
Because cisgender and transgender are cultural/societal concepts and they don't exist outside of a society.
Or as Scott put it:
"there is no neutral culture. Having lots of transgender people is downstream of cultural choices. But having lots of cisgender people is also downstream of cultural choices.....Even within evolution’s constraints, culture can do some pretty weird stuff. I think you could probably have a culture where 99% of people were transgender, where it was generally accepted that everyone transitioned on their 18th birthday"
in https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-geography-of-madness
A society in which 99% of people are medically sterilised on their 18th birthday does not meet your low bar of "evolution's constraints"
I'm having a hard time taking the report seriously. How, exactly, are you supposed to do a blind control group for puberty blockers? It will be pretty obvious if you're still going through puberty, you can't placebo yourself into just not maturing. And some of these charts are *obviously* bullshit. The worst that I've seen so far, Figure 18, suggests that the gayest of boys are barely more interested in male partners than the least male-attracted girls. And every single curve in that chart is the exact same shape, and it implies that NO girls identify more with male gender than any boys, which is just obviously untrue because boys and girls identifying with the other gender is the entire *reason this study happened*. I'd expect better from a middle school science fair poster.
At this point I've stopped reading. It may be that my early skim has just picked out a couple of weak spots, but if a random sample of it is this bad I am not expecting the rest of it to be any better.
Listen, Beowulf is smart and critical and willing to call bullshit on anything and anybody. If he takes this report seriously then IMHO it's worth reading in full.
Why, thank you, Eremolalos!
But to answer Unsaintly's question, the Cass report discusses this question in their chapter on Evidence-based Medicine in which they discuss the limitations of the current studies and they suggest methodological improvements.
But the bigger question here, Unsaintly, is why are you having trouble taking the report seriously if you haven't even bothered to glance at it? This seems to be the rationalist method, though — come up with reasons to support one's position without looking at the evidence.
I admit this report is huge, and I'll probably never get through the whole thing, but I was curious enough to check it out and bring it to this group's attention. What blows my mind is that most of the critical comments have come from people who are (a) either too lazy or too prejudiced against it to bother to look at it, and then (b) fail to mount an evidence-based argument against it.
It's all very tiresome.
Seconding Eremolalos' comment on it "not being the rationalist method, but a common result anyways"; the issue is at least partially one of time.
Namely, "the first replies will tend to be from people who haven't read whatever you're saying/linking/etc.", roughly proportionately to how long it takes to read it (and/or find time to read it in depth). Possibly with an additional multiplier for how much other interesting reading there is available in the vicinity.
It's not the rationalist method, it's just that most of us are smart, stubborn, opinionated and articulate, so spouting opinions is our default mode.
...and never bring an opinion to a data fight.
I get how irritating it must be that almost nobody (or literally nobody?) read some of the thing on the strength of your post. You brought a big chunk of info about something people argue and speculate about here. That's like bringing home a big fresh kill for the tribe to feast on, and instead we all just sat on our rocks and kept speculating and arguing. I did that myself. Though Anon eventually got me to consider seriously the idea that transsexuals did not exist before the 1800's. But I am sort of impervious to new info these days. I am writing a novel and all the flow valves are set to out. I canceled all my news subscriptions, and don't even own a TV. Anything big I'll hear through the grapevine anyhow
>How, exactly, are you supposed to do a blind control group for puberty blockers? It will be pretty obvious if you're still going through puberty, you can't placebo yourself into just not maturing.
You do a blind control group by giving the control group a placebo and not telling them they're the control group. Just because they may be able to figure out that they're taking a placebo through observation doesn't invalidate it. Many blind control groups for medications are in the same boat, where the fact that the pill doesn't do anything opens the possibility of participants noticing that they're in the control group. You still have to do it anyway if you're going to have any idea what the effects of the medication you're studying actually are.
>Figure 18, suggests that the gayest of boys are barely more interested in male partners than the least male-attracted girls. And every single curve in that chart is the exact same shape, and it implies that NO girls identify more with male gender than any boys, which is just obviously untrue because boys and girls identifying with the other gender is the entire *reason this study happened*.
I checked the paper that she gets that chart from, and can confirm that the cart she presents is directly from that paper. Sadly I don't understand statistical analyses well enough to critique the paper itself, but here's what the paper had to say about it:
"Conventionally, d values of 0.8 or greater for group differences in human behavior/psychology are considered large, those of about 0.5 are considered moderate, those of about 0.2 are considered small, and those below 0.2 are considered negligible. The d value for the sex difference in height is 2.0. Most human behavioral/psychological sex differences are smaller in magnitude than the sex difference in height, but a few are larger. For instance, the sex differences in gender identity and sexual orientation are larger...This sex difference in gender identity is very large with an approximate d value greater than 10.0 (Hines et al., 2003a, 2004). Sexual orientation refers to the direction of a person’s erotic interests, e.g., in males, females, both or neither. Most people who have female-typical external genitalia are interested primarily in male partners, whereas most people who have male-typical external genitalia are not. This sex difference also is large, with an approximate d value of more than 5.0 (Hines et al., 2003a, 2004; Meyer-Bahlburg et al., 2008)."
I could see that chart being accurate: most men are not gay, and most women are not lesbians, so it would make sense that the vast majority of women are more attracted to men then the men who are most attracted to men. Similarly, most people do not have gender identity disorder, so it makes sense that even those with gender dysphoria may not identify with their chosen gender more than cisgender individuals.
> Just because they may be able to figure out that they're taking a placebo through observation doesn't invalidate it.
Of course it does? I mean, what's the point of double blind studies in the first place, in your opinion? So that people can publish *technically still double blind* studies in papers? Or is it about finding things about reality, regardless of researchers and participants beliefs?
We can say that when the chance of figuring it out is low, then the double blindness protocol is invalidated less. But with longterm puberty blockers study the chance of discovering whether you are in the control group or not is around 100%.
I think what FLWAB means is that in order to check the assumption that a treatment has obvious effects, you have to do a study that doesn't already assume the effects will be obvious.
Yup. The point of a double blind study is to find out what your medication actually does.
I think the most interesting angle on this is the question of how one _would_ properly study gender dysphoria treatments.
And this is where I regret the polarization in our discussion. Half the population seems to have concluded that gender affirmation treatments are an absolute right and that it would be horrible to deny any kids as much treatment as their doctor and/or parents can push. The other half thinks any such treatment is self-evidently child abuse and thus totally bans it. So it's hard to see a context in which the kind of 'high quality' study the Cass report asks for can happen in the US.
It looks like Europe is doing better than we are at actually asking the important questions, and hopefully we'll be able to learn from them.
I don't know how one could do a proper study of the psychological aspects of gender dysphoria treatments, but studying the medium-term and long-term physical effects of puberty blockers does not seem undoable. You compare height, weight, bone strength, general health etc. of people who used them and people who are otherwise similar who did not use them. There are some subgroups whose development would also give useful info: People who took puberty blockers for a relatively short period then stopped. People who took them but never followed up with male or female hormones.
Yeah, I would definitely agree, though it's worth noting that nobody is taking these for physical health, so measuring mental health would be a necessary component. The goal is to give doctors/families/kids advice on side effects, not necessarily to prove that these drugs are per se harmful.
Anecdotally, a common story among many adolescents who detransitioned in adulthood is that many of them do not regret the treatment even if they changed their mind. I would love more rigorous data here, but it's possible these treatments have worthwhile benefits on mental health even if there are physical side effects and even if the treatment doesn't stick.
But that's a tricky balance.
> nobody is taking these for physical health
As far as I know, that’s not true. They were initially developed to push premature puberty. The daughter of a family friend got her puberty with 8 and took the blockers for I think 4 years und then stopped using them. She is around 35 now and the last thing that I heard is that she is doing fine.
Yes, I have heard informally that a majority of children taking puberty blockers are undergoing medical therapy to correct an otherwise messed-up puberty. This was cited as serious potential collateral damage from efforts in Texas to ban use of the drugs. I can't offer any sources at the moment.
Surely it would make sense to hold off on broad use of any treatment -- especially a treatment with potentially huge, life-altering consequences -- without the answer to those questions?
If we were asking the question de novo, that would be the appropriate course, I think.
But we don't seem to be. I don't claim deep expertise here but my understanding is that puberty blockers have been in use for decades now, and while the evidence for their benefits is unclear, so is the evidence for their drawbacks. That's well short of a good medical study, but it's also not nothing.
To me, this justifies neither 'full speed ahead' or a complete ban, and from what I can read, the Cass report comes to the same conclusion: we should exercise more caution than we currently are, and should try to do better science. But it falls short of endorsing the sort of complete ban that we're seeing in many states.
Previous usage of puberty blockers is a red herring. It was universally used to delay precocious puberty to the natural timing. This is like arguing that since we have treated diabetes with insulin with tolerable side effects, we can therefore give people arbitrary amounts of insulin and it will never be an issue. But in reality, Hypoglycemia (caused by excess insulin) is very dangerous. In general as a rule-of-thumb, medication used to replicate the healthy natural human state can not be expeected to safely be used to push a human beyond the natural state. That doesn't mean everything unnatural is therefore bad, but it does mean that you have to be increasingly cautious the further you move away from the natural.
Why is precocious puberty considered to be a health problem? The only *possible physical* problems that I see listed are (a) an early growth spurt that *may* cause shorter stature, or (b) *possible* abnormal weight gain in girls. All the rest of the negative effects listed for precocious puberty seem to be emotional and psychological. Not that I want to discount the emotional/psychological component, but couldn't counseling handle that downside better and more safely than puberty blockers?
The NHS website says that puberty is considered precocious if it's before 8 for girls, or before 9 for boys. The idea of going through puberty at 7 is pretty awful to me, never mind even earlier than that. And even then, puberty blockers are only considered "if it's thought early puberty will cause emotional or physical problems, such as short height in adulthood or early periods in girls, which may cause significant distress." So it sounds like even puberty as young as 6 or 7 isn't automatically handled with blockers, although that's just from reading the website, I don't have any first or secondhand personal knowledge.
Mental health is far too complicated and individual for such blanket statements. Outside of transgender stuff, lots of cases of e.g. depression and anxiety respond far better to medication than to any form of counselling.
I'm skeptical that counseling will adequately handle either "my body is changing in ways I don't understand and none of my friends are going through this and I'm a GIANT FREAK", or "I really really want to have sex now but that would be a very bad idea and also massively illegal".
Can't we use Scott's "hairdryer" argument here, just as in the case of using puberty blockers for trans people? On the one hand, sure, we could engage in a lot of counseling and therapy, but on the other hand, why not just fix the problem?
I'm not deeply knowledgable either, but just googled puberty blockers advantage disadvantage, & Mayo Clinic listed these undesirable side effects: Possible effects on growth spurts (there's usually a big growth spurt in the year before puberty, with kids growing several inches), bone growth, bone density & fertiity.
I'm not sure why they're saying "possible effects" rather than "effects": maybe because of what was mentioned in Cass report of poor quality of most studies.
I would be surprised if there were not some substantial downsides to interfering with puberty: a crucial, profound, one-time developmental step. The process is probably very complex with many intertwined processes going on, and later maturational processes dependent on the changes at puberty, including of course the gender-specific hormones. Seems very unlikely to me that we could use one drug to stop the body from making the transition of puberty without interfering with a whole bunch of other things.
>I don't claim deep expertise here but my understanding is that puberty blockers have been in use for decades now, and while the evidence for their benefits is unclear, so is the evidence for their drawbacks.
Much of this evidence is unclear largely due to stonewalling from gender medicine practitioners as described in the report, as well as extraordinarily broad-based and occasionally violent pushback from society against those who bring the issue up.
An expensive lifelong medicalization regime, often including extensive cosmetic surgery, is also a pretty obvious drawback all by itself even if it ends up being necessary. No treatment has _zero_ effects.
One of the obvious advantages of puberty blockers is that they make extensive cosmetic surgery unnecessary or at least much less necessary and less extensive.
This is like arguing that having your legs amputated brings the obvious advantage of never having to buy shoes ever again.
It doesn't look good when we have used something for long time and still don't have good evidence that it is efficient and safe. It could be a snake oil or something worse. Most ineffective treatments or therapies are in this category.
What prevents collecting good evidence? When the therapy is ineffective or worse, all such evidence is buried and discarded. Instead poor quality evidence that shows some effectiveness is published.
It is very difficult to conduct human trials up to legal and ethical standards for publication in peer-reviewed journals. And this doesn't seem like an area of medical practice where there is a lot of profit to be made (compared to something like a glp-1 agonist for example). Lack of potential for profitable drugs or treatment makes it less likely for research to be privately supported, and because it is socially controversial, there are probably hurdles to public research funding and other resources.
There is a Slate Star Codex piece which breaks this down in the context of research that Scott Alexander was interested in conducting. You might find it relevant if you don't interact with research or structures like an Institutional Review Board https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/
That's not obvious to me given that the lack of treatment can have equally huge, life-altering consequences. With out clear answers either way I would default to using some mix of the best judgement of the patient, their doctors, and if the patient is a child their legal guardians, although when those people don't all agree it's not obvious how to weight their different opinions.
Can you give some examples of where lack of treatment in teenage years has had detrimental outcomes? Please link to studies. One common assertion is that it lowers the chance of teen suicides, but Cass addresses this...
86. It has been suggested that hormone
treatment reduces the elevated risk of death
by suicide in this population, but the evidence
found did not support this conclusion.
Are you actually disputing that puberty has life-long, irreversible effects on the human body? I don't think I can be bothered to look for a study either way but under the circumstances I don't think it's really necessary.
To what extent that's "detrimental" is a little more complicated but again I believe pretty strongly that people should have the right to make their own choices about their own bodies- I think the burden of proof falls on the people who want to override their right to do that.
I'm not sure what your point is, but I didn't argue that. Yes, puberty has life-long irreversible effects on the human body. But going back to first-causes — and baring hormonal adjustments from the medical profession — our 23rd chromosome pair is the ultimate determinate of puberty and our biological sex. If one goes through gender reassignment therapy, one may be made to look like the opposite sex, but one will not be able to reproduce your 23rd pair. Considering that we don't really know the long-term health effects of hormonal therapies, it seems like a risky choice to make, especially if one isn't an adult.
I'll ask the question again: can you give some examples (research studies) of where lack of treatment in teenage years has had detrimental outcomes? Otherwise we're arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of pin.
Even if the person in question is a young child?
"First, do no harm" is at the heart of medicine. If the great majority of children with gender dysphoria recover naturally with no long-term harm, then it is in fact obvious that defaulting to these extreme treatments is a bad idea.
Right, and while we're making hypotheticals that do not align with the evidence (since the report above went out of its way to *not* be about gender dysphoria), if the great majority of children with gender dysphoria DO NOT "recover naturally with no long-term harm", then it is in fact obvious that making it more difficult to access these treatments is a bad idea.
In the interim, though, it seems reasonable to provide treatment options that the overwhelming majority of people asking for them have said were beneficial, and insist on better research going forward so we can come to a sane conclusion, instead of making decisions based on "no evidence" (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence-is-a-red-flag).
>In the interim, though, it seems reasonable to provide treatment options that the overwhelming majority of people asking for them have said were beneficial,
Except we _don't_ know this, given that the gender clinics stonewalled when the report's authors tried to follow up on the cases.
It is also relevant that the people being "treated" are submerged in a social milieu that insists taking these treatments is not only universally beneficial but is in fact heroic, and where people who desist are treated as pariahs and traitors.
Well yes if you assume we know that. But we were just talking about how there's a shortage of high-quality evidence available.
Right, because of social and legal pressure from activists.
Incidentally, that by itself should be a blaring red flag that there's something deeply wrong here. The truth does not need a bodyguard of lies.
Also, this... A longitudinal study from the Netherlands about gender non-contentedness in teens. Turns out that gender non-contentedness peaks at the beginning of adolescence (age 11) and steadily declines until age 19, at which point it plateaued. The authors found that, overall, 78% of the children never experienced gender non-contentedness (gender dysphoria); 19% experienced gender non-contentedness that declined with age; and 2% experienced gender non-contentedness that increased with age.
By age 25, the share of people who always felt gender non-contentedness was 0.75% for men and 0.5% for women.
Question: given that some interventions are irreversible, shouldn't we wait until individuals reach adulthood before they choose their final gender identity?
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-024-02817-5
One thing in life the provides a bit of an analogue to puberty blockers is training to be an elite athlete, where kids spend a vast amount of time training, miss a bunch of the stuff they'd have done if they weren't training, and are at considerable risk of developing things like repetitive stress injuries. Also female gymnast, skaters and dancers must be slender, and many of them do all kinds of unhealthy things to keep their weight down. I have never enjoyed watching the Olympic events where most participants are quite young because of thoughts about how much they had to miss to get to the Olympics. I expect most of these people as kids fell in love with their sport, and with being awesome at it, at a very young age, and were permitted or encouraged by parents and coaches to begin an elite training regimen. My daughter fell in love with gymnastics at age 5 or so, and if she had proved to be extraordinarily talented by age 9 or so I am sure she would have wanted to commit to elite training. Fortunately she was not a good enough gymnast for that possibility to loom, but if it ever had I don't think I would have let her do it. She was too young to understand the big picture -- what she would have to give up to make it to the top.
That study uses a fairly broad measure of "gender non-contentedness", i.e. answering "sometimes" or "often" to "I wish to be of the opposite sex" on a survey. A DSM-V gender dysphoria diagnosis requires at least six months of meeting at least two out of six specific definitions involving "strong desire" for medical or social transition or "marked incongruence" between internal gender identity and physical sex.
And "sometimes" appears to be doing almost all of the work in this study's data. If you just restrict your definition to people who reply "often" instead of "sometimes", then based on eyeballing Figure 1, the percentage of the sample experiencing gender incongruity drops to 1-2% at age 11, less than half a percentage point at age 13, and maybe 0.1% at age 16 before rising back to about 0.2-0.5% at age 25.
The study's authors explicitly call out their metric as being likely to over-estimate gender non-contentedness:
>In a previous study in youth, gender non-contentedness was assessed in a similar way, but with five instead of three response options; “never,” “rarely,” “sometimes,” “often,” or “always.” In that study, 9% of individuals answered one of the latter four, with 6% of them answering “rarely” (Potter et al., 2021). It can be speculated that a large percentage of individuals in our sample who answered to “sometimes” wish to be of the opposite sex, might have answered “rarely” if this answer option was provided. Therefore, our numbers may overestimate the prevalence of gender non-contentedness. Furthermore, this item is multi-interpretable, as positive endorsement may reflect the participants’ wish to have the opposite sex’s identity, but just as well their gender role characteristics.
Well... that's what the puberty blockers are for. They're supposed to buy time so that the patient has time to figure stuff out, at least in theory. I was on them for three years, then I stopped, and I still went through puberty normally afterwards.
Can you be sure that puberty blockers will have no long-term effects on your health? Sorry, if I seem a bit persnickety about this subject. I'm not an MD, but I did take my med school's embryology course. And it's not just the hormones, but the timing of hormonal signals, that play an important role in human sexual development as well as bone and muscle development. Having said that, my knowledge is forty years out of date. But I was curious about the current state of our knowledge and I queried CoPilot, and different studies seem to be yielding contradictory results. If I were an MD, I would remember that line from the Hippocratic Oath where physicians are told, "first, do no harm".
You
What drugs are commonly used as puberty blockers, and are there any longitudinal studies on their long-term effects?
Copilot
Puberty blockers are medications used to delay the changes of puberty in transgender and gender-diverse youth who have already started puberty. The most commonly used drugs for this purpose are called gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) analogues. Here’s a summary of their possible benefits, side effects, and long-term effects:
Goserelin (Zoladex): This medication suppresses sex hormones (testosterone and estrogen) during puberty.
Histrelin (Supprelin LA): Another commonly used puberty blocker that helps pause physical development.
Leuprolide (Lupron Depot-Ped, Fensolvi): Also falls under the category of GnRH analogues and is used to delay puberty changes.
Now, regarding longitudinal studies on their long-term effects, there is evidence to consider:
A long-term study conducted by the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust in the United Kingdom found that the majority of children who took puberty blockers did not resume puberty after stopping the medication. Contrary to common beliefs, almost all children treated with puberty blockers went on to take cross-sex hormones to permanently alter their sex characteristics. Additionally, participants reported no improvement in psychological well-being, and bone density and normal growth were affected compared to their peers.
Another study suggests that young people who have been on puberty blockers have normal reproductive function after they stop taking them. Data also indicates that puberty blockers do not have long-term effects on bone or metabolic health.
However, a Mayo Clinic preprint study has raised concerns about long-term fertility issues in boys who have taken puberty blockers. The findings suggest that the impacts of these blockers may be permanent, disputing claims that such effects can be reversed.
In summary, while puberty blockers can be beneficial for gender-diverse youth, it’s essential to consider both their short-term benefits and potential long-term effects. As research continues, medical professionals must carefully weigh the risks and benefits when prescribing these medications.
>Can you be sure that puberty blockers will have no long-term effects on your health?
No, but we can be sure that *puberty* will have long-term effects on one's health, including ones that are clearly negative (in particular, there are a lot of serious diseases regarding the uterus and ovaries that only become an issue after female puberty). It seems like forcing trans people to go through that twice should also be included in your risk profile.
By this definition, being born also has "clearly negative effects on one's health" because being born guarantees that eventually you will die!
Mandatory abortions!!!1!
You know, I suppose you're right. In fact, being born is so dangerous that we often intentionally delay it! This can come with medical risks of its own, but we decide the benefits outweigh the risks. If only there were some other medical intervention this metaphor could apply to.
Nearly all medications in use fall under this category, in fact. Puberty blockers do too. The point is that "do no harm" should include, y'know, the potential harm from *both* puberty and blockers, rather than just blockers.
Children are not capable of "figuring this stuff out" by definition. They're literally children! If you were lucky and dodged the bullet I'm genuinely happy for you, but that's all you were: lucky.
>Children are not capable of "figuring this stuff out" by definition
So it's a good thing we have puberty blockers to give them more time to figure out whether they want to make the serious medical decision to have hormones irreversibly alter their body in ways that have well documented effects to their health! (A process known as "puberty")
It's not possible to "make the serious medical decision" to not grow up, sorry. We don't live in The Culture yet, and acting as if we do is causing enormous damage to innocent people.
Good thing we're not talking about that, then.
...What's that supposed to mean? Let's not pretend that minors are all just braindead zombies, they are absolutely capable of thinking. And frankly, I wouldn't trust most adults to make decisions for themselves either, but we let them have agency because, well... we don't have a better option.
If there was a better way to diagnose gender dysphoria other than self reporting, I would absolutely support that, but unfortunately there isn't. And again, obviously asking a pre-pubescent child to make a big, life-altering decision like this is too much, which is precisely why puberty blockers are used to give them more time.
Legally, minors are not allowed to do all sorts of things because they're generally considered (under the law) to lack the capacity (due to their age and level of maturity) for things like signing contracts. This principle is based on the idea that minors may not fully understand the implications of the contract or they may be easily influenced.
There are all sorts of things that minors can't do. For instance, Federal law prohibits licensed firearms dealers from selling handguns to anyone under the age of 21 and long guns to anyone under the age of 18.
There are also all sorts of state-level age restrictions about sex between minors (for instance, a fourteen-year-old can't have sex with a twelve-year-old in some jurisdictions). And I think all states maintain that the age of consent for sex with an adult at at least age 16. (Of course, the minor doesn't get in trouble for violating the age of consent statutes, but the adults do — because those laws assume that minors don't have the "capacity" to resist the pressures that adults can put on them.)
Many states restrict abortion to minors without parental consent.
Minors can't vote.
And when the draft was in effect, minors couldn't be drafted for military service, and they could only volunteer with the consent of their parents at age 16. I don't know if this is still allowed.
In general, minors are not allowed to serve time in adult prisons, and their record is expunged upon adulthood because their crimes were perpetrated when they had diminished capacity.
So, State and Federal laws carve out all sorts of special cases for minors. If that's the case, why should we let minors have agency about their sexual identity? There may be good reasons, but I admit I've become more skeptical about the need for this exception.
Minors going on puberty blockers or hormones through a legitimate route are, to my knowledge, all doing so with parental consent with the possible exception of legally emancipated minors. Though I am personally very hesitant about the idea that parental consent should always be necessary, especially for older teens. This is consistent with existing policies on medical treatments.
The most important difference between accessing puberty blockers, and say, the right to own a gun or have sex with an adult, is that there are few to no consequences to simply waiting to do those things later. You can wait until 18 to buy a long gun, without being permanently harmed.
However, someone forced to wait until 18 for hormonal transition will, in the meantime, undergo a process that irreversibly changes their body in a way that is often highly distressing, and may require many additional surgeries to begin to correct. If not allowing minors to buy guns somehow made their fingers atrophy so that they struggle to operate tools in the future, I'd feel much more amendable to letting minors buy guns. Given that drastic changes will occur to someone's body either way, we should at least afford them some agency, even if they are underage.
If by "have agency about their sexual identity", you meant social transition such as names, pronouns, and clothes, I would defend this for the same reason minors should be allowed to have friends, hobbies, and political or religious views of their own: they're not property.
Er... I don't think it's really very controversial that minors on average aren't as smart as adults, and have much less of an understanding of the long-term consequences of their actions. I mean, have you ever met one?
>If there was a better way to diagnose gender dysphoria other than self reporting, I would absolutely support that, but unfortunately there isn't.
"Something must be done, this is something, therefore it must be done" is the sort of thinking that brought us the Iraq war. It is frequently the case that when there's only one course of action available and it's terrible, you're better off not doing anything.
>And again, obviously asking a pre-pubescent child to make a big, life-altering decision like this is too much, which is precisely why puberty blockers are used to give them more time.
I'm glad you at least acknowledge that a pre-pubescent child is incapable of making this decision, which is hugely more than most activists are willing to do... but "more time" is dangerously wrong, because going through puberty is part of what makes you smart enough to realize it's a better idea to go through puberty and live a normal life. (And I note you even said that yourself: if puberty is blocked... isn't the child still pre-pubescent and therefore unqualified?)
...You keep assuming that I was perfectly content with my decision to stop my blockers, but that is far from the actual case.
Most of the reason I didn't go through with HRT was because I'm incapable of making actually consequential decisions. But it was also because I knew there would be a major blowback against the increasing visibility of trans people. And who would have thought, I was completely fucking right.
So I ended up going through puberty, and guess what? I still feel the same way as I did back then, even worse in many regards. No matter how much I try to keep running away from reality, the pain never goes away. And I know that you're never going to understand this, so I don't even know why I'm typing all if this down. ...I'm just venting, I guess.
About gender discontent at the beginning of puberty: I had that. I was revolted by my body hair and fuller hips, which to me just looked like an ugly fat butt, a perpetual scattering of zits, hair that got greasy overnight and, of course, my period. Seemed like a whole new level of nastiness, plus there was now the possibility of mortifying accidents. And I was on the swim team and couldn't figure out how to get a tampon in and if I just didn't show up for practice once a month everybody would know why and the idea of that was intolerably embarrassing.
It didn't occur to me to wish I was male, though. I just wanted my kid body back. But if the idea of gender dysphoria had been in the air, I might have concluded that's what I had.
I have, though, seen kids as young as 6 who do truly seem to have something inborn going on with gender. I remember a boy about that age who insisted on wearing dresses, and truly did have a female presence. I kept forgetting he was a boy. And this was 25 or so years ago, before gender dysphoria was so much a thing. The kid seemed happy. His parents worried about how life was going to work out for him, but had given up fighting with him about his clothing etc., and just enjoyed him as he was.
Oh god, what the hell is this new Substack feature where the whole width of the text column narrows when you select something?? This is seriously annoying. You've got to find some way to turn this off.
(And geez, website makers in general should remember that lots of people are "selection readers"; having selection even just pop a little thing is annoying, let alone *this*!)
I've long been annoyed by how slow this blog loads on desktop browsers, especially when posts have a lot of comments (e.g., the Ivermectin post with over 2200 comments). I finally decided to do something about it, and created a browser extension that reimplements the comments section which speeds up page load considerably. I can finally open the Ivermectin post again!
If you want to try it, you can get the Chrome extension here: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/astral-codex-eleven/lmdipmgaknhfbndeaibopjnlckgghemn, or the Firefox add-on here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/astral-codex-eleven/.
The source code is available on Github: https://github.com/maksverver/astral-codex-eleven, and you can file bug reports or feature requests there too. If you are especially paranoid, you can unzip the extension before installing; it's implemented in 100% unobfuscated Javascript without frameworks or libraries, so it should be relatively easy to verify it does nothing inappropriate (no ads, click tracking, or uploading of data of any kind).
While the main goal was to be able to load posts with lots of comments in a reasonable amount of time, I also worked in a few other improvements, like keyboard navigation (h/j/k) and more precise comment timestamps.
What an improvement. Thank you for making this extension.
Wonderful
Wow, look at how fast that scrolls!
Good idea! And in case anyone wants a dedicated discussion page for problems with this website's commenting system , I created one: https://megaleaf2023.substack.com/p/reader-comments-matter
I wrote a post at the end of the last open thread about why Substack probably won’t fix this. It was a few days into the thread though and nobody commented. It’s not worth posting again but the main argument is that this is not a social media platforms driven by comments unlike reddit. The slow comments affect fewer than 1% (my guess) of the users and nobody is defecting - if we were the situation would fix itself.
Holy crap. I knew substack's code for displaying comments was bad, but I had chocked it up to there maybe being some technical limitation with the sheer amount of text on the page. But the speed at which they load in your extension (and how they don't take a full second to display when tabbing back) proves this is not the case, and makes substack's team just seem incompetent.
I will say that I disagree strongly that profile pictures "add little value"; I personally heavily rely on avatars in identifying who's commenting over just usernames, since my visual memory (and pattern recognition) is much stronger there. I'd certainly appreciate them. (If I have time, I might look into submitting a PR for this, but no promises)
Agreed about avatar pictures, even the auto-generated ones. And especially in any conversation with more than 2 people.
I'd also like the avatars back, but if it's a huge effort to have them AND the lightning quick comment reading, I guess I can live without them. Or maybe just toggle the add-on off if I want to see them again (otherwise bye-bye Unicorn Power: https://pbfcomics.com/comics/nice-shirt/)
I focus more on the names, but I can see recognition value in the avatars.
One thing Substack is clearly doing wrong is setting the avatar to the left of the comment instead of above it. This ends up wasting tons and tons of horizontal space in any case where the commenters are talking to each other instead of doing nothing but responding directly to the post.
FWIW I blasted avatars with Ublock on Firefox, which significantly sped up the comment loading. It was weird at first, and then my correlation engine quickly adapted to seeing just the names. But I do like being able to see them again with this extension.
> which significantly sped up the comment loading
WHAT?!?!?!?!?!?!?
I don't doubt what you say, but there should be multiple layers of image caching to stop this exact problem. What the HELL has been going on in browsers, or Substack, to cause this?
Oh, it’s a disaster all right. I did it because someone mentioned it a couple of weeks ago in these here comment boxes, that the freaking avatars slow the comments down. So I made custom filter in Ublock that blasted almost, but not all (? - don’t ask! I’m a stranger here meself :) ), avatars. Significant speeding up of comment loading ensued.
I will be trying this. It's the first such fix I've seen that attempts to keep the comments, rather than just turning them off. Thank you for your work!
Holy Moly, that's a substantial amount of programming, with extra care to get auto-linking right. And the code is nice and readable too. Good job!
So my mother has a kidney tumor which may or may not be cancerous. She says that the doctors are quite confident but I've not been entirely convinced by the way my grandfather and uncle cancers were treated, so I'm looking for recommendations on what to read to be able to do at least a sanity check on what her doctors say.
If the imaging shows typical features for a cancer, as opposed to a cyst, they should operate and remove it. Most kidney cancers in an early stage are curable. Depending on the pathological features at time of operation they may recommend a 12 month course of immunotherapy as adjuvant to reduce the risk of recurrence
Good luck!
You might start with the National Comprehensive Cancer Network's guidelines for treating kidney cancers: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10191161/
Guidelines should be the default in treatment decisions, and physicians should be able to justify any decisions that don't follow guidelines--e.g., "This guideline doesn't apply because ___."
Confidence is not a good metric to judge physicians by. For important diagnoses and treatment decisions, it's worthwhile to try to get a second opinion.
I have a question about lgG4 antibodies and food intolerance.
Specifically, I recently made a lgG4 blood test and it showed reactions to almost two dozen foods. I already have celiac disease, and continue to have (much milder) GI issues on a gluten (and lactose) free diet.
Are elevated lgG4 levels merely indicative of exposure, or should I actually eliminate the foods? It would be logistically difficult to do so.
Many thanks!
Have you recently switched to a gluten-free, lactose-free diet? I'm asking because for a while after switching it's not unusual to still have reactions to almost anything even if your diet is completely free from gluten (and lactose, in your case). It should eventually calm down - if it doesn't, then you need to go back and ask your doctor. As for elevated IgG4 antibodies, as far as I can tell from a quick search, they can indicate a lot of different things (including being raised in asymptomatic individuals) so I wouldn't rely on them as a tell-tale for things to cut out of your diet. Not as the only indicator, anyway.
Thank you so much for your answer! I switched to GFLF last September and the "getting better" seems to have plateau'd. Your answer made me hopeful that I might still get better, though I need to schedule a follow-up soon anyway. Thanks for the answer about lgG4 antibodies, too! That's about the same conclusion I'd also come to, but I was worried I'd missed something.
Also, if you are sufficiently motivated, you could try an elimination diet - cut out everything that you think might be causing problems for a few weeks and see if the problems subside. Then add things back in, one by one, monitoring the results. I'd trust that kind of test more than the IgG4 blood test.
I suppose the final question is, are you absolutely sure you've eliminated all gluten sources? It's a sneaky molecule.
Thank you for your advice!
You're welcome, but I only did a quick search so don't take it as good research or anything. I hope your follow-up helps.
Lately I've become easily "triggered" and upset about politics that I come across in my day-to-day. I didn't used to be this way - I was more open-minded about views I disagreed with, more intellectually charitable, and less emotionally invested. I am not able to avoid the triggers or situations where they happen (it's about coming across things "in the wild", rather than places, incl. online ones, where I can easily choose to opt out.)
I really don't like being this way, and don't want this vice to become amplified over time. How can I change?
If the triggering is caused by online political discussions, log off and focus on offline activities that bring you joy.
I think listening to another side's framing and believing them has been the most helpful to me. For instance, the war in Ukraine. Both sides use peace, well being, and other utilitarian justifications in their framing, and paint the other side as stupid, evil liars. Anti war people point out: that weapons companies make money and use it to bribe politicians, conscription happens, and lots of civilians die. The other side is worried about 2nd order effects like defending democracy, the liberal International order, strategic stability, bad precedents, etc. You don't have to buy either side, but most news source will paint their opponents as believing "Hey we like killing babies, we want more of that" which is just not true for any political issues. Same for all the issues of the day: DEI, Israel, abortion, inflation, gun control, climate change, healthcare, immigration, etc.
"Knowing a man well never leads to hate and almost always leads to love."
-John Steinbeck
I'm sorry that I don't have any real answers. I'm dealing with something similar, and haven't gotten rid of it, but here's some stuff that might help.
Maybe try looking into Zen or some other form of Buddhism? This sounds like textbook "attachment", where encountering a stimulus causes a series of reactions in your mind, which end in suffering.
Something that jumped out at me, was your use of the word "vice". That makes me worry that you're reinforcing this by positing a component of voluntariness that may not be warranted. (How good are you at not thinking of elephants?) Don't blame yourself like that, if for no other reason than that it might make the problem worse. Instead, I'd suggest trying to relax through it. Try to notice the process happening as quickly as you can, and then step back (inside) and watch what happens. Paying attention to your thoughts, breathing, and pulse. Find the "Litany against Fear" from the book "Dune", and do that, but with the upsetness. Understand the process, and slowly dissolve it. Get to a place where you can laugh at yourself and at the process.
Good luck.
Is it just one aspect of politics that you find triggering you, or many?
Because there's no point getting worked up about something you can't do anything about, and you can't really do anything about most political issues. You might be able to do something useful, at least on a local scale, regarding *one* issue. But you'd have to focus on it, and not get distracted by all the stupid people who are wrong about everything else.
So, maybe pick one political issue where you're going to make a difference, donating your time and/or money, and speaking on behalf of the cause you believe in. Everything else, is someone else's problem. There are lots of good people out there, some of whom will have chosen as their One Thing the very thing the clueless dolt in front of you is wrong about, and you've got to leave it to them while you go about your One Thing.
And when you're talking to other people about that thing, if they're the stupid ones who are wrong about it, the *only* way you can accomplish anything is to treat them with courtesy and respect and even then you're probably going to have to settle for planting the seed of an idea that might change their mind in a few months. But because you're actually there to *do something* rather than just venting your rage, you're going to suck it up and fake courtesy and respect while you make your case calmly, rationally, and hopefully persuasively. Eventually, you'll find that you aren't faking it any more.
Alternately, you might decide that you can't do anything about *any* of this. In which case, you treat politics the way you treat the weather - an arbitrary, impersonal thing you can't hope to control and can barely forecast. Do you get triggered by bad weather, directing emotional outbursts at the Storm God or the TV weatherman? Or do you go on with your life, and help your family, friends, and neighbors muddle through the storm as best you can?
Hard to answer without more details about what types of things are causing this and what you are feeling?
For instance is your relative "lack of charity" more of an emotional response but your rational brain is giving more charity to the problematic views?
Or is your rational brain saying "these views are abhorrent and have no merit" and you want to change your rational brain.
If it's the later it's hard to understand why you would want to change that.
Like if the views actually have no merit in your brain's evaluation why would you want yourself to believe that they do have merit.
If it's the former there might be a few things you should keep in mind:
1. Read: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/ and understand that the views that happen to percolate to your attention may do so because of their abhorrence so that the sample "views you are exposed to" is not a representative of "views people have" so you need not dispair for the sake of humanity.
2. Remember that sometimes bad actors (like the Russian government) might intentionally feed the toksoplasma for various reasons
3. Remember that lots of people say abhorrent things just to signal support with a side and not because they believe them. Like people who say "we should kill all the rich people" don't really mean that, usually. Like they wouldn't shoot a guy just because they happened to win the lottery.
4. exposure therapy. continuously seek out obhorent views until you become numb to the emotional impact
I find asking myself “what am I supposed to do about it?” really helps. Sometimes the answer is a something, like calling my congresscreature, or giving money to a cause. But for the most part… nothing. Then, why getting upset about it.
Also, what Melvin said.
I don't know, I mostly grew out of this kind of thing as I got older. I don't know whether it's just age, or having closer-to-home things to worry about, or whether all my self-talk about not getting worked up about dumb political things eventually paid off.
Or maybe it's just the experience of seeing plenty of dumb political moments and fashions come and go with no real effect on my life increases my confidence that the next time I see some idiots saying something stupid it probably won't massively effect me either.
One thing I like to remind myself sometimes is that over the whole course of my life, roughly half of the elections will be won by the bunch of jerks that I hate more, and the other half of the elections will be won by the bunch of jerks that I hate less, that this has been going on for a long time, and that it mostly evens itself out.
This is very close to my experience. I also chock it up to how often I watch people on either/all sides make a complete fool of themselves. Nowadays they become memes and get repeated thousands of times by their ideological enemies. Like some guy with no sleeves and a misspelled sign or some purple hair screaming nonsense. I'm like - "Nope, Not me!"
...Until that stops happening, and people start getting killed. Even I'm not naive enough to think that this charade of a status quo is going to last forever. Once people realize that democracy is the only thing stopping them from creating their ideal society, it's all over.
Still not my problem, of course. It's the people who survive who are going to suffer for their ambition.
I've gone back and forth on this axis over the last decade or so. So I obviously haven't solved the problem, but some things that have helped me improve include:
- Finding context. Either looking at "more important issues" like ex. who cares about the outcome of <this issue> honestly, there's a horrible famine in Sudan, this thing that's making me mad doesn't matter. Only works if you aren't getting mad about how little people care about important issues.
- Focusing on my personal life and family and friends. Assuming the political issue in question doesn't directly impact you, reminding myself of the important and meaningful parts of my own life and letting those distract me is helpful.
- Depending on how charitable you feel, reframing the people annoying you as either objects of sympathy - "Wow that thing they are saying is awful but they seem uneducated and exposed to bad influences. It's so sad they are like that." or as objects of derision - "Wow it is so not worth my time to engage with such an inbecile." Both result in me being able to step back from engaging/caring about the situation.
- Any form of irony, nihilism, and/or just plain laughing at the dark humor of the world that you find relatable. If you can laugh at yourself getting worked up that's great, if you can laugh at the situation for being so terrible, that's partial, and if you can laugh at the source of the frustration that at least let's the one off go.
- I read a lot, and fiction or nonfiction that covers the topics or themes you find enraging I find helps restore the charitable and open minded focus by putting me in the learning/listening mindset vs. the discussing/debating one.
YMMV on all of these, but as a fellow afflicted person, good luck!
Personally, I find not caring about anything really helps!
Username checks out.
Dial back the enthusiasm though.
There’s a very helpful book called “stop fixing yourself” which says, instead of trying to change yourself, try to understand the motives and reasons for the behavior you want to change. It’s been helpful for me.
Have you tried using CBT and DBT techniques?
Living in a reality optional world is pretty challenging. Slow deep breaths help.
When you think about tolerance as a cultural virtue, to what extent does it include tolerating intolerance in others?
For instance within a single country, if minor ethnic group A doesn’t tolerate people of major ethnic group B, is it more in line with tolerance as a virtue for group B to tolerate group A’s intolerance or to seek to enforce country-wide tolerance through legislation?
Edit: To clarify, group A’s intolerance doesn’t extend to an explicit, doctrinal call to violence against group B.
I read an article once called "Dissolving the paradox of tolerance". I can't find the article any more. It seems like the sort of thing that Scott would have written but apparently he didn't.
Anyway the argument was that the supposed paradox comes mostly from the vagueness of the word "tolerance". To be "intolerant" of someone is an extremely broad spectrum from "herd them into death camps", through "actively and publically shun them" to "think they're basically alright but you wouldn't want your sister to marry one". Once you start being more specific about what you mean about "be intolerant", most of the paradoxical examples go away.
1. Group A is intolerant of Group B, should we tolerate Group A? Stupid question, be more specific.
2. Group A advocates throwing Group B off rooftops, is it okay if we don't invite Group A to our cocktail parties? Yes.
3. Group A refuses to invite Group B to their cocktail parties, is it okay if we throw Group A off a rooftop? No.
For the most part the paradox goes away once you stop using vague terms.
For anyone else who, like me, was ignorant enough not to have known that there was an official “Paradox of Tolerance” (associated with Karl Popper), in Popper’s words it starts like this:
“Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”
Popper goes on to say that the tolerant should still let the intolerant spout intolerance until they get irrational about it (such as denouncing all argument), which sounds good but hard to objectively evaluate.
Since I’m not aware of any serious advocates for unlimited tolerance, I’m not too concerned about the paradox specifically (I agree with Popper that unlimited tolerance sounds bad). I’m just trying to understand where other people draw the line and what’s reasonable to expect of a society.
The full original quote (which, should be noted, is a footnote in a text talking about something else and not a fully developed treatise) goes:
"Less well known [than other paradoxes] is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
The discriminant is not that the other group is being irrational -- there's hardly a political, ideological, religious, or ethical group that would be worthy of tolerance otherwise -- but resort to violence over argument, which seems to be how "intolerance" is actually defined in this context. At this point there isn't much of a paradox left: of course you cannot argue with someone who has decided not to take part in any argument, and of course when someone is shooting at you there is little you can do but shoot back.
>The discriminant is not that the other group is being irrational -- there's hardly a political, ideological, religious, or ethical group that would be worthy of tolerance otherwise -- but resort to violence over argument, which seems to be how "intolerance" is actually defined in this context.
You might think that intolerance just boils down to violence, but I don’t think that’s exactly what he said and I don’t think most people see intolerance that way. If a blue person won’t hire a purple person because blue people think purple people are barely people at all, and blue people dismiss any rational argument from purple people to the contrary, that would be considered intolerant by most folks because it is irrational, not violent. If a red teacher won’t let a green student in his classroom because he believes all green students are unclean even though they aren’t, that’s irrational and widely considered intolerant. Are you saying Popper believes this behavior should be tolerated because it doesn’t involve violence? I think based on what he said he thinks it might be ethical to suppress these behaviors if public opinion and rational argument aren’t enough to keep them in check.
> I’m just trying to understand where other people draw the line and what’s reasonable to expect of a society.
Part of the problem is that there's no way to draw a bright line, it's just a continual spectrum. And it doesn't help either that everyone's always trying to work the refs and get themselves treated more favorably and the other side less favorably while ignoring the meta level.
I see your point, but isn’t saying minor groups should be punished less for intolerance kind of like saying weaklings should be punished less for assault and battery?
I don't think you're necessarily obligated to find out if a given member of Group A happens to hold a rare sub-belief that the majority doesn't share. The whole point of group identification is as a shorthand for the things the group supports.
If someone self-identifies as a Nazi, I probably won't be interested in talking to them further to find out if they actually support killing Jews or if they just want to rebuild the German Empire.
(You do, however, have an obligation to know if the thing that "everyone in group A believes" is actually a majority or not.)
As an absolute minimum, you should tolerate people who are, let's say, half as tolerant as you. That is basically compensation for your biases, where you see your own actions as more reasonable and justified than the actions of others.
On the opposite extreme, tolerating physical attacks is basically a suicide pact. And when you start criticizing people who defend themselves from physical attacks for being insufficiently tolerant, then you are basically cheering for the baddies.
Problem is, in real life this often gets very complicated, because people act in groups, so (1) you always get some people doing the verbal intolerance and other people doing the physical violence, and it's quite difficult to stop the violent ones when all the onlookers are applauding for them, and (2) the victims of physical attacks often extend their definition of "defense" to include attacking random people from the other group.
> As an absolute minimum, you should tolerate people who are, let's say, half as tolerant as you. That is basically compensation for your biases, where you see your own actions as more reasonable and justified than the actions of others.
The simple idea behind this, of tolerating some greater level of perceived intolerance to compensate for your own inevitable biases, seems like a great place to start.
I have fallen on: tolerate _talk_ about intolerance completely. People are allowed to advocate for intolerance, express preference for intolerance, etc. But do not tolerate actions of intolerance. Actions must follow the law but speech can be anything. This is because it is an incredibly important norm to allow people to express opinions. When you disallow peaceful expression of opinions, you get back to people attempting force and violence. I'd much rather have the (admittedly odious) pressure release valve of intolerant speech.
Can't silently upvote, so have to say something here. I completely agree with this.
The correct answer is to treat all people equally regardless of their ethnic group membership and/or the size of those ethnic groups.
If it's illegal for an A to do (intolerant act) towards B, then it needs to be equally illegal for B to do it to A; this includes not just technical legal equality but also the odds of being prosecuted, severity of sentencing, et cetera, and in an ideal world would also include the amount of social opprobrium received although one recognizes that's impossible to enforce but can be encouraged via the culture. Anything else simply creates a caste system, which is a) flatly unjust and b) will eventually explode with far worse consequences than equal treatment would have.
In the United States, we have the legal concept of protected groups or protected classes which is where maybe the most substantial thinking about this that I am familiar with. And we do periodically change the list of protected groups.
Taking that as a starting point, one principle becomes clearer to me: this is an area where the law has to be kept up with evolving social practices and classes of people. So any solution (in my United States framework) would still involve periodic public debate about adding or removing protected classes, like our current system.
My impression of the United States approach to protected classes does emphasize identifying actual harms faced by members of protected classes and potential protected classes when making that designation. Unfortunately I only have an interested layperson's knowledge of the topic and I don't have any background reading ready at hand to offer.
Protected classes aren't "black" or "white," (your position within the classes) they're "black or white" (the class itself). This is a common misconception and I don't know how it got started as everyone is clearly stated to be equal before the law by every civil rights act ever enacted.
They may be equally protected on paper, but the chances of getting fired for tweeting "kill all whites" are probably very small. So people are referring to how the law works in practice, not in theory.
> tweeting "kill all whites" are probably very small
Really? I’d say it was inevitable.
The laws are written to be applied equally, and the courts usually do so. Employers have the latitude to do things differently. Nobody can deny that they have the arbitrary power to ruin people's lives with no recourse to fairness, but that can't be confused with civil rights legislation.
As I can comprehend the intent of this aspect of American law, a protected class begins when one or more constituencies within the class experience enough intolerance to warrant protection. Then the class is named and enshrined in law as protected.
At that point, even constituencies within the class that did not historically experience intolerance are entitled to certain protections in American law. However it should not be surprising or an argument against the process or theory that the groups experiencing the most active protection under the law are the ones that have historically experienced intolerance, rather than groups whose collective experience would not generally warrant being protected as a class.
Understanding the power dynamics is useful for considering this scenario, although simply knowing more about power situation won't answer the question.
In other words, it is relevant to know what the relative power or status is between the two groups. It is particularly important to know whether your Group A has social advantages or disadvantages when compared to Group B in this society. Knowing that information doesn't resolve the dilemma, but it would help frame the stakes.
Probably this question as framed is too complex to answer without developing the scenario more.
The category of examples that come to mind for me involve religious communities with strict criteria for membership where some people might never be allowed based on their identity. Or there might be practices like banishment, excommunication, or shunning that are used to move people from being accepted Group A to being part of the un-tolerated Group B.
"society", as you use it here, is a dangerous overgeneralization. Every person moves in multiple circles in multiple dimensions. All it requires to harm someone through intolerance is a brief period of dominance in one of those circles or dimensions, and all it requires to make it a lasting harm is to find ways to prevent the other circles and dimensions from counterbalancing it.
I don't understand how it is an over-generalization or dangerous. The original prompt uses the term "country" and that naturally tends to lead to discussion about the legal framework of that hypothetical country. My use of the word society is only a little different from country, so I would suggest just reading "country" in my post to keep it aligned with the original prompt.
I don't see why it's a bad thing or dangerous to consider this within the scope of a single country. Or for that matter any self-described society that has laws or social mores. It's true people can be in multiple circles at once -- I would only say in reply that we could complexify the scenario by adding more of those circles if that seems more useful to you.
Is your point along the same lines as the idea of intersectionality? In other words, it is dangerous not to consider all intersecting social identities when considering this question?
Whether using "country", "circle", or "society", these social arrangements and their rules seem central to discussing intolerance. I don't know how it could be done otherwise.
I think that "whether your Group A has social advantages or disadvantages when compared to Group B in this society" is far too simplistic, and likely to lead to generalizations that erase certain types of problems from the discourse.
You bring up "intersectionality", and I think what's happened to that term in the last 20-30 years is a great example. It's gone from meaning that we need to look harder, to creating Venn diagrams, to justifying hierarchical rankings. I think an adversarial take on the concept would prove more useful: group A may have less formal power in area X than group B, but what other resources can someone from group A use to screw over someone from group B? Are there areas in which they have more power, what other groups are they a member of, are there other factions in society, are there outside powers that can be brought into play, is it possible to change the playing field somehow? Can you just walk up and stab them?
There's this urge to boil individuals down to a number, and collect the numbers into a graph, and then collapse the graph into a single number for all of society. But life's a lot messier than that.
I suggested reverting to the original "country" instead of my "society". I get the impression that you are very vested in using words that best describe the topic you are discussing.
I don't see the terminology I've selected as inevitably leading towards collapsing the graph to a single number for all society, but I'd be game if you have another approach and some other words for discussing this.
>In other words, it is relevant to know what the relative power or status is between the two groups.
I originally described the two groups as “minor ethnic group A” and “major ethnic group B” in an effort to illustrate that B is larger/more powerful than A.
Thanks. I initially understood that you meant that Group B was larger than Group A, but it wasn't clear that you meant that Group B also had greater power or status. With this clarification in mind, I am still coming up with examples like relatively small religious communities that are somewhat geographically based. I'm also trying to think of other categories of examples.
Depends heavily on what we're talking about when we say tolerance/intolerance. Does group A simply harbor a general dislike towards group B, e.g. they prefer not to mingle with members of group B? Then I think this is potentially concerning and perhaps should be addressed culturally/socially, but not necessarily legislatively. Are members of group A actively physically assaulting members of group B, engaging in discriminatory business practices against them, etc.? Then yes, that should be dealt with legally.
Thanks for your perspective. To clarify, group A’s intolerance doesn’t extend to an explicit, doctrinal call to violence against group B. I think most people agree that this can’t be tolerated within a functional society. Let’s just say group A thinks group B’s way of life is inherently immoral, unjust, fundamentally flawed.
Well, you can't really do anything legally about someone's thoughts/feelings, so it really depends on how that intolerance is materially expressed: hate speech, discriminative hiring practices, social stigma against in-group members who hang out with group B, etc.
> you can't really do anything legally about someone's thoughts/feelings
a) Sure you can! Depends on the legal system perhaps, but in America it's quite possible.
b) The legal cause of action can be different than the real cause of action. That is, if you identify wrongthink, then just find some other legal excuse to go after the person.
c) Really, why restrict yourself to "legal" means? Just don't get caught.
What I mean is you can't directly do anything about it. You can't just charge someone for "having the wrong thoughts"; at the very least, they need to say something or do something that you can charge them for.
Can this be exploited? Sure. But I don't think that's relevant to what we're talking about here, which is about "tolerance as virtue", i.e. what we believe, ideally, *should* be done.
"Creating a hostile environment" seems to work, depending on the exact type of wrongthink? Even if the person had only expressed the wrongthink outside of the environment in question.
And yeah, sorry, this is a tangent, and not a helpful one. I don't have much to say about main issue, at least not rationally. My PTSD thinks we should be tolerant of everyone except people who advocate for intolerance, who should be slowly tortured to death in public in ways that will give children nightmares 500 years from now. But I don't think my PTSD is always a reliable guide to ethical behavior; somehow it usually ends up advocating for schemes that would kill off everyone in the world.
Can someone tell me how voting for the ACX Book Review contest works? Will it just be based on the likes that each review post gets? Or is there some sort of jury, or a ranked voting system? I tried looking up how it was last year, but found Substack quite difficult to navigate.
During the initial round of voting, Scott will post a series of giant Google docs with all the submissions typed up together. There will be a Google form where you select a book review from a drop-down menu and rate it from 1 to 10. You don't have to rate every single book review.
When initial voting is done, Scott calculates the average score of each one. Any review above a certain cutoff score becomes a finalist and gets posted as its own post. (The cutoff score in past years has been ~7 or 8 out of 10.)
After all the finalists have been posted, (this usually takes several months) then Scott posts another Google form where you vote for your top choices out of the finalists.
I think the first year review contest was just a single vote by readers (in a google form) for whichever review you liked the most and the second year (last year) allowed you to vote for multiple reviews. I strongly doubt there would be any kind of jury but who knows what our illustrious host will decide this time
I get up very early and get to the gym before sunrise. If I have ADHD medication upon waking up, it revs me up and I'm eager to start exercising. Caffeine works about half as well for these purposes.
If I don't have any stimulants, it's a struggle. Things improve as I start the workout, and then things really improve once the sun rises and I finish my workout. My mid-morning, I'm wide awake.
So I'm clearly not dependent on stimulants to feel alert during the day; it seems like a pre-sunrise issue. I've tried cold showers and artificial sunlight lamps, but they seem only marginally helpful. Any tips?
Stimulant withdrawal?
Is this something you only experience when waking up before dawn? It could be sleep inertia or a similar phenomenon that naturally fades as your body wakes up.
I wouldn't know. I wake up at the same time every day! If it's sleep inertia wearing off, I'd sure like to accelerate the process.
You could try something like nighttime bupriopion? The only study google is giving me is this collection of case studies (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8020706/), but I swear I also read about a larger study a few years ago.
Interesting! I never would have guessed.
All the kids where I work are coming down with chicken pox, so it's the time of year for sickness. Good luck to all the Dr. Scott family!
Don't they get vaccinated for chicken pox?
The argument against routine vaccination seems to be related to increased vaccination for chicken pox leading to an increase in the rate of shingles in adults: https://www.ox.ac.uk/research/everything-you-need-know-about-chickenpox-and-why-more-countries-don%E2%80%99t-use-vaccine
Our school has recently had chicken pox, scarlet fever, whooping cough and covid all doing the rounds in the same couple of weeks! I was surprised about the chicken pox as it's a middle school (aged 9-13) and I had assumed virtually all children would have had it by that age.
"[T]here could be an increase in the rate of shingles in adults over time, which would make the vaccine programme not cost-effective.
"This is because, if chickenpox in children disappears as a result of a vaccine programme, adults would no longer have their immunity boosted by exposure to their chickenpox-suffering children and grandchildren and would be more likely to get shingles. Put simply, the conclusion of the previous review was that it would not be cost-effective for the NHS to immunise children against chickenpox."
I find that unconvincing. There is a shingles vaccine now. Why not vaccinate against chicken pox in childhood and then against shingles for the over-50 crowd? Letting kids get sick (and my case of chicken pox at age 9 was miserable) just so Grandma's immune system can get a boost seems like a weak argument.
They did say "cost-effective", so presumably that's what convinced them. It might be possible to do all the vaccinations you want, but is it cost-effective? Maybe that cash should be spent on bed-nets.
But the objection is to a temporary effect. If you vaccinate everyone against chickenpox, that might aggravate shingles in the elderly people of today. But it will flat-out prevent shingles in the elderly people of the future; how could this possibly fail to be cost-effective?
I thought the objection was: right now, the waves of chicken pox in young people are providing old people with free boosts to the partial immunity from their shingles vaccines. But if we vaccinate the young people against chicken pox, there won't be as many waves of the disease going around, and old people won't be as protected against shingles, and so the next time the disease goes through the country, they'll have worse cases.
I had to look it up and apparently we don't, which surprises me since they vaccinate for pretty much everything so far as I was aware.
The government is talking about introducing it, so sometime in the indefinite near future:
https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/question/2023-10-24/511/
Interesting. I had assumed that vax was more universal, since chicken pox is common, miserable, and can lead to shingles in later life.
Fwiw, I can’t imagine having two newborns at the same time and still produce the volume you produce. I steal all my time in the very early hours and between meetings.
Does orbital bombardment still make sense as a potential weapons systems? A couple years ago we discussed Project Thor on here (briefly, a satellite or launch system in orbit that would drop tungsten rods onto targets on Earth). People argued that Project Thor is not very realistic because you can't just leave a very expensive, very valuable weapons system sort of hanging around in orbit where anyone could attack or hack it. I agree with that argument.
But how about simply launching the tungsten rods as missiles? A land-based system sends the rods into orbit, likely via SpaceX. They maneuver into position and then fall onto the target back on Earth. It would undoubtedly be slower & more expensive than our existing missile capability. But would the drop from orbit offer enhanced damage against dug-in targets? I'm particularly thinking of Iran's underground nuclear facilities here. A tungsten rod from orbit might not be better than a nuclear weapon, but it does avoid nuclear weapon usage, and might just obliterate a ground-based target while being extremely difficult to defend against....
When I discussed this with the CEO of a NASA contractor that I know, he said he thought SpaceX had the right technical skillset to not just launch the rods, but also guide them back to Earth- he said their guidance systems for re-entry are top notch. The original issue with this idea was just cost, but SpaceX has also greatly reduced the cost-to-launch
Something like this, but taboo the word "orbit" except insofar as it appears in the word 'suborbital". At the time your weapon hits the target, it will be on a suborbital trajectory - by definition, because an orbital trajectory doesn't impact the surface. So just wait until you know what and where the target is, and then use your rocket to launch the payload onto a suborbital trajectory directly from your launch site to the target. There's no advantage to actually putting the thing in orbit here; that just requires adding another 500 m/s or so of velocity to circularize and then subtracting 500 m/s or so when you want to deorbit, leaving you exactly where you were before but having squandered a bunch of rocket fuel and propulsion hardware.
Basically, you're talking about an ICBM with a kinetic-energy warhead rather than a thermonuclear one. And if you go the SpaceX route, maybe an ICBM with a reusable first stage (but a more cumbersome launch procedure). People have proposed non-nuclear ICBMs before; with modern precision guidance it isn't a completely ridiculous idead.
It's never been done, for two reasons. First, ICBMs are expensive, and nobody has yet been willing to pay that price for delivering a mere few tons of TNT equivalent to a target. And second, because "everybody knows" ICBMs are only cost-effective with nuclear warheads, everybody tends to assume that any ICBM launched in wartime will be nuclear. And they might not wait to confirm that before nuking you in return.
Both of these will also apply to a hypothetical orbital or fractional-orbital system. If boosters get cheap enough, people might reconsider the suborbital version, but there's still no reason to go all the way to orbit and back.
Imagine, instead of just launching 1 large tungsten rod, you launch say a dozen or more tungsten artillery shells with their own guidance systems- maybe encased like a bullet to survive re-entry. You could launch those at ground targets, but also naval ones- say, one overly aggressive Asian nation trying to blockade an island 90 miles off their coast..... Would be impossible to defend against those falling from the sky
> There's no advantage to actually putting the thing in orbit here; that just requires adding another 500 m/s or so of velocity to circularize and then subtracting 500 m/s or so when you want to deorbit, leaving you exactly where you were before but having squandered a bunch of rocket fuel and propulsion hardware
I guess the advantage would be if you have enough of them in orbit that you'd have one passing overhead any given target in a short timeframe, so you could blow up anything you like with fifteen minutes' notice or something.
Although even then I guess you might as well use an explosive warhead while you're at it.
You need a *lot* of warheads in orbit to always have one fifteen minutes out from an arbitrary target. But having one warhead on one missile on the ground, allows you to engage any target in half an hour or so.
One problem: to a foreign observer, launching a tungsten rod on an ICBM looks a lot like launching a nuke on an ICBM. You don't want to start a nuclear war through a misunderstanding.
Yes and no; my understanding is that you can very quickly differentiate a missile whose intent is to arc back down to a target, and a mission into space.
Of course, throwing a bunch of instant-pounding rods into orbit to threaten any and every country is going to ruffle some feathers.
Fractional orbital bombardment systems are a thing, never particularly common but everybody knows the concept. If anyone launches a payload into low orbit in wartime, particularly one where the first orbit passes over the enemy's capital or whatnot, it's going to be presumed a nuclear warhead until proven otherwise.
If anybody launches a payload into low orbit in peacetime, lots of people are going to be curious about what it's for, some of them are going to be suspiciously curious as a matter of principle, and their spies and analysts will probably figure it out before you get around to starting a war.
I read an interesting substack a year ago about how the SpaceX Starship would deliver about as many Joule/$ as non-nuclear B52s do today, but now I can't seem to find it.
Maybe this one from Austin Vernon? https://austinvernon.site/blog/starshipsuperweapon.html
That's it! Thank you!
Cost would still be a gigantic issue; you can send explosives on an ICBM to accomplish the same thing.
On the fundamentals, you can look at the potential energy of an object in space (you can't just use mgh, because g is not constant over the distances involved, but this is a well-understood question) and assume that's how much energy you'll release on impact. Then you ask how much energy you want to release on impact and that will tell you the size of the rod you need. Then you can ask how much it will cost to launch that rod.
Agreed, I never understood the appeal of these rods and why they somehow would be superior to existing missiles.
At orbital-reentry velocity, or ICBM velocity, the kinetic energy of an inert mass is at least a factor of five greater than the detonation energy of an equal mass of high explosives. And it's rare for anyone to build a warhead that's more than 50% explosives.
So if you're going to put a "warhead" on an orbital or ICBM-class rocket, there's no point in putting anything less than nuclear explosives inside. Conventional explosives would add maybe 10% to the yield, all else being equal, but all else won't be equal - the low density of explosives compared to steel will make the warhead bigger, so more drag and it will be moving slower when it hits, which will cost you more than 10% of the yield.
Just make it out of the densest material you can find, and make it as long and skinny and streamlined as you can manage to keep stable. Against some targets, you'll prefer a cannister that dispenses lots of heavy metal darts shortly before impact.
If you're willing to go nuclear, and you can afford to go nuclear, that will be more destructive still so just focus on efficiently packaging your H-bombs for re-entry.
You are correct! My back-of-the-envelope calculation using orbital velocity of 7 km/s yields 24.5 MJ/kg of kinetic energy (mV²/2), while I found a figure of 5 MJ/kg for high explosives. Of course the projectile will not hit the ground at the orbital velocity, but the numbers are at least in the ballpark.
> Of course the projectile will not hit the ground at the orbital velocity
Just use impact velocity.
https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/11e32p9/why_is_11kms_said_to_be_the_slowest_possible/
Substack ate my reply, try again. The Reddit thread was confusing: they all talk about terminal velocity = escape velocity, but it makes no sense to me. For one, they are ignoring the atmosphere. And I don’t see how it applies to a projectile launched from a few 100s km away.
I think the argument is that a tungsten rod dropped from space would have superior firepower to existing non-nuclear weapons, and greater penetration against hardened underground targets. Specifically, in this case, Iran's nuclear facilities which are reportedly underneath a mountain
Realistically, your rod penetration would be limited at the upper end to something like the newtonian/impact depth equation.
So your tungsten alloy rod (~18g/cm3) can penetrate about 6.7 times it's own length into rock (~2.7g/cm3).
So no chance of punching through hundreds of metres of rock.
Wouldn't there be a shockwave of damage going much further than just the actual penetration?
There would be something like that, but it would spread out quickly - the rough-and-ready metric that I used early seems to imply that a massive 10m-long rod could penetrate something like 70m. The deepest bunkers can be hundreds of metres underground, so any shockwave would have to pass through tens to hundreds of metres of rock and concrete to do any damage.
I have my doubts that a rod could possibly penetrate all that deeply and do all that much damage when it gets there. A concrete bunker sure, but a deeply buried facility? I don't know anything about the Iranian facility but Cheyenne Mountain in the US is beneath 600m of granite and there's no reason why the Iranians couldn't dig something similar. Even if you use a whole SpaceX starship to launch a single rod it can't have more than about 8 kT of kinetic energy (minus atmospheric losses, which would be significant) and that's a lot, but it's not "blow up a whole mountain" type energy.
As a side note, here's Bret Devereaux on orbital bombardment ( https://acoup.blog/2020/07/17/fireside-friday-july-17th-2020/ ):
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𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗴𝗶𝗰 𝗼𝗯𝗷𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗹𝗶𝗸𝗲𝗹𝘆 𝘁𝗼 𝗶𝗺𝗽𝗼𝘀𝗲 𝘀𝗵𝗮𝗿𝗽 𝗹𝗶𝗺𝗶𝘁𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗮𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝘁𝗼 𝘂𝘀𝗲 𝗼𝗿𝗯𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗹 𝗳𝗶𝗿𝗲𝗽𝗼𝘄𝗲𝗿 if the goal is to control the planet or even to be able to meaningfully extract resources from it. Blasting a world into uninhabitability using nuclear munitions or even just de-orbiting large rocks may be strategically unacceptable.
[...]
𝗧𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗻 𝘁𝗶𝗲𝘀 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘀𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗱 𝗽𝗼𝗶𝗻𝘁, 𝘄𝗵𝗶𝗰𝗵 𝗶𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗹𝗶𝗺𝗶𝘁𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗳𝗶𝗿𝗲𝗽𝗼𝘄𝗲𝗿 𝗮𝗴𝗮𝗶𝗻𝘀𝘁 𝗶𝗻𝗳𝗮𝗻𝘁𝗿𝘆 𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗰𝗲𝘀 𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗰𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗰𝗲𝗮𝗹𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁. How much firepower do you need to remove deeply entrenched infantry? 𝗔 𝗹𝗼𝘁, 𝗶𝘁 𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗻𝘀 𝗼𝘂𝘁. Stephen Biddle (you may recall him) wrote a piece in 𝘍𝘰𝘳𝘦𝘪𝘨𝘯 𝘈𝘧𝘧𝘢𝘪𝘳𝘴 (82.2, 2003), “Afghanistan and the Future of Warfare” where he laid out some statistics for firepower against entrenched infantry. He noted, for instance that “French defenses at Verdun in 1916 endured a two-day German artillery barrage equal to about 1,200 tons of explosives — in nuclear parlance more than a kiloton, or more explosive power than the w48 𝙩𝙖𝙘𝙩𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙡 𝙣𝙪𝙘𝙡𝙚𝙖𝙧 𝙬𝙖𝙧𝙝𝙚𝙖𝙙 — yet enough of the entrenched defenders survived this maelstrom to halt the German assault [emphasis mine].” And “On July 18, 1944… [the allies] deposited… 𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝗻 𝟴 𝗸𝗶𝗹𝗼𝘁𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗳𝗶𝗿𝗲𝗽𝗼𝘄𝗲𝗿 — on just seven kilometers of German frontage 𝗶𝗻 𝗹𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗿𝗲𝗲 𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗿𝘀 [emphasis again mine].” In both cases, there were enough defenders left not merely to fight, 𝙗𝙪𝙩 𝙩𝙤 𝙖𝙘𝙩𝙪𝙖𝙡𝙡𝙮 𝙬𝙞𝙣 𝙗𝙤𝙩𝙝 𝙗𝙖𝙩𝙩𝙡𝙚𝙨. Nor is this merely a feature of old dumb-bombs; in Afghanistan, Biddle notes, “One dug-in al Qaeda command-post was found surrounded by no fewer than five 2,000-pound bomb craters. Still, its garrison survived and resisted until overrun.” 𝗜𝗻 𝘀𝗵𝗼𝗿𝘁, 𝗶𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝗽𝗼𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗶𝗻𝗳𝗮𝗻𝘁𝗿𝘆 – 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗼𝗻𝗹𝘆 𝙞𝙢𝙥𝙧𝙤𝙫𝙞𝙨𝙚𝙙 𝙛𝙞𝙚𝙡𝙙-𝙛𝙤𝙧𝙩𝙞𝙛𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙨 – 𝘁𝗼 𝘀𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗿𝗴𝘆 𝗱𝗲𝗹𝗶𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆 𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗹𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗹 𝗼𝗳 𝙩𝙖𝙘𝙩𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙡 𝙣𝙪𝙘𝙡𝙚𝙖𝙧 𝙮𝙞𝙚𝙡𝙙𝙨 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗼𝗻𝗹𝘆 𝘀𝘂𝗿𝘃𝗶𝘃𝗲, 𝗯𝘂𝘁 𝗯𝗲 𝙛𝙞𝙜𝙝𝙩𝙖𝙗𝙡𝙚 𝗮𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗼𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿 𝗲𝗻𝗱.
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(All emphasis is original. I would emphasize that, for an attacking force that itself inhabits the same planet being attacked, rendering the planet uninhabitable is 𝘨𝘶𝘢𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘦𝘥 to be strategically unacceptable.)
That makes absolutely no sense. They do not have superior firepower in proportion to their cost, which is the only way that would matter, and dropping anything that affected facilities underneath a mountain would have catastrophic effects in most of the world; it would be the worst war crime ever committed, and whoever was responsible would get wiped out by a coalition of everyone else in the world.
I don't see why that would be. You have no fallout; possibly a lot of the energy is even released underground; the total energy of the explosion is not more than that released by a full load of B52 (conventional) bombs.
I don't like the idea because it's an explicit militarization of space without any really huge gain in capabilities. But I don't think the strikes would amount to some unprecedented crime against humanity.
> the total energy of the explosion is not more than that released by a full load of B52 (conventional) bombs.
I'm not sure what you're thinking here. But here's a quora answer on point:
https://www.quora.com/If-humans-built-a-20-Gigaton-nuclear-bomb-on-Mt-Everest-detonated-would-it-be-enough-to-turn-the-mountain-into-a-crater
> The above ground mass of Mt Everest is estimated at 357 trillion pounds or 1.619×10^14 kg. To melt 1 kg of granite starting from 200 C costs about 1.3 MJ. 20 Gigatons TNT is 8.4×10^13 MJ. So, no, even with 100% efficiency, such a bomb is simply not large enough to accomplish the task. It is a factor ten too small at least.
> This is ignoring of course, that most of the energy of such a bomb would be directed upwards, through the Earth’s atmosphere, as a huge pulse of thermal radiation, and would vanish uselessly into space. The energy would not be deposited directly downwards into the rock, where it needs to go, should you, for some unimaginably crazy reason, actually wish to destroy Mt. Everest.
> In comparison to what is needed to destroy mountains, the biggest explosions human beings can make are miniscule. They are laughably small. The biggest nuclear weapon ever exploded was in the range of 57 megatons-TNT.
A full load of B52 bombs, by the way, appears to be something like 30 megatons. This is obviously not enough to accomplish anything if the goal is to strike below an existing mountain.
Using our generous estimate of 40 gigatons of explosives' worth of energy released straight into the mountain to destroy Mount Everest, admittedly an unusually large mountain, first, let's note that we have exactly the same problem of most of the impact energy not going into the mountain, and second, that the Torino scale threshold for "impact will cause global catastrophe" is an impact with the equivalent kinetic energy of 10 (ten) gigatons of explosives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torino_scale
For that threshold, we're not worried about the "problem" that impact energy mostly doesn't go right into the ground below the impact -- rather, that is the reason we expect a global catastrophe.
"dropping anything that affected facilities underneath a mountain would have catastrophic effects in most of the world; it would be the worst war crime ever committed, and whoever was responsible would get wiped out by a coalition of everyone else in the world."
Why do you say that? Basically you couldn't do it without a massive explosion that would put the mountain into the atmosphere, or something?
See my response to Boris Bartlog's flat-out insane comment.
I recently noticed that I find historical or technical inaccuracies can really break my suspension of disbelief in media such as video games.
It depends on the setting, though. The space mechanics in the X universe and the like are fundamentally underwater mechanics, because you have a maximum speed (which depends on your engine strength) and also do not need to carry reaction mass, so you are acting more like a submarine than a spacecraft, not to mention that interesting things in space are many orders of magnitude further apart than in games. This does not break immersion for me because realistically simulating space is hard from a gameplay perspective. Likewise I won't complain that two dimensional games from FTL or Rimworld or Factorio enforce a square grid and do not have rooms which stack in z direction even though it this is obviously what would happen in reality. Or how research gets handled in every video game. Or how the probability of making a full recovery after having been shot half to death in most video games is close to 100%. Or how unrealistic it is in a deckcrafter game that you can only use abilities if you draw their card. This is all part of the genres, and I can accept that.
What gets me though is making an (implicit) promise of accuracy and then underdelivering. I really stumbled when (IIRC) The Doomsday Book mentioned Potatoes in medieval England, for example.
You can have the Roman Empire as a setting for your video game. You can have Julius Caesar in it. I might even give you a pass on making young Caesar a subordinate NPC in the party. Likewise, if you really want, your squad of Romans can have an archer. The Empire is a big place, plenty of space to find some mercenary coming from a culture with a tradition of archery. But if you make Julius Caesar the archer of the party I will stop playing your game right there. (Expeditions: Rome, for the curious.)
Or take Victoria 3. This game seems to put a lot of effort in historical accuracy. Building chains which produce resources required in the industrial revolution are also a major keystone, from what I gather. So why then is the Bessemer process (reality: 1856) on the same research tier as the atmospheric engine (reality: Newcomb 1712)? Why not throw nuclear power (~1945) in on the same tier while you are at it? This totally broke immersion for me.
I generally wouldn’t care so much about that. But the potatoes mistake would be a deal breaker.
> You can have the Roman Empire as a setting for your video game. You can have Julius Caesar in it. I might even give you a pass on making young Caesar a subordinate NPC in the party. Likewise, if you really want, your squad of Romans can have an archer. The Empire is a big place, plenty of space to find some mercenary coming from a culture with a tradition of archery. But if you make Julius Caesar the archer of the party I will stop playing your game right there.
This isn't something I'd expect you to tolerate if you hate seeing potatoes in medieval England. By definition, Julius Caesar cannot be present in the Roman Empire.
He also really can't be part of a "party"; he was a politician and their entire career track was well specified.
I knew when I wrote it that this phrasing was coming to bite me.
Is there a better phrase to mean 'the land masses controlled by ancient Rome in whatever state form'? In German, the term 'Roemisches Reich' fills that role, because 'Reich' is a large realm more generally, not necessarily ruled by a 'Kaiser', while in English there is an association between 'empire' and 'emperor'.
I would argue that the latin phrase 'Imperium Romanum' is also a bit more in that direction (from reading acoup, 'imperium' was a property of certain offices in the Republic which basically meant they were allowed to command armies), and German Wikipedia claims that the phrase 'Imperium Romanum' is used in Cicero's time (late republic), so it might be what I am looking for.
The English Wikipedia has a disambigiation page for Roman Empire, stating that "The Roman Empire usually refers to the post-republican, autocratic government period of Roman civilization" and then goes on to admit that it might also refer to other time periods.
> Is there a better phrase to mean 'the land masses controlled by ancient Rome in whatever state form'? In German, the term 'Roemisches Reich' fills that role, because 'Reich' is a large realm more generally, not necessarily ruled by a 'Kaiser', while in English there is an association between 'empire' and 'emperor'.
If I were going for that, I would probably use the phrase "ancient Rome". There are other options; I might refer to the general time and place by a phrase like "the classical Mediterranean", but that's overtly geographic and definitely includes areas that might not be under Roman control, depending on the details of what time it is. ("Rome" sounds geographic, but it has the same political extension that you see all the time when decisions are attributed to e.g. "Washington" or "Berlin".)
We have words like "realm" (as you've noted!) that refer to territory without specifying how the territory is governed, but they tend not to appear in the names of specific entities.
> from reading acoup, 'imperium' was a property of certain offices in the Republic which basically meant they were allowed to command armies
While that's true, it is surely not the sense that is meant in the phrase "imperium Romanum".
But you're right that "imperium Romanum" wouldn't refer to an "empire" in some technical sense, and certainly wouldn't be related to the concept of an "emperor" - as best I'm aware, there wasn't a Roman concept of an "emperor", and they technically held power by simultaneously holding many different formal offices, including some that were only for them. ("Trib. pot.") The closest title they had to "emperor" was "Caesar", which is technically a part of their name, not a title, and literally means "a member of Julius Caesar's family". So the phrase should mean something like "everything under Roman command", which seems like a good match for Reich.
One could conceive, for instance, a classical Mediterranean pirate game where the pirates capture young Caesar (following a notable episode of actual Caesar's game), and he features as a party member while they are bringing him back to the pirate... lair or whatever.
> the pirate... lair or whatever.
"Base" is the most neutral word I could think of for this.
Maybe "fortress" if it's fortified, but I don't really know how they were set up. Modern pirates operate out of regular towns populated mostly by non-pirates, and it seems like classical pirates could have easily done the same thing... except that they held a bunch of captives, which would probably be easier if they had their own fortress somewhere.
I'm pretty sure that captives being held against their will aren't allowed to have weapons. What would it mean for Caesar to be in the player's party here?
Let's see what Suetonius has to say:
"While on his voyage thither [to Rhodes, to study rhetoric], in the winter season, he was taken by pirates near the island of Pharmacusa, and detained by them, burning with indignation, for nearly forty days; his only attendants being a physician and two chamberlains. For he had instantly dispatched his other servants and the friends who accompanied him, to raise money for his ransom."
So, he allegedly told the pirates that once he was freed, he would crucify them, and by jings he did do that. Clearly the pirates didn't believe him, or they preferred "collect ransom now, worry about that later". He was 25 at the time, so you could stretch it that, bored out of his mind as a 'guest' of the pirates, and maybe them having a jest at the expense of their 'guest' who was threatening to hunt them down and execute them afterwards, the pirates brought him along on a raid or similar where he was part of the party. "Let's see you put your money where your mouth is", as it were, if this snobby young Roman is as good as he's claiming to be in regards to leadership and fighting and the rest of it.
Plutarch's account certainly gives us leeway:
"2 1 To begin with, then, when the pirates demanded twenty talents for his ransom, he laughed at them for not knowing who their captive was, and of his own accord agreed to give them fifty. 2 In the next place, after he had sent various followers to various cities to procure the money and was left with one friend and two attendants among Cilicians, most murderous of men, he held them in such disdain that whenever he lay down to sleep he would send and order them to stop talking. 3 For eight and thirty days, as if the men were not his watchers, but his royal body-guard, he shared in their sports and exercises with great unconcern. 4 He also wrote poems and sundry speeches which he read aloud to them, and those who did not admire these he would call to their faces illiterate Barbarians, and often laughingly threatened to hang them all. The pirates were delighted at this, and attributed his boldness of speech to a certain simplicity and boyish mirth."
EDIT: Regarding pirate bases, seems they were a regular scourge and grew into a genuinely severe problem until Pompey eventually set about methodically to break their power. "Cilician" became a synonym for "pirate":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cilician_pirates
"Cilician pirates dominated the Mediterranean Sea from the 2nd century BC until their suppression by Pompey in 67–66 BC. Because there were notorious pirate strongholds in Cilicia, on the southern coast of Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey), the term "Cilician" was long used to generically refer to any pirates in the Mediterranean.
...It was thought that a war against the pirates would be big and expensive and that it was impossible to attack all the pirates at once or to drive them back everywhere. As not much was done against them, some towns were turned into pirate winter quarters and raids further inland were carried out. Many pirates settled on land in various places and relied on an informal network of mutual assistance.
...Western campaign
Pompey divided the Mediterranean into thirteen districts, to each of which he assigned a fleet and a commander. Pompey then swept through the western Mediterranean with his own powerful fleet, driving the pirates out or into the paths of his other commanders.
By keeping vigilance over all the sea at the same time (and at great cost), there was nowhere to run or hide. Those Cilician pirates that did escape fled to the eastern Mediterranean. Pompey completed this first part of his campaign in 40 days.
Eastern campaign
Pompey then turned to the eastern Mediterranean. He gave mild terms to those pirates who surrendered to him personally, as opposed to his other commanders. Some pirates surrendered their ships, their families and themselves up to Pompey. From these, he learned about where others were hiding.
Many pirates retreated to their strongholds of Asia Minor, where they gathered and waited for Pompey to attack them. At Coracesium Pompey won a decisive victory and blockaded the town. The Cilician pirates surrendered all their harbours and fortified islands."
So they had not alone harbours, used towns as winter quarters, but also had fortified islands. The pirates who captured Caesar could well have had a base on such an island, or a camp around their harbour.
So our Cilician pirates, holed up in their winter quarters (Suetonius says Caesar was captured while travelling in the winter season) while they await the return of the ransom for Caesar, decide to do a little light inland pillaging and looting, and bring the young lordling along with them as a joke member of their party.
He'd be a temporary party member in a technical sense.
"I really stumbled when (IIRC) The Doomsday Book mentioned Potatoes in medieval England, for example."
Possibly the game creators confused that with the Red Book of Westmarch?
Not a video game but Jake Tapper wrote a political thriller style novel where a 1956 Mustang made an appearance. IRL they wouldn’t appear for another decade. Tapper was born in 1969 I believe so he gets a pass, but no editor picking up on it was pretty bad.
Editors and proof-reading appear to be luxury optional items in modern publishing, the current practice seems to be "knock the raw manuscript into some sort of shape, then send the files to China for typesetting and printing the physical copies".
This is a huge problem with self-published books. I read a few of them years ago; their ebook forms are cheap on Amazon and often have attractive theming and blurbs.
Sadly, the big lesson I learned was "don't ever read self-published books".
It depends. I found that the real popular web serials (e.g. Worm, the bigger ratfict novels (HPMOR, Unsong, Worth the Candle, Luminosity)) are usually readable (even though Deiseach might disagree at least on HPMOR).
I am not sure if this is because of the feedback from writers, or if all the rationalists have someone editing their texts before publishing, or because to write a viral web serial you need to be able to edit your texts well in the first place.
I think people directly putting their work on Amazon is kind of a red flag not because of anything fundamental but more out of signaling concerns.
Sort of like a private car sale (instead of cutting in a dealer who might be obliged to give some guarantee on it) or hiring someone without formal education (instead of someone who payed their tributes of lifetime and debt in the ivory tower): sure, there are a lot of legitimate reasons to cut out the middle man, but there are also a lot of less legitimate reasons, namely, that you would not make it past the middle man. This information asymmetry makes deals difficult.
I tend to select on authors mostly through personal recommendations. (It used to be that I read Hugo and Nebula award winners, I don't mind reading SF with woke undertones as long as it is fun to read. (Contrast with Eneasz, who mentioned on some podcast that he uses these awards (iirc) to know what not to read.) Of course, after the 2023 debacle, Hugo has jumped the sharks.)
(Of course, I also don't do Amazon for ebooks because I refuse to deal with DRM for books. Kindle is great hardware though.)
I have read, and liked, HPMOR. I'm not saying it's impossible for self-published work to be good. But the odds are so poor that it's not worth finding out. (I read HPMOR on the strength of a personal recommendation.)
I would bet pretty heavily on your third reason, "to write a viral web serial you need to be able to edit your texts well in the first place".
I have found that by far the strongest predictor that a book will be good is "the author has written another book, and that one was good".
Well that’s true about self published books but I’m sure Tapper was paid an advance for his effort.
I seem to be four steps from Winston Churchill. The first step gets me to my grandfather, who I have met. During WWII, he served as a driver for senior officers in the Finnish military, where he almost certainly met some senior officer (step 2) who met Carl Mannerheim, the head of the Finnish military (step 3.) Mannerheim met Churchill twice in his life (step 4.)
Anyone have a Winston Churchill number lower than that?
My dad(1) was a local politician who definitely met the then prime minister(2) of Ireland a few times. That prime minister definitely met the US president(3). From there you probably get all leaders(4) who weren’t directly met by the Irish pm.
I have two more to get to Kevin bacon.
Sure, I've met several people who have met Queen Elizabeth II, and she met Winston Churchill many times.
The Queen met a ridiculously high number of people in her life. I wouldn't be surprised if she met (under some reasonable definition of the word "meet") more people than anyone else in history.
This - and many more than any politician, even one with such a long career as WSC. So I think a Churchill number of 3 through the late Queen is easy mode in the UK. I'm in the UK, and although I never met HMQ I know dozens of people who have. In fact my grandfather, grandmother and mother all met HMQ *during the time that WSC was Prime Minister*. But none of them ever met him in person at any time.
Playing on harder mode, my father met every Prime Minister from 1963-2010 (Home, Wilson, Heath, Callaghan, Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown), of whom the first five certainly knew WSC.
If you're British, as I am, and of an age, you are likely to have met quite a few people who met Churchill. I have, variously: Clarissa Eden, who I met at a book launch in London in the 90s, and who, amazingly, died as recently as 2021: 66 years after her husband took over from Churchill.
I also got to know a very senior civil servant who in early career worked in Churchill's private office at No 10 in the 1950s.
And perhaps above all else my late mother in law, who worked at an airfield in East Anglia, and met Churchill when he visited in summer 1944.
Four for me - as a teen I met Original Seven astronaut Deke Slayton, who was astronaut boss at the time, and would have worked with the Apollo 11 crew. They met with Prince Phillip, who would have met Churchill many times.
Not me, but as a reader of many of Churchill's own works plus several serious biographies, I'll bet that a decent number of people of European heritage can come up with 4 or fewer steps. His professional lifetime at high levels of responsibility and/or prominence was _so_ lengthy. Also he was always an enthusiastic traveler who wanted to meet people as part of his work and/or for its own sake.
Oh wait -- I met Walter Mondale, who as VP met Queen Elizabeth II. And I know two people who each met the Queen at honorific ceremonies (one got knighted the other got an OBE). So that's three 3's for me to Churchill just offhand....never thought of it this way before. Kind of neat actually.
Shook hands with George Will once, and George McGovern -- could be a couple more 3's there, not sure.
I'm two steps. One of my childhood neighbors was Lt-Col Montagu Cleeve, who I often used to meet, and he was Winnie's big gun expert in WW2 and so would certainly have met him.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montagu_Cleeve
Old timers of that generation rarely spoke of their wartime experiences, but he did once mention he had been at the front through most of the Battle of the Somme campaign in 1916, including the fateful first day. He was so whippet slim that I reckon he must have turned sideways and advanced crab-wise after going over the top, so to all the German machine gunners it would have been like trying to hit a playing card edge on!
Driving one day in the 1990s I suddenly heard him on the car radio. "Feck, that's Monty!" I thought, "What's he doing on Classic FM?". It turned out he was reminiscing about WW1 in a series called "Forgotten Voices of the Great War" (the latter being what it was called before WW2). He said the worse thing for him was not the mud, nor the lice, nor even the shells and bullets, but the giant rats everywhere!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgotten_Voices_of_the_Great_War
I think I can do 2: I've met a European royal who likely met Churchill as a child or teen. I need to do more research to verify the link but it seems probable. If not I have 3 (through Queen Elizabeth), but so do others in this thread.
I met former U.S. Senator Jake Garn who met Queen Elizabeth who met Churchill. So 3 steps for me.
Doesn't count as a meeting if they never co-authored a paper :P
What counts as a meeting?
Many years ago I met Charles when he was still a prince. We shook hands, but didn't interact much beyond that. He was around 17 when Churchill died, so I imagine they must have been introduced at some point. So that's two steps?
Interesting. I was volunteering to help a Holocaust survivor who sort-of-attended a meeting with Ben-Gurion as a young officer.
Ben Gurion met Churchill. So I guess I have some claim for 3.
A few likely 4s: worked with Fei-Fei Li who met Biden and Obama. Surely at least one of these two had met someone who met Churchill.
Met a very old mathematician who met Shannon. Shannon met a lot with Turing who met Churchill- and possibly Shannon himself did too?
ETA: Met Michele Sebag at a conference. She’s extremely likely to have met someone who met De Gaulle who met Churchill.
I met Sharon who met Ben Gurion who, taking your word on it, met Churchill.
I also met Hillel Kook (Peter Bergson) who likely met Churchill.
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780805088649/churchillandthejews#:~:text=During%20his%20meeting%20with%20David,the%20world%20has%20ever%20realized.
They met in 1960, apparently.
Interesting!
I'm also fairly certain I heard from Herman Wouk that he'd met Churchill (but a quick google search didn't confirm it, top-loaded as it is with pithy quotes). If true that would be my best bet as Herman Wouk was a congregant of mine and study partner in Palm Springs for some time.
Both Biden and Obama met Queen Elizabeth, who definitely met Churchill.
Indeed. What are the odds that Fei-Fei Li met Her Majesty, giving me a less vague “3”… a quick google fails to find a connection, and I’m not quite so close to her that I could ask.
But now I also wonder whether Amnon Shashua met QE2, giving me another possible 3.
I've met Gerry Adams, who - during the Northern Ireland peace negotations - would have almost certainly parlayed with senior British figures of the sort who could have very well met Winston Churchill at some point.
Hmm… I ran into Al Franken when he was still a senator at LaGuardia once. We shared coach passage back to MSP.
That’s about as close as I’ve come to a big time politician. Oh yeah, I got to shake George McGovern’s hand when he was stumping for Obama.
No ties to Churchill though.
Al Franken was in the US Senate with John Kerry, and may have met him. John Kerry met Queen Elizabeth, who met Winston Churchill. So Al Franken's Churchill number may be 3. And yours may be 4.
Thanks. That’s very weird but I appreciate it. :)
> and your local mayor probably met your head of state.
Really? That would surprise me. England is tiny, but it's pretty common not to live in a tiny country.
The U.K. is fairly median in population. Or above median - being 22nd in the world. Of course population is a power distribution.
Population isn't the right metric for whether you'd expect a mayor to have met the head of state. It would need to be adjusted by mayors per capita.
Geographic size is also relevant.
But the Queen, nevertheless would turn up to the opening of an envelope. Good chance many people were 2-3 degrees away from her.
A random thought - it appears Jewish-Americans are underrepresented as novelists.
Those who come to mind are Philip Roth, Jonathan and Faye Kellerman, Leon Uris, Chaim Potok, and Harlan Coben. (As a Canadian, I'll add the great Mordechai Richler.)
Surely I'm missing a bunch, but if not is there something in North-American Jewish culture that discourages fiction-writing?
Norman mailer was Jewish. I’ve heard arguments that the American novel is the American Jewish novel, at least post war. Roth and Mailer in particular. Who else is there vying for top spot? Updike?
I feel they have all fallen somewhat out of fashion though.
As a space nerd, I have Mailer's Of A Fire On The Moon in the basement. Still haven't read it yet. Thanks for the nudge.
I read a John Updike short story (A Sense Of Shelter) in a 1st-year English Lit class in college many years ago. I've reread it a number of times. I found/find it very evocative. I've tried to borrow his Rabbit novels from the library, but it seems they've fallen out of fashion.
I don't think that's likely. Even if we stopped with your list it's still a little unclear whether we'd actually be talking *under* representation, given how few Jewish people there actually are in America (2.4%). But you also missed Sidney Sheldon, Isaac Asimov, Herman Wouk, and probably twenty more that I can't call to mind off the top of my head.
Certainly not all fiction - for comics, the Wikipedia page is like a Who's Who of the greatest comics creators.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_American_cartoonists
How true!
As a child I was highly (and very positively) influenced by the great Sam J. Glanzman's art, and Stan Lee's (Lieberman's) editorial positions.
Jack Kirby (Jacob Kurtzberg) suggested something along the lines that since comics weren't Proper Art and not Important, no-one took it away from them.
Ha! I liked Jack Kirby's work (Sgt Fury and his Howling Commandos) too. Had no idea he was Jewish.
Oh geez, pal. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon is dedicated to Jack Kirby!
I read that c. 12 to 15 years ago, and almost certainly noted the JK dedication, without realizing the Jewish connection.
What can I say? People are ethnocentric, and I'm no exception.
You might be interested in this non-statistics post from Andrew Gelman:
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/05/11/young-lions-how-jewish-authors-reinvented-the-american-war-novel/
You aren't doing much with SFF-- if you go there, you get Asimov, Silverberg, Novik, just off the top of my mind.
When in my peak SF-reading era (aged c. 12 to 15) I went through any number of paperback anthologies of short stories. In my memories, these collections were usually compiled and edited by Robert Silverberg.
> is there something in North-American Jewish culture that discourages fiction-writing?
Considering their representation in screenwriting... no. The opposite is obviously the case.
Curse you, I was too slow. I have the 'reply' box open right now to say "the joke answer is that they all get hoovered up by screenwriting and never write that novel".
Also, though, what about Joseph Heller dang.
Is Michael Chabon nothing to you? 😀
I'd never heard of him. Lots of catch-up reading ahead!
Is this a joke? There are so many: Bellow, Chabon, Stein, Wouk…
Not a joke - I only cited the ones that came to mind. I haven't read the ones you listed, though I've heard of Bellow and Wouk.
Oh you need to read Bellow. You can’t understand the first half of the American 20th century without him. The guy is incredible Michael Chabon has a couple of outstanding novels too.
Thank you!
If you ever want to make an AGI candidate confidently give an incorrect answer ask it if Leon Trotsky appears in any of Bellow’s novels.
Last time I ran this by ChatGPT it said no way. It apparently never ingested “The Adventures of Augie March” - it’s a good one BTW
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_American_authors
To me they seem solidly represented, perhaps even overrepresented considering they only make up 2% of the population. I think the overrepresentation of Jews everywhere else makes you think there should be more than there are, but there are a pretty good amount of fictional writers there.
And J.D. Salinger? Wow, I never knew ...
Oh, now I feel stupid! I should have thought of at least Joseph Heller, Isaac Asimov, and Ayn Rand. Duh ...
Are we all really descendents of Charlemagne? Is every European alive in the 10th century who left descendants the ancestor of every living European today?
All though I havent interrogated the mathematics on this it seems to depend on everybody having a large number of ancestors at that point, and of people alive at that era producing a lot of descendants. Hand wave a bit about big numbers and you are done.
Its easy enough to intuit a case ( by induction) where it isnt true. Imgaine an island isolated since the end of the 10th century, populated by exactly 100 people. Simple ancestor mathematics would suggest that by the end of the 19C, with 900/25 generations passing, everybody on the Island would have 68,719,476,735 ancestors, much more people than alive in Europe at the time. Everybody is a world citizen!
In fact they have, as we established, 100 unique ancestors at most. This pedigree collapse is ackowleged to a certain extent, but the amount of collapse is to my mind not taken into account.
The island of course, is an extreme example, but given that people married with 2 miles for most of history, not that extreme. [1]
With regard to descendents. Cities are population sinks for much of this time. Although I cant get the statistics on how much cities populations would fall without migration, it’s generally accepted that places like London are large population sinks over the Middle Ages. If we assume that the existing population of London reproduces only 90% of its population per generation ( a small enough sink), over many generations the population it contributes later on is negligible.
The population is continuously getting replenished from the countryside. The plague exagerated this process, with cities being widely hit.
Therefore a descendent of Charlmagne who arrives in London ( which is the most likely) around 1000AD, doesnt contribute much to London’s later population, and probably nothing to rural England, or the Shetlands or what have you. The reverse is true. The people from this area swamp the genetics in London.
[1] This source says 1 mile (https://www.galibier.cc/love-is-but-a-field-away/) but I generally read about 2.
If you're of European descent on any side of your family tree, yes, you have Charlemagne among your ancestors — because his descendants can be traced up to 1400. And 1400 is a special date according to Joseph Chang, a professor of Statistics and Data Science at Yale. He proved that, except for recent immigrants to Europe, the most recent common ancestor of every European today was someone who lived in Europe about 600 years ago. In other words, all Europeans alive today have among their ancestors the same man or woman who lived around 1400. Contrariwise, until, about a thousand years ago, according to Chang’s model: 20 percent of the adult Europeans alive in 1000 would turn out to be the ancestors of no one living today (that is, they had no children or all their descendants eventually died childless); each of the remaining 80 percent would turn out to be a direct ancestor of every European living today.
This is a thorny problem and it's not clear to me that we will ever have a definitive answer. The issue is that the degree of diffusion of ancestry over long time frames is *highly* dependent on possibly rare events, that is, the odds of some person crossing class or geographical boundaries to be incorporated in to the ancestry of some otherwise unrelated group.
There have been papers published that try to establish how far back we have to go before we have a common set of ancestors for all humanity, but they rely on fairly naive diffusion models and give possibly incorrect (too recent) a date, given the continuing isolation of some Native American populations and others.
The claim that every European alive in the 10th century who left descendants are the ancestor of every living European today goes around a lot, it's even in the scientific literature, but I haven't seen any good calculation that backs it up.
This video is pretty good IMO: It uses the Queen of Denmark as a model and gets an Identical Ancestors Point for Europe that's a bit higher than 128 generations ago (i.e. far earlier than 1000 CE): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgXu19LNYEk
I don't know how much population-sink cities would affect the calculation: wouldn't just medieval Paris (or whatever) "concentrate down" the 1000 CE population to a small set of post-plague decedents (to use two arbitrary dates), but as soon as one of the "concentrated" decedents "escape" to the countryside and becomes super-fertile then the 1000 CE Parisians will have lots of decedents again. I.e. the other side of the cities-as-population-sink coin is that rural areas are hyper fertile, and it seems like a small amount of mixing between the two would make them cancel out each other when we look at long time periods.
Actually, it was modeled by Joseph Chang back in 1999. And 1400 is the key year. If you have a European ancestor who was alive in 1400, then every other European alive today shares that ancestor. Charlemaigne had descendants who were alive in 1400, so if you have any European ancestry you're related to old Charlie.
Behind a paywall, here...
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/advances-in-applied-probability/article/abs/recent-common-ancestors-of-all-presentday-individuals/330372AB57FB1CB3839FAAA46CF81B66
There's a big difference between having *a single common ancestor* and the Identical Ancestors Point (the first one is obviously more recent). But even with that said I'm sceptical of these calculations before looking at them: If late Queen Margrethe II had 3000 ancestors in 1425, and I'm sure we can find plenty of rural farmer on the other side of Europe with an equally inbreed ancestral line, and Europe in 1400 had about 80 million people in it, I would guess that we can find two people who don't have an overlap. But I'll look into the math.
> And 1400 is the key year. If you have a European ancestor who was alive in 1400, then every other European alive today shares that ancestor.
You're being very strangely definitive about this. That's not how probability works. 1400 is an estimated value, not a revealed truth.
I wasn't able to read the article but I remain skeptical given that it's based on a spherical-cow type model rather than a detailed study of geographical and class mobility in Europe 1400-present.
I’ll have a look at that video but I’m very dubious about any descent mathematics - I just don’t think it’s possible to work it out. Shakespeare had 3 children and no known heirs. However knowing he had descendants at one generation would presumably, if plugged into whatever mathematical model used here, assume that everybody will be his descendent at some stage in the future.
Why wouldn't it be possible to work it out? It's not that complicated to model.
A simple model will assume that Shakespeare had decedents because that's the most likely outcome for a person with three children. That's just how models work. But it's not that hard to build a probabilistic model and make Monte-Carlo simulations of European population history: such a simulation would give you plenty of people with three kids but no current decedents (just like Shakespeare).
It has been worked out. Discussion here...
https://gcbias.org/2017/11/20/our-vast-shared-family-tree/
But it's important to note that starting at about seven generations back you'll begin to have ancestors who've contributed nothing to your genome. So even though you are technically a descendant of Charlemagne, the chances that you inherited anything from Charlie's genome is virtually nil.
https://gcbias.org/2017/12/19/1628/
Using that model, with a "well-mixed" population, will we ever see people like Queen Margrethe II with inbreeding in the fifth generation?
> Our numbers of ancestors grow so quickly that it is soon unavoidable that we have shared ancestors. Six hundred years ago (roughly 20 generations back) I'll have just over a million ancestors alive (220), a thousand years back I potentially have over a billion ancestors alive (233). There simply aren’t that many people alive in Europe back then, and so I’m a descendant of everyone who lived then as long as they left descendants (and vast numbers did).
Thats the kind of simple math that I’m disputing. In my isolated island example, at 36 generations everybody on the island has at most 100 ancestors and not 68 billion (2^36) because nobody joined the gene pool. In reality there were no, or few, isolated islands but plenty of mostly isolated villages where people largely mated within a mile or two, and anybody who came in were exotic if they were ten miles away.
The problem with the math is probably in this offhand statement
“ the first individual who all of our family trees trace back to, in a well mixed population of size N individuals.”
“Well mixed” is doing a lot of work there.
I also wonder why the restriction is Europe. At 1000 years (40 generations) there’s a potential 1 trillion ancestors and the world population is much smaller.
I think we would be surprised to find that people in the Shetlands in 1900 have any Japanese ancestors from 900.
Honestly London isn’t in practice much closer to the shetlands - even today it takes 30 hours to travel from London, if you don’t take a plane.
This is probably weeks or travel for most of the era under consideration.
There’s no easy way to model this, but simple “well mixed” populations are not the answer.
Cities were population sinks, but the social status of Nobility was not a population sink.
One of the assumptions involved in the "Charlemagne as ancestor" proposition is that Charlemagne had many children by many women... and a good number of those children married into royal/noble families scattered across Europe. This was an important step in moving his descendants over many hundreds of miles in a single generation.
Another assumption is that there was a attrition at the edges of the Nobility social status, such that younger sons and daughters would have children, but those younger children would not carry the same rank as their parents...and that this process would iterate over the generations until it reached someone who could socially intermix with the peasant class.
These assumptions are not well-enumerated. Though it's probably not too hard to fill out a table of how-far-to-marry and how-many-children for most of the children of Charlemagne.
The Charlemagne case is a reduction of the European Royalty and Nobility case into a single, easy-to-state example. The probability is very high that all members of the Royalty/Nobility class during the approximate lifetime of Charlemagne are the ancestors, along some path, of everyone of European descent who is alive today.
Along a different subject of descent from a well-known historical people: I am fairly certain that I am descended from a man who sailed on the ship "Mayflower". There are estimates that some 35 million or so other people can claim that status, also. (Several people on the "Finding your Roots" TV show, on PBS, have been shown to be descended from at least one passenger on the "Mayflower".)
While that is a minority of the population of North America, it's not a vanishingly-small minority. The 102 people who were the founding population of Plymouth, intermarrying with the many thousands of migrants who arrived in New England over the next 50 or so years, are now represented by approximately 35 million descendants.
These number don't increase linearly with generations, or with centuries. They increase exponentially--even if the exponent involved is some number less than 2.
This is the kind of math that leads to the statement that all people of European descent alive today are likely descended from Charlemagne.
I definitely think that the offspring of nobility have a better chance of spreading through the population than a random person for two reasons. 1) being wealthy they have more children to begin with (although to spread throughout the population most of their offspring have to be as poor as everybody else) and 2) they are more likely to immigrate to places outside cities which saves them from the population sink.
> The probability is very high that all members of the Royalty/Nobility class during the approximate lifetime of Charlemagne are the ancestors, along some path, of everyone of European descent who is alive today.
I disagree. These probabilities ignore the way populations flow and the effect of cities. It’s just simple math, applied incorrectly, assuming humans reproduce mathematically like bacteria.
> The 102 people who were the founding population of Plymouth, intermarrying with the many thousands of migrants who arrived in New England over the next 50 or so years, are now represented by approximately 35 million descendants.
I was going to mention that the American population mathematics is different but I knew we would get to it in the comments.
You really can’t use this large exponential growth elsewhere. The Amish were a few thousand on arrival and the population will reach 1 million by 2050. Pretty soon we will all be Amish.
However If the Amish had arrived in london then or earlier, they would have a different demographic profile right now.
Ok, so the Amish couldn’t have existed pre reformation - but If a religious group that only intermarried only amongst itself had arrived in London in 1000AD then by 1900, assuming the original population of this group was 1000 and that all generations had children they would have 22 descendants.
(This is assuming that the natural decreases in population was by a mere 10% a year )
That would be to go from 10% of the population to 0.00045% ( the population of London was 5 million in 1900.)
These are two extremes and the truth is in between. Intermarriage would spread the number of descendants of the 1000 migrants throughout London’s population but it’s likely that even that would be swamped by migration.
Possibly with Charlemagne if his descendants bypassed cities they would, paradoxically, have contributed more to the UK‘s and London‘s population.
On the other hand, the nobility would have gone through another process of culling - the frequent periodic warfare where they would have been bound to participate.
The peasantry are also bound to participate in wars, if only in the role of "guy whose harvest was 'foraged' by one army or another" or "girl who was raped a dozen times in the Sack of [X] and didn't survive the experience". And then there are all the peasants, etc, who are given a spear and told "you're a soldier now" but without the high-quality armor and horses of the aristocrats.
Good armor makes a *huge* difference. And when you lose a battle, so does a fast horse.
But medieval warfare wasn't that deadly (for the combatants), especially not if you were rich?
EDIT: Scratch that. Charging guys with swords is in fact quite deadly.
Greg Clark says otherwise.
Link?
Instead of a link, a quote, from A Farewell to Alms:
Note that in England the reproductive success of the class that engaged in warfare on a large scale in the pre-industrial era, the aristocracy, was much poorer than for economically successful commoners, and was probably less good than that of the average person. Table 6.3 shows for the English aristocracy - kings, queens, dukes and duchesses - the Net Reproduction Rate, as well as life expectancy at birth for males by period from 1330 (when Dukes were first created) Medieval manorial tenants, for example, had a life expectancy at age 20 of about 30, compared to 22 for the aristocracy.
These excess deaths at relatively young ages contributed to the low net fertility of aristocrats. Thus in the earliest period we observe fertility, 1480-1679, the aristocracy, despite its privileged social position was barely reproducing itself. Only after 1730 when death rates from violence declined to levels little above the general population, did aristocratic life expectancy come to exceed the general population. In this period also did aristocrats finally enjoy more reproductive success than the average person.
Those are from near the end of chapter 6 "Malthus and Darwin: Survival of the Richest".
Good point. I retract.
My understanding is that, for instance, the reason why the original Magyars don't really feature that much in current-day Hungarian genetic inheritance is that the Hungarian nobility, which they would have formed, got pruned down pretty hard at regular intervals through warfare.
As I said when this was discussed previously, I've had family members doing family studies that reach in some cases up until 1400s or 1500s, and insofar as I've been able to tell, 90 % of all of my ancestors have lived somewhere around two (separate) very specific peasant areas in Eastern Finland (one where my mother comes from and one where my father comes from), with people living and creating families with other people who are perhaps not within a 2-mile radius, but at least within a 50 km radius.
Considering this, while it's *possible* that Charlemagne would be my ancestor - say, one of his descendants moving to Russia and begetting a Russian trader visiting my father's original home village - it is by no means certain.
"90 % of all of my ancestors have lived somewhere around two very specific peasant areas in Eastern Finland".
That's the wrong metric. Two ways of looking at it:
1) If 10% of your ancestors are born elsewhere, that's a lot of people. Like, really a lot. And it suffices that one of them came from a place that mixed well.
2) Let's assume that basically all of your ancestors come from just one island. But if there was ever a few hundred years ago a stranger washed ashore that island who mixed into the gene pool, then after a few generations this stranger is ancestor to the whole island, and so are all his ancestors. Even if this was the only violation to the "no outsider" record of the island.
In a nutshell, being isolated is a very unstable state for these questions. Even a single deviation destroys it thoroughly.
The 10 % mostly would come from, say, a 100 km radius instead of a 50 km radius.
Again, my argument is not that I would know Charlemagne is my ancestor, but rather that there does exist a real possibility that he is not.
Currently the implied probability (to the nearest whole percentage point, mid-price) of the following people winning the US Presidential Election is, in the order Betfair/Polymarket/Metaculus/Manifold (numbers 3 weeks ago in brackets):
Trump: 43/46/50/49 (48/50/50/50)
Biden: 42/45/50/49 (38/41/49/47)
RFK: 4/4/1/0 (3/3/1/0)
(Michelle) Obama: 3/2/1/0 (3/2/1/0)
Newsom: 2/0/1/0 (2/1/1/0)
Harris: 1/1/1/0 (2/2/1/0)
Broadly Biden has improved and Trump has worsened across the board, but the effect has been more pronounced in real money markets. In fact Trump and Biden were at one point tied at 42% on Betfair, which caused me to cash out half my Biden position and reinvest it (at the same odds) on Trump, so that I now make 76% profit on my original stake if either of them wins, which feels like a good position to be in.
The odds on Betfair imply a 15% chance that somebody else wins, which seems too high to me, and I think is small odds bias. RFK specifically is also up in the real money markets, while the play markets continue to ignore him. My guess is that RFK bettors are acting from conviction in their guy rather than a rational assessment of his chances (and there is the usual problem that a return of 3.6% on a market which may not resolve until 6 January probably fails to compensate for the opportunity cost).
I’m not sure what has caused the tilt from Trump to Biden: in my judgment nothing very surprising has happened in the past 3 (or 6) weeks. Trump’s legal problems continue as expected, there’s been good and bad news on the economy (jobs up, inflation also up) and the situation in Gaza remains as it is. Broadly though, the new numbers are much closer to where I think they should be, so if anything the question is why Biden was so low before (a sitting president in a good economy with a campaign finance advantage should not have been at 28%, in my assessment).
>I’m not sure what has caused the tilt from Trump to Biden: in my judgment nothing very surprising has happened in the past 3 (or 6) weeks.
The number one threat to a sitting President is a bad economy, particularly the country being in a recession in the months before the election . The closer we get to the election without a recession having begun, the less likely that there will be one immediately before the election. Hence, "nothing happening" is good news for Biden, and if prediction markets did not shift towards him under those circumstances, that should undermine one's confidence in those markets.
PS: As for inflation , it is was up in March, but very slightly relative to 6 months ago (annual rate of 3.5% in Mar versus 3.2% in October), and food inflation is low https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/food-inflation
The prediction markets in this case are following the polls, which also show a narrowing of Trump's lead over the last month.
My thinking is that Trump's numbers largely follow what's been going on in the news with him lately. Recently that's not much so his numbers have been dropping off; with another show trial starting up I predict his numbers will go up again in the short term.
That would make sense, but I'm not seeing it https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/national/. I see a wide range of outcomes, tending to favour Trump, both recently and in early March/late February.
The graph here https://www.economist.com/interactive/us-2024-election/trump-biden-polls does show a slight narrowing between the central lines in a wide spread, from Trump 45/Biden 44 to Trump 44/Biden 44, but while we need to give some weight to the polls (and the fact that Trump is polling so much better than at the same stage of the last cycle is the main reason to think he should be the favourite), we shouldn't give them too much weight so far out from the election, so a shift of that size should not have resulted in the probabilities (on Betfair) going from Trump 47/Biden 28 to Trump 43/Biden 42 over the same timeframe.
I was basing my comment on https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/president/general/2024/trump-vs-biden ; I meant to include a link in the comment but I guess I forgot.
With all the emphasis on the presidency going to Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, various Kennedies, etc., I'm kind of surprised Donald Trump Jr. never comes up.
At least with the Kennedies you can see the idea that "this family should be president" passing down to subsequent generations. If you think Michelle Obama would be a good president because she's related (not by blood!) to Barack Obama, surely Sasha Obama would be a better president. She doesn't yet meet the age requirement, but that's not true of Donald Trump Jr.
According to Polymarket, Junior is 3rd favourite to be the Republican Nominee, with mid-point odds of 0.9%, behind Haley but ahead of DeSantis. Betfair only gives him 0.15% (placing him behind Haley, Carson, DeSantis and Ramaswamy (in that order), but ahead of Tucker Carlson).
The meme energy is all with Barron Trump as the next Trump president. He's eighteen feet tall ffs.
> The odds on Betfair imply a 15% chance that somebody else wins, which seems too high to me, and I think is small odds bias.
Definitely partly small odds bias, but we are talking about two old men here. There's a real chance that one or both of them is incapacitated on health grounds before the election and someone else gets drafted in. Someone popular enough might stand a decent chance in that case.
That's definitely a possibility but over such a short timeframe putting the odds anywhere near as high as 15% is insane. I'd guess closer to 5% myself, maybe less.
Yes, my all-things-considered view is around Trump 50%, Biden 45%, someone else 5%.
Biden is a sitting president. I'm always amused at people saying he can't win. For better or worse we have a two-party system (no, RFK will not win a single state or even a single EC vote), and half the country will vote for one, and the other half for the other, and the outcome will hang on weird turnout distributions in a handful of states, and a sitting president has an advantage.
Sure is fun how the polls always tighten the closer we get.
If it's at all a horse race, you'd expect the trailing campaign to course correct based on early polling more than the leading one does.
That certainly is an explanation, yes.
Wasn't there a big scare around Biden a few months ago and kinda a push to get him off the ticket?
https://www.natesilver.net/p/its-time-for-the-white-house-to-put
A ha! I do remember stuff.
I remember a bunch of guys in February making a push to retire Biden from the ticket on the small fact that he's old and the big fact that he's running even with Trump. I can't access Betfair from this computer but I'd put good money on Harris and Newsom being much higher back in January/February when replacing Biden seemed possible. Now that Biden is guaranteed to be the Democratic nominee, the money pivoted back to Biden.
As for Newsome or Harris, those odds kinda make sense to me, even now. Basically, what are the odds of Biden suffering some catastrophic infirmity, say a crippling stroke, at his age and stress level in the next six months. 3% doesn't seem wild to me and, contingent on Biden being removed from the ticket, Newsom or Harris stepping into that role and having a >50% chance of beating Trump seems reasonable.
I was getting 3.55 (=28% chance) on Biden in mid-February, and he was still about that level in early March (see https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-318/comment/50883466). Newsom and Harris were higher, although it's mostly Obama who made up the difference (there was a discussion about this on Open Thread 315).
Biden is still old and he's still running even with Trump: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/national/. The "bunch of guys" never included anyone with any direct influence on the outcome. They've made less noise recently, but I've not seen any of them row back the argument. Few people thought that Biden might lose the primary: the argument has always been that he should step aside, which he still could. So this seems more like a vibe-shift than any change in the fundamentals.
By the way, if you could access Betfair, you would be able to get 1/7 on Biden being the nominee, which is of course free money if you consider this outcome to be guaranteed (and I myself have money on this outcome, so I don't entirely disagree).
My impression is something like
- There was lots of inflation, which made people angry at Biden
- But it hasn't gotten worse recently, and people have short memories
- The more time things go by without anything happening, the better Biden does
Putin needs to blow up a few gas fields.
Abortion seems to have been a national discussion again in the US which, at this point, seems to clearly benefit Biden whenever it happens.
I think this is definitely something to watch, but the move in the markets mostly predates the published decision in the Arizona Supreme Court, so unless somebody was betting inside information, that won't be the cause.
In 18 years, lol. Chin up dad and thank you. As other members have said, certainly no need to apologize. We’re grateful and rooting for you.
Does anyone have any resource recommendations for starting an online business that aren't clickbaity coursemongers with little actual value?
I'm a complete noob but would like to start a healthcare-related online blog and eventually service business. Any advice on how to get off the ground would be greatly appreciated. For example, I have a domain and have registered the domain but have no real idea on what steps to take next. What are the best practices for coding the website, brand design etc? Thanks
Check out the podcast Startups for the Rest of Us and the related content from the host.
I’d be happy to give you a free 15 min consult on web dev and branding (I do this professionally). DM me if interested. :)
That would be awesome, I absolutely will! Thanks
I (at last) have a new post on my Substack:
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/policy-tariffs-and-trade-3-china shock
Comments solicited as this is is a prelude to another post on what to do about a possible China Shock II.
I've heard the statistic that, in the U.S., "half of all marriages end in divorce." That often leads to the observation that, of the remaining 50% of marriages that last until the end, many must be unhappy unions that persist only due to some combination of financial considerations, inertia (laziness), unwillingness to hurt their children with a divorce, or unwillingness to lose social status.
But has anyone considered the flip side of that? How many divorcees REGRET divorcing their spouses? And in how many instances is the regret mutual?
The rejoinder I've heard for that stat is that it came from measuring the marriage rate (number of marriages per 1000 people per year, or whatever) to the divorce rate measured the same way, and the latter was half of the former. Not taking into account that the marriage rate was lower at that time than it was in the past when the people then getting divorced, were getting married.
In addition I have heard that first marriages are less likely to end in divorce than later marriages (because of people who get serially married/divorced)
And divorce has gotten less common than when that stat was first being thrown around.
First marriages are much less likely to end in divorce. The number goes down again if your marriage passes some basic sanity checks (you are both over the age of 21 and have a reasonable age gap, you have been dating for at least a year, neither of you has a criminal record et cetera.
You'd think these numbers really ought to be easier to find though. The Bureau of Births, Deaths and Marriages (or your local equivalent) really should be shouting these numbers from the rooftops so that people can have a more realistic understanding of marriage success rates.
Another annoying fake statistic that often gets repeated is the "80% of small businesses fail within the first year", which as far as I can figure out is not based on anything in particular and is far from the truth for any reasonable definition of small business.
My understanding is that at one point in history, some number X of marriages were measured to occur in the United States, and approximately half that number were measured.
If that is the source of the claim about 50% of marriages ending in divorce, then it a poorly-informed statistic. It can't be used to estimate the probability of any marriage ending in divorce during the years between the marriage beginning and one (or both) spouses dying. It can't be used to measure the increase or decrease in the rate of divorce (or the rate of marriage).
Keep in mind that repeat divorcees make up a disproportionate number of the divorces, so it's something above 50% of the remaining that stay together. Quick stats I'm seeing show that 67% and 74% of second and third marriages end in divorce, greatly increasing the total number.
Some basic math: If 100 people get married and 30 get divorced twice while the remaining original 70 remain married, that would be a 46% divorce rate. Real rates are more complicated since some divorce once while a rare set might divorce 4, 5, or 10 times.
Also, by the time you're looking at people who changed stable partners several times in their adult life, you're pretty far away from the traditional model of marriage for life. So it might be more relevant to look at how much long-term relationships last regardless of whether they got married or not.
Also complicated by different rates in different age cohorts, and by age at time of first marriage.
Apparently the regret is mutual 6-15% of divorces.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/a-better-divorce/202206/why-divorced-partners-end-up-remarrying-each-other#:~:text=Key%20points%201%20Research%20suggests%20that%2010-15%25%20of,help%20couples%20address%20the%20original%20reasons%20for%20divorce.
How much of “spiritual/meditation” type advice boils down to, “learn how to relax and see things holistically?” Is that, like, all of it?
I guess some people *will* never experience more than your summary ( https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-experiences-are-you-missing-without-realizing-it/ ) but reading MCTB, Seeing that Frees or just r/streamentry tells me there's a lot more to it.
That's a tough question to answer, because "spiritual / mediation advice" ranges from light mindfulness taught by any rando, up to all kinds of spiritual practices from any of the world's traditions, taught by their respective qualified teachers. It goes as deep as the spiritual side of any of the world's religions can go, including yours if you have one.
In any case, learn to relax and see things holistically sounds like pretty decent beginner advice.
In my experience, meditation in this context is about focusing all of your awareness on some sensation before any mental processing of it can happen. This is very different than trying to relax. Though I'm not sure if the people you've heard this from mean something different.
"Serious" meditation does seem to have a self-hypnotization component to it that induces dissociation. Though, this apparently can result in some major psychological issues if overdone. https://harpers.org/archive/2021/04/lost-in-thought-psychological-risks-of-meditation/
> Though, this apparently can result in some major psychological issues if overdone
For sure especially with bad guidance or going in without any knowledge (e.g. Goeanka retreats for people without knowledge/experience).
I didn't read the whole article but I thought it was interesting how the she pretty much perfectly describe A&P followed by Dissolution and Fear described in MCTB
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/18/book-review-mastering-the-core-teachings-of-the-buddha/.
No. It is about being aware of the breath, focusing on it, which relaxes the mind.
Hmmm. Yes, but being relaxed wasn't the object of my meditation practice, rather it was a side-effect. The object of my meditation was to understand how thoughts, emotions, and sensations arise in the mind and to learn how to silence them. Relaxation, bliss, stress reduction, etc. were not the primary objectives the practices imparted to me by my Kagyu and Gelug teachers. Detachment was. And Prajna — "wisdom" — but wisdom in knowing how one's mind worked.
Kagyu and Gelug! Let me bother you with the same question I have been bothering others with. One thing that confounds me about figuring out thoughts arising in the mind is that I just can't do it: the closest to "watching thoughts" for me is *recalling* what I thought a few moments ago. It is so bad that as I sit to "meditate" and try to watch my thoughts, I sometimes scratch myself, and only after that realize that I had scratched myself. Is this level of mindlessness normal in the initial stages? Is this why vajrayana folks recommend competence in sutrayana before even starting vajrayana?
P.S., edit: If not for avoiding suffering, is it merely for curiosity that you wanted detachment and prajna? And -- if it is not too personal -- despite all that you need CBD to sleep?
> Is this level of mindlessness normal in the initial stages?
Yup. Most of what we think we're perceiving in real-time is the immediate memory of the perception that our mind has just processed (filtering out details, and tagging it with a hypertext of associated emotions and feelings etc.). The thoughts that arise within us are the same way. If you're initially losing track of your awareness, it's OK to count your breaths (though some of my teachers advised against it, some thought it was fine). At some point, you'll stop needing to count, and some further point along the path, you'll find the thoughts will stop spontaneously arising (think of thoughts as feeding off your attention, and if you starve them, they'll give up trying). After a year — or five — or ten of doing this practice (YMMV), you'll be able to achieve one-pointed (undistracted) awareness.
If you have an itch, scratch it, and try to return to your breath. The Zenners don't like that advice, though. They seem to think you're giving in by scratching the itch. I resisted the urge to scratch until the itching took over my entire body. I resisted further and I started to hallucinate that I was on fire — then I screamed, jumped up from my meditation, and left the hall until the feeling went away. The lay instructor thought I was crazy when I told him why I screamed. But he wasn't very clued into all the possible ways your mind can sabotage your intentions, though. A lama later told me to just scratch the itch and return to the breath. He pointed out that it was a positive sign that I was hallucinating though since that's what the Buddha went through before he achieved enlightenment.
After about five years of almost daily practice, I could achieve that one-pointed consciousness state for a block of time (not indefinitely). Then I reached a plateau (but I didn't have an instructor who I trusted — that's another story — and I was meditating on my own). I kept it up on my own for another five years, but I wouldn't say I achieved many benefits from my ten years of meditation, per se, except that it's made me more patient dealing with extreme boredom situations — like waiting in the DMV line. ;-)
Theoretically, one should be able to ignore all sorts of unpleasant things without flinching. For instance, those Vietnamese Buddhist monks who self-immolated didn't scream or move while the fire consumed them. I could never be able to do that! But I discontinued my meditation practice because I had a very different type of uncomfortable experience/hallucination. I was practicing without a teacher and trying some advanced visualizations (Vajrayana stuff), and the visualizations became real! Scary real. Dharma protector deities are happy to teach you a lesson, but the lesson won't necessarily be very pleasant. I never went back to meditation. So I advise you not to undertake meditation practice without at least the occasional supervision of an advanced meditator — and even the introductory stuff can backfire on you (viz. my itch that turned into fire).
BTW, some meditators confuse bliss with enlightenment. You might end up in a blissful state, and you might be able to cultivate at will — but that's not necessarily beneficial to your advancement, because you get attached to the bliss. We called those people bliss-heads. Detachment is the goal of the Middle Way. I can't speak for other Buddhist schools or the Vedanta schools.
I also undertook some Sufi meditation training. That was totally different from my Buddhist experiences. The Sufi practices put my mind into a high-energy state that was very exhilarating. They didn't explicitly say it, but it seemed like they were after an ecstatic state where they could merge with the godhead.
As for sleep, for most people, our sleep gets more brittle as we get older. Although according to Bob Thurman are some advanced sleeping and dreaming meditation practices (really!), I never had instructors who were familiar with them. And though relaxation techniques may help you get to sleep, they're hard to implement when you're suddenly wide awake at 3 in the morning. With CBD, I can sleep like I did when I was younger.
Absolutely fascinating. Thank you very much for sharing.
You say "After ... I could achieve that one-pointed consciousness state for a block of time" and "At ... some further point along the path, you'll find the thoughts will stop spontaneously arising". Was there a stage where you had thoughts, but you could watch them "from the outside"' without getting engrossed in them, and without the "hypertext"?
Everything else in your comments: dieties, sufi meditation, CBD etc. are interesting, though I am sorry about the unpleasant experiences, both fire and the "lesson", and that things did not work out. I am still intrigued as to why you wanted detachment if you didn't care about stress-control or bliss: just curiosity about the nature of reality?
There's a lot to unpack in your questions. I'll address your first one and get back to the second one later.
> Was there a stage where you had thoughts, but you could watch them "from the outside"' without getting engrossed in them, and without the "hypertext"?
I'm not sure I experience things the same way you do or anyone else does. We assume that we do, but I'm not convinced that we do. And verbalizing internal experiences is harder because it's a symbolic abstraction of experience (and then we fall down the rabbit hole of whether our shared symbols describe the same thing). Having said that, I am going to put down my laptop sit upright in my chair, and follow my breath for a few inhalations and exhalations (inhaling through my nose, exhaling through my mouth with my tongue lightly touching the front of my palate — eyelids barely open). I'll try to describe what I was experiencing. Back in a few minutes.
....
At the beginning of my first inhalation, I was in the middle of remembering all the arguments about the best way to breathe when meditating. There were a lot of quick almost subliminal associations that jangle with those memories — humor and frustration associated with dozens of earnest discussions about the best way to breathe are bundled together with those memories (but I'm NOT remembering any particular discussions or incidents, I'm just aware that they're there) — long inhalation through my nose — the memory thoughts drop away. I'm chest breathing on my first inhalation, and I'm aware of the air filling my lungs. I've stopped inhaling, and I'm aware of my heartbeat and the constant background tinnitus in my ears, but I have the familiar impression (association) of my mind being in a deep warm cavern. A morning dove is cooing outside my window (no associations or memories with that, I'm just aware that it's cooing). I exhale through my mouth slowly deflating my lungs and I have the subliminal (symbolic) visualization of all my thoughts and memories flowing out with my exhalation. Pause before I inhale again, and there's just stillness.
As I begin my next inhalation my normal mind processes start their chatter again. But their jangle decreases as I follow the air into my lungs — but It's not until I have air in my lungs that I'm in stillness again. I'm aware of my pulse and the gentle ringing in my ears. That's all. Exhale, I'm aware of the air leaving my lungs. Stillness until I'm about to begin my next inhalation and then random thoughts and memories start springing up again. They get snuffed out when I focus on the airflow through my nostrils and sinuses. Quick thought: funny that I'm unable to feel the air flowing down my trachea, but I feel it entering my lungs. Stillness again when my lungs are filled. And stillness as I exhale and pause before the next inhalation.
And so on...
So these were my remembered impressions of my first two inhalations and exhalations. I noticed that I'm pretty aware of everything around me. And when I conceptualize thoughts and perceptions, I see them as multidimensional things. They pop up through a chain of associations like beads on a string. If I clutch at a thought beed, my mind will automatically pull up another thought or impressions hung together along a string of associations. I can short-circuit that process by following the sensations of the breath and being aware of the sensations of my body. I'm waaaaaay out of practice though, and I can't help but get distracted by thoughts between each breath cycle. When I was in practicing regularly, I didn't.
And I don't see myself as watching my thoughts from outside. They're coming up from within the thing I consider to be the larger "me." But it's also important to note that I see the me kernal — identity part of my mind — as being nestled in a larger womb/pool/sea of consciousness. I can't really perceive the fluid that my identity is floating in, but shiny thought-fishes are always arising from the depths. I can either reel them in, or I can just sit in the boat — but the only way I can stop reeling them in is to follow my breath. I can just sit in the boat while I inhale and exhale until the thoughts and impressions start rising up from the depths again at the end of each breath cycle.
You may have a totally different visualization of your selfhood, so I don't know if this helps or not.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/18/book-review-mastering-the-core-teachings-of-the-buddha/ this gives a good summary what enlightenment is about on one level.
> learn how to relax and see things holistically?
You could also summarize it with: "Just observe your experience", but that doesn't really tell you what will happen.
That does sum it up pretty nicely.
What advice have you followed to help you be a better husband/wife?
I firmly believe that the most important factor in life satisfaction is a happy family. Most relationship advice centers managing a troublesome partner rather than improving oneself. While it’s obviously hard to be specific, this community is most like myself out of any I’ve found. What works for you?
I'm not married yet, but I'm in a long term relationship and I truly think they are my partner for life.
I find it's really important to be mindful of context and factors that may cause myself or my partner to have friction, and make decisions to reduce friction.
A really common issue - the friking dishes. We're in a privileged position of having a decent income and no kids, so when things are getting too much and I want to scream at my partner for not doing the dishes, I take a step back and interrogate what's happening. Usually what's happening is that I'm stressed and tired and I can't cope with another chore. This is the point where I say, "takeout tonight, then we'll tidy up when we get home".
A lot of people consider the shared pool of tangible resources (money) but not necessarily the intangible (time, energy), and it's important to notice when the demands of life is outstripping available time and energy. We don't fight when we're not tired and hungry!
This goes for a lot of things. Partner drank my coconut water? No big deal, he'll have to buy me another later.
We spend a lot of money on takeout, groceries, etc, because I think mutually we value our relationship more than money. And I have watched a lot of people in my family in unhappy marriages (they're an older generation, they won't divorce) because they just refuse to spend the money to reduce friction.
I think I learnt this from my parents, mostly. (Happily married for nearly 30 years now). Prioritise reducing friction whenever you can. For a frankly ridiculous number of petty grievances, money makes them go away. If you don't have money, then accepting help from family and friends.
Best advice? Communication is key.
More precisely: Peterson pre 2019 is a lot worth listening to, especially on the "do not let sleeping dragons lie". Raise long term issues with your partner. When there's some obvious elephant in the room, find a way to talk about it.
Other big advice: get married or find another sufficiently binding agreement that puts your backs to the wall and forces you to grow. Life's always going to throw cannonballs in your face. Any situation where giving up remains an option on the table is a situation where one of those cannonballs will one day lead to that option being picked up.
I was given some advice by the pastor who married us a few days before the service. I took the advice to heart, and have tried to live by it, and I do believe it has been helpful to my marriage.
He said, "Marriage is not 50-50. Its 100-100. You're going to find yourself thinking that your partner is not doing their fair share: fight that thought. You give 100% of yourself to this marriage, regardless of what your partner gives you. Do not keep score. It will seem unfair sometimes, because it is unfair. You two will never be 'even', so do not aim for that as a goal. Resentment will destroy any marriage."
Yes! Do not ever keep a score. Ask for help when you need it, not because "it's unfair that I do the laundry all the time".
My wife introduced me to a system called "Fair Play Cards" for managing household tasks. The goal is to reduce "mental load" and "second shift" problems by making tasks open and visible. In a nutshell:
1. List off all the tasks you're doing in your household, and agree on what they entail. Not just basics like cooking and cleaning, also think of more intermittent and hidden things like who's going to the kid's soccer game or who sends birthday/holiday cards to friends. The book has a big list of suggestions to consider.
2. Divvy up the tasks in a way that feels fair to both of you. Since you carefully listed off everything you could think of, you both should have a good idea of what sort of load the other is taking on. If one partner is doing a lot of work but the other doesn't know about it because they're keeping silent about it, that breeds resentment.
3. When you take on a task, you own both the planning and implementation, from start to finish. If you own the grocery shopping task, you are responsible for knowing what ingredients you need and deciding what to put on the shopping list, not just going out and buying stuff. This solves the "mental load" problem where one partner thinks "of course I help, I do all the grocery shopping" and doesn't realize how much time and effort it takes to keep track of the pantry stocks, plan meals, etc.
4. Meet once a week to update each other on your status, plan tasks for next week, and make sure you're both doing okay. Renegotiate tasks as needed. My wife and I get take-out so that we don't have to worry about cooking and cleaning for that night and can just talk.
It's worked pretty well for us. We've also noticed another benefit: when the other spouse is out of town for something, you have a good idea of what you need to take care of while they're gone.
Great question. I (married ~17 yrs) would suggest the following as things you can do unilaterally:
a) You gotta give up the ego around your partner, 100%. This is easy when times are good, but you also gotta do it when your partner is pissed at you over some trivial thing that makes no sense to you. It may help to remember they are not pissed at you, they are having a hard day and you just happened to do that one thing that drives them nuts. There is no argument you can win, because it's not an argument, it's an emotion. The best thing to do is say I'm sorry and put some distance between you ("I need to go check on the dog")
b) If something your partner does bugs you, don't react in the moment. First wait and see if it's a pattern, and see if you can put up with it. When we first moved in together I decided consciously to wait a year before before mentioning any of their annoying habits. After a year most of them had become things I was used to, or understood, or even appreciated as intrinsic to who she is. I gave the others another year, and so on - by now I'm pretty much used to everything except the kitchen mess, but she's such a great cook I decided it was the least I could do to clean up after her.
c) If it's a really big issue, raise it as the start of a conversation that may last days, weeks or months. Don't have all your talking points lined up and expect to come out with a decision or agreement that you want. Say from the start that you want to talk about x, want to hear what they think about your idea/concern/unhappiness, but don't expect a resolution right away. Because if it's a hard issue, you'll both need to listen, think a while, talk, listen, think a while, if you hope to land somewhere that works for both you.
Hope this is helpful.
Communication is a skill. If you practice it, you will get better at it. That includes both listening to your partner and expressing yourself.
Depends on how deep of a rabbit hole you really want. How 'spergy' would you and your fiancée consider yourselves?
When I was first married there was an element of competition in our relationship. Dropping that nonsense smoothed things a lot.
What were you competing about?
Nothing that made any sense. Which one of had better taste in music, which of us had read more or better authors, which childhood sucked the most. Stuff like that.
See my response to Lasagna for #1.
The most widely applicable advice I can think of is: someone in the relationship has to keep their mouth shut when things are bothering them, and it might as well be you. The idea that couples should talk about problems and faults they have with each other is a mistake - for the most part you need to just deal with it. Be really, really judicious with criticisms and demands.
Depends on which side you err... if your tendency is already to keep your mouth shut and put up, you can accumulate serious amounts of resentment, and it's not pretty when it all bursts out. Bringing things up in time can help avoid that.
Yes, whoever came up with "never go to bed angry at each other" advice was on a mission to ruin relationship. Don't stay up till 4 am trying to "resolve" an argument, do go to bed, more often than not you'll wake up and won't even remember what the hell that angry argument was all about.
Epistemic status: >20 y first marriage.
That sounds like refuting the joke version of that advice: [i]Never go to bed angry with each other. Stay up and fight![/i]
The "joke version" is what often actually happens.
I think it's often misunderstood - I take it to mean that you should get your own head straight before you go to bed so you're not lying there mentally rehearsing the disagreement. Ideally you want to be able to say "I love you, I'm sorry we fought, sleep well and we'll figure it out tomorrow". I think it's good advice on the whole, but I agree with you some people take it to extremes.
"you should get your own head straight before you go to bed so you're not lying there mentally rehearsing the disagreement"
Ideally - yes. But it's often impossible because there's no space to get there in the middle of a fight. So "I can't do this anymore, I need to sleep" is as good a pretense to break the fight as any.
That ‘make up’ sex is pretty great though. ;)
Sure! But there's a danger of it becoming a goal in and of itself. As often is the case, TLP had this one covered: https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2010/08/love_the_way_you_lie_with_me.html
Hmmm… Conflict as foreplay. Sex is weird and we will never understand it.
Everyone has a limit to what they'll tolerate. The major discontents get brought to the surface once that threshold is breached. Placing a premium on communication does not mean confronting on every little thing, it's about working through issues as harmoniously as possible.
Very often couples fight because of "tone", defensiveness / hurt feelings, or otherwise some other source of stress that may be out of the ordinary that leads to one more to get snappy. Since we're not mindreaders, communicating well and understanding where everyone is coming from can help diffuse disputes promptly. The confrontations will be inevitable, the difference is whether they will escalate in anger and blunt pointed criticism (all those things we tolerate big and small) versus taking a break and reconvening with honest thoughts and feelings *without* antagonizing your partner.
I would say the couples ONLY fight about tone, defensiveness, hurt feelings or the like. I mean sometimes genuinely large issues come up but it’s rare. Couples probably aren’t having knockdown battles over the Nicene Creed, or the status of trade agreements with China, or even money. It’s almost always tone, irritating habits, chores undone, general feelings of being disrespected or the like.
What you wrote sounds great, but the problem is that these things are incredibly unlike to change. Your wife might leave her family and move across the earth for you. Your husband will convert to Judaism if it means that much to you. But neither is going to stop sounding condescending when talking about proper nutrition for the kids or start cleaning the house “properly” because those things are too ingrained. It’s very difficult to change them at all, and if you start listing all the ways you would prefer you partner was different than they are you’re going to end up even angrier and more unhappy when they fail to update.
> these things are incredibly unlike to change
I disagree. If both parties approach in good faith for improved communication, the primary shift is that they better understand each other and sooner intervene to avoid needless blowups. No one is expected to be perfect or completely change in their habits for another person, and that isn't contingent on it being the case.
For example, were there a "tone" incident at a certain point in a relationship both parties are pretty aware of what's happening, and so one of two things could happen first a) the person speaking could clarify / apologize, b) the person offended could voice their concern rather than starting a silent treatment and accumulating more discontents, and then diffuse before anything starts.
None of this requires fundamentally changing a person. It's about understanding them, in a two-way street, and making certain concessions and compromises. Anyone who can't make a compromise in a relationship won't get far.
If you're in a situation where your partner won't meet halfway, and you've done all the couples therapy shit, then you have to decide whether you're better off swallowing it or leaving.
Being able to talk about issues seems to me one of the most important things about my relationship with my wife. I think it matters a lot how you approach, and "criticism" or "demand" seems like bad ideas, while "request" or other softer language works just fine.
That said, I definitely agree with you about learning to keep your mouth shut, especially in the heat of a moment. Calling your spouse a derogatory term or with a laundry list of everything that's ever bothered you about them while you're angry is going to make everything worse. Calming down and coming back in an hour with a more helpful approach is really good for relationships.
A heuristic I’ve found helpful is, “whenever I’m annoyed at her for doing X, ask how I am doing the same thing, and focus on that.”
When I’m upset or mad at her, trying to imagine her perspective on things and think about how she feels.
Noticing my level of emotional arousal and walking away, rather than trying to talk. Doing the same for her.
Trusting that the future will be ok and I don’t need to solve this problem now, especially when I feel the need to to solve it now.
Remembering that my map isn’t the territory and that I dont really know her, so I can see her as a kind of joy to explore and mystery to partake in.
Noticing when I am upset at a caricature of her in my imagination and laughing at that.
Regular, consistent date nights.
Knowing a feel things that make her feel loved and doing those consistently.
Small attempts to give affection without any expectation of reciprocation.
Making little inside jokes.
Telling her she’s doing a great job and trying to learn from her.
Telling her what I admire about her, especially when I’m angry.
A very solid set, and I would expand upon a few things.
"Regular, consistent date nights" is often used as a code for "sex is really important", possibly because our culture codes that you must behave as though sex as fundamentally frivolous. I'll be more explicit and simply say "Sex is really, really important". If partnered (particularly life-partnered), you should almost certainly be having more sex. Sex for humans can be bonding. It can be a time to turn off your thoughts. It can be a time to be someone else. It can be a time for the pleasure of giving pleasure. It can be so many things, all the while being quick and inexpensive entertainment and a great sleep-aid. Both partners in a life-relationship need to get comfortable with the fact that if is to be "successful" (i.e., they carry one of you out feet-first) then you will be boinking literally thousands of times with the same person, so it behooves you both to get good at it.
I use "Regular, consistent date nights" as code for "For god's sakes get out of the house occasionally", which is also important.
Rations. In addition to everything else you and your partner will be doing together, you will quite often be eating together. It's a really good idea if one or both of you commit to being able to produce good meals for each other on a regular basis, and enjoy doing so. Poor rations lead to poor morale inexorably, and you often won't even notice _why_ morale is poor. Armies have mutinied over it. The rest of housework is important, but meal provision is an often overlooked key to long-term joint happiness.
You have limits, as you are human. Limits on what you will accept, on what you are capable of, and on what you enjoy. While you should be always be looking to overcome your limits, your partner should nonetheless know and respect them. That means _telling_ your partner when your limits are approached, and what you need with respect to them. This advice of course applies in reflection as well.
If possible, time apart (say a week or so) can be a great opportunity to gain perspective on the partnership. Traveling for work doesn't really count, as you are unlikely to have time for the necessary reflection. Separate vacations, long weekends with friends, hobby retreats, what have you.
Food + sex + expressing gratitude = making each other happy.
These are excellent. I’m curious about “I don’t really know her” because I do feel I know my fiancée extremely well — we probably spend more time together than any couple I know, because of what we do.
Can you explain that one any more?
What I’ve found is that the woman I thought I knew, when we were engaged existed more in my head than in reality. Training myself to both follow the breath and get in a habit of skepticism made it easier to see that, behind that idea of her, there is this immensely vast unknowable thing. When I focus on that, I’m open to being wrong and curious about what she’ll do next.
The boundary between self and other is, I think, a kind of fractal that grows exponentially. I become more of who I am in our relationship, in part because raising kids is so hard. These challenges make me better understand myself, which then helps me to learn more about her, which increases the surface area of that boundary.
Not apxhard, butting it a bit, hope you don't mind. I've been married for >20y and still don't think I really "know" my wife. Or, to say better, the "unknown" space is still vastly greater than the "known". But I know what you mean: in the early years I may have had a similar illusion.
I think it's fundamentally impossible to fully "know" another person, especially one of the opposite sex. Understanding that brings a degree of humility and curiosity that are vital for a long-term relationship.
If I could distill this to one sentence, it would be "don't assume, ask".
Yup. The map ain’t the territory, but it sure feels that way. Especially when im upset.
Your "fractal boundary" metaphor is great!
I love all of these pieces of advice and want to yes-and:
Make sure they know they are appreciated and they make you happy.
Small things and big things.
"I really appreciate you doing (small everyday chore) for me"
"I really appreciate the sacrifices you've made for the life we have"
3: No need to apologize! You're great. We love you. Hope you and your family are doing well.
Can someone steelman Tyler Cowen for me?
Yes, I'm sure he's a pretty smart guy with very wide reading habits, but I've been consistently unimpressed with his rigour of thought on Marginal Revolution or other work, or hearing him interviewed on podcasts; he's very confident, but I find his willingness to hold forth confidently to be unrelated to the actual extent to which he has thought about something (examples off the top of my head is a lack of thinking through how children or disabled people fit into his libertarianish socio political worldview, or his incoherent ideas about animals ethics.)
What's the draw?
Allow me to point out one thing I appreciate, apart from the usefulness of his link aggregation. Cowen sometimes tries to indicate useful limits on how much explanatory power his favorite ideas have, in a way that is useful to the reader, rather than just as a parenthetical remark meant to dissuade criticism. This seems rare in the blogosphere.
For example, Cowen's take on an issue is likely to be along the lines of 'What would Hayek say?', relative to just about any other social theorist. But he has also posted this: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/02/john-stuart-mill-on-women-as-explained-by-tc.html.
I chose this example both because it is recent and because I think it would be a helpful one for the many ACX commenters who have read Hayek and/or Seeing Like a State.
>examples off the top of my head is a lack of thinking through how children or disabled people fit into his libertarianish socio political worldview
What do children have to do with libertarianism? This objection strikes me as a category error. Libertarianism is a political philosophy and children don't participate in politics. I believe the only libertarian attitude here would be to limit State interference and let families raise their kids however they like (modulo things like abuse).
I guess OP means: what about orphans or children with woefully inadequate parents, and what about people who have expensive care needs that a realistic salary can't pay for? Sometimes people can't stand on their own two feet without help — does libertarianism just say "bad luck, you're on your own?"
I think the stock libertarian reply would be that most people agree that helping needy people is important, and if we do agree that we're free to help via private charity. I think a libertarian would say that it's wrong to force people to be charitable if they don't want to be, and also that the state is an inefficient and untrustworthy means of allocating charity, so it's better overall to let people help directly.
Yes, I think this is both correct and consistent with my answer. "Letting people help via private charity" conforms to the libertarian notion of "this isn't within the State's remit, deal with it yourself." Some people might view this as a cruelly laissez faire attitude in the context of child care, but libertarians (rightly, in my opinion) view the harms caused by a potentially indifferent culture to be less than those caused by well-meaning policy enacted by incompetent bureaucrats. Government simply can't solve some problems directly and ultimately does more damage when it tries.
MR is a very frequently updated content aggregator, usually with something interesting.
He hosts interesting interviews with interesting people, and asks good questions.
He shares insightful comments even if I don't agree with him on 33-50%+ of everything. His readership seems to lean far more to the right and criticizes him at every turn, so in that microcosm the quasi-libertarianism seems moderate.
This does _not_ answer your steel-manning request, since that is way beyond my ken. As a lay person I attach a great deal of weight to how someone is viewed by peers and Professor Cowen appears to be held in high regard by peers. The breadth of his culture is unusual; in modern times with super-specializations finding a single human who knows so much about so much reveals both the interconnectedness of knowledge and the possibility of a modern "renaissance man". His writing is interesting, I almost always finish reading the full piece, of many others I abandon midway.
I think the appeal is his breadth rather than depth. I agree on the lack of rigor.
Read his book Average is Over.
Can you please elaborate? I've got a long "to read" list.
This may or may not be Turok's point, but I think the best steelman for Cowen's rigor of thought is to read one of his books.
I think the problem is that TC says things to provoke reactions rather than to suggest an optimum response to issue X.
He has said that his routine for interviewing people is to read the top N books on Amazon. For example, he interviewed Martina Navratilova and read the top five books on tennis and a couple on Navratilova. When he interviewed her, he came across as something of an expert. When he interviewed Gary Kasparov, he asked him about an opening from, 1981 (or whatever) and was able to hold forth on the merits of moving his knight where he did (or whatever). I have heard him speak knowledgeably about my own profession (software engineering) too. I listened to him interviewing Fareed Zakaria last night. Cowen knew more about the history of India and foreign relations in the 80s than any non-expert has any right to know. He does this week after week.
I can't think of anyone in the world who has such a diversity of knowledge. Maybe he doesn't know as much about a topic as the experts in that topic but he sure knows a lot and his knowledge sure is diverse.
PS. I don't think Marginal Revolution provides credible evidence either way. It's a casual blog.
Which podcast does he talk about software engineering?
> I have heard him speak knowledgeably about my own profession
FWIW, I have the precise opposite impression when he speaks about my area of expertise (music)
I should maybe clarify: it's not that he's not knowledgeable, relative to an average member of the public. It's that he seems to be performing a level of expertise and understanding that he lacks.
Thank you; you have expressed more elegantly than me what rubs me the wrong way, despite him being, I freely admit, astonishingly widely read.
I’d like to hear this too. I’ve only followed Tyler for a couple years but I’ve noticed much more of an offputting soldier mindset in him. Not sure whether that’s him changing or just me noticing.
In what way is he a "soldier"? The comments on MR rightly accuse him of being far too Straussian, since he rarely takes any strong stands on issues. I've read MR since its inception btw.
I haven't seen "soldier"-ish behavior either; if at all he has chips on his shoulder he is good at hiding them. This is despite him seemingly obsessed with status -- this is not just about platonic discussions of the concept but of status, but a lot of "Who is the most underrated/overrated", who needs to increase in status type stuff. That said, one hears related complaints. Many accuse him of being provocative, and he seems to drive some sections of his readership really mad, but I am not sure what to think of this: in such situations the rest of his readership seems to barely notice any pressing of buttons. He *seems* sometimes to throw in gratuitous bits that at least superficially sound judgemental, like: "Via the apparently excellent Bruce Cleaver." He makes comments such as "Country X does this thing better than country Y" or "women tend to have a better attitude on this than men", using language that is mild, and yet more definitive and less tentative than one might normally expect.
True, and while it is clear Tyler is a bit of a troll, an underappreciated fact about the commenters on MR is they are mostly rather highly self aware and in on the joke. The median comment on MR would get a ban on ACX, so I always have to remember to be well behaved here after saying what I *really* think under one of my sockpuppet accounts on MR (yes, I could say what I really think here, but not without much prevarication and bowing to the rarionalist gods, and I simply don't have the patience, being a post-rationalist after all).
While Scott polices various bad faith attributions/conflict-theoretic behavior, MR seems to police content more. Yesterday in that Michael Cook post there was a handle called "Crusader", worrying about Khamenei asking Iranian Americans to fight against the US. Though I felt the comment was stupid, it wasn't phrased incitefully, and was anyway overwhelmed by numerous counters, some of which were insightful. But they deleted the comment and thereby the counters as well.
What is your explanation for the quality of MR comments having deteriorated over the last 10 years (if you agree with this)? Tyler was no more or less a troll back then. Is it that back then smart people tended to look up more to economists to explain the world to them (as a recent piece of Noahpinion suggests)?
I know what you mean by deteriorating comments, but they are worse in one dimension while being better in others. People who want a rationalist style pedantry have a forum here (I'm describing tradeoffs on Scott's moderation, not declaring it inferior). I would agree over the last year MR comments have gotten a bit ridiculous at times even for my taste.
I have seen the deletions you mention on occasion and it really is a puzzle as to why certain comments are targeted. Adds to the mystique of the place, though I personally never had any of my comments deleted.
I think where I disagree with the moderation here is that bad faith comments are fine if they provide a new perspective. Though I'm highly immune to getting emotional over political discussion, and admit that others may regard ridiculous comments to be inflammatory. (is in this thread, unlees deleted, you can see someone being accused of supporting Hamas and him going ballistic. If I was accused of X, I would just find it silly for pretty much all values of X if I judged it untrue; sometimes humans really confuse me)
I see Tyler as a great curator. He's great at finding interesting stuff from around the web and connecting it with other interesting stuff. He's also really good at drawing people out in conversation, so I find his podcast worth listening to. But, agreed, when I read his original stuff, it's mostly pretty mid.
TBH I don't get him either. He's on my list of people who a lot of people I respect seem to respect but just seems completely banal to me (Paul graham is an even more extreme case, even before, uh, recent trends).
Graham is at least successful in a field requiring more than "what your contemporaries let you get away with saying" (as Richard Rorty defined "truth").
What did Paul Graham do recently?
Suppose you're a highly educated, socially conservative American Christian with two young children (a boy and a girl) and while you don't want to raise them as cloistered fundamentalists, you also think the broader culture has kind of gone crazy and you don't want them to end up woke or (God forbid) transgender. If you could choose to live anywhere in the US (any state, city/suburban/rural), where would you choose to live to best achieve this goal?
The obvious, and perhaps correct, answer is a strongly religious area in a red state. On the other hand, anecdotally many woke ex-Christians (or ex-conservative Christians) are rebelling against growing up in restrictive conservative environments. And there's a lot of crazy out there in conservative areas for children to rebel against. So maybe there's a case to be made for exposing your children to progressive craziness to inoculate them against it.
> If you could choose to live anywhere in the US (any state, city/suburban/rural), where would you choose to live to best achieve this goal?
South Carolina
Correct me if I've got you wrong - so I think what you want to avoid is a specific kind of person that makes everything about politics?
If so, I think geography might not be the biggest factor. This is an attitude thing, and it comes from home. Besides, you're looking at a 10 - 15 year time horizon - a place can change a great deal in this time, and the "woke" that you're talking about will inevitably shapeshift. It'll be some completely new thing by the time your kids are teens.
I think the biggest thing you can do is model being a good, grounded human. This means try to avoid very biased, partisan content. Steer clear of the opinion columns. Personally don't engage with political content that makes you angry (much easier said than done).
The aim is to model someone who focuses on the important things in life - the day to day. Your family, loved ones, and doesn't spend energy raging about real or imagined slights on one political tribe or another.
Don't set a precedent that it's normal to spend all your time ranting about politics. That means even if say, your cashier is visibly trans, you treat them like a normal person - polite respect. You don't give them any special attention, negative or positive. Just normal.
Its different if there's a local issue that will impact your own day to day, but approach it with practicality and respect for community norms. Model the behaviour you wanna see, wrt to fitting in with community wishes. You might wanna pick a specific community that you think you can fit into - not necessarily for educational reasons, but because it would make you happy to be surrounded by people who understand you and have similar values.
I can't predict what stupid debate is going to dominate our attentions in 2038, but I hope this skillset and attitude will be broadly applicable. It doesn't require finding a homogeneous community and hoping it doesn't change over the next decade. It only requires being mindful of what you spend your time talking about and how you go about it.
You can't do anything to ensure your kids aren't transgender, the best you can do is to ensure they're closeted
I'd vote for Texas here. I'd move there in a second if the weather and geography weren't both so godawful. Avoid Austin though.
Interestingly someone else suggested Austin specifically as a good place to move to. Perhaps it has both a disproportionate number of far-left progressives and principled conservatives, so that it depends on your social circles in the city?
Anywhere in Texas would work, including Austin, as long as you stayed in the suburbs/exurbs and not the city. I also advise not voting.
Why not voting?
Because I don't want to encourage any more conservatives to move here who will vote for the anti-abortion extremists in Austin. This used to be a nice state. You won't be welcome be people like me if you vote for Greg Abbot, Dan Patrick and his ilk.
Can you define "anti-abortion extremist"? I feel like this has the potential to mean a lot of very different things.
There's always the midwest or certain large cities in the south, but I think your concern is mostly a boogeyman. Twitter-land doesn't reflect opinions on the ground. For all of it, kids just want to be kids, they're interested in sports videogames and anime, not politics. Even in later years, it's the always-online types who adopt more extreme views, in either direction.
If you're planning on going to Church or sending kids to a religious private school, then you already control for environment so it's a moot point.
I am inclined to think that "no smartphone" is 50% of the battle, and restricting Internet usage/encouraging them to play outside is another 25%. But I do think peer influence and IRL social environment also matter here.
Private school (or homeschooling) is an option but it's nice to not feel you have to rely on that. And I'm not totally convinced that either option is the best way to inoculate your children against progressive craziness, especially if they're not exposed to those ideas much outside of school and then are suddenly hit with them when they go to college.
Learning how to think and be skeptical is the only inoculation against bad ideas.
Having been to college, radicalism was not new to anyone by the time they arrived as it was all exposed through internet, but one's major of study (STEM vs liberal arts) is a reliable predictor of whether peer environment will be far left or moderate. Classmates are ultimately the ones you hang around with anyway.
All that said, I don't think you can force or expect your kids to reflect the same worldview you have.
My understanding is that smartphones are just a fact of life for kids nowadays and denying them one will exclude them from routine social activities and make them an outcast.
I expect my kids to make that argument! I'm inclined to give them dumb phones but I also understand there are some smartphones with restricted features on the market -- I'll probably look into those too. I'd also love to enroll them in a school that doesn't allow smartphones, which seem to be getting more common.
You absolutely can and should raise your children without smartphones. All you need to make it work is a sufficient number of other parents who are doing the same thing.
If everyone has a smartphone, the kid without one is just a pariah.
If one in twenty kids don't have one, most other kids will be familiar with the idea that they aren't a given.
If one in five kids doesn't have one, then kids will no longer expect that all social activity, invitations to gatherings, etc. should be carried out through the phone, as every group will likely have one or two people who need to be contacted separately.
My girlfriend has signed us up to this: https://smartphonefreechildhood.co.uk/
I'm less enthused about the pressuring government for regulation angle, but I definitely see the value in sending a clear signal that a huge number of parents are already in agreement about this.
I'm less enthused about the "pressur
People have tried that, and it never works. The reason these modern religious movements like Quiverfull fail is because they give their children the option to leave. If you want to properly indoctrinate your children, cutting them off from the outside world is the only way to get decent results.
The Amish are doing fine giving their children the option to leave. I believe the children are expected to get exposure to the outside world, so that they can make a genuine choice to be Amish.
I have thought about the Amish here -- something like 93% of Amish children remain Amish now. Is the combination of "cloistered upbringing" followed by rumspringa at adolescence the key to their success? And is there a way for us to replicate that if we don't want to go off and join an intentional community like the Amish or Hutterites?
It's not just the Amish either, I understood the year out thing was a pretty common ritual across many cults and subcultures.
Ya know there are conservative transgender people, and there were transgender people long before 2015 or whenever you want to attribute wokeness to. There are worse things.
Do you know personally any adult or young adult trans people?
I hate to make this another thread about tension on this point but genuinely I think the answer to your question is it's the wrong question. Raise your kids to be independent, rigorous thinkers and questioners, and give them the emotional tool box to deal with distress and they won't be susceptible to social contagion. Spend their formative years giving your best arguments for your conservative values, why they work, why some people think they don't, and don't lie to them. Give them a happy childhood and reason to like you.
If youre at all sure your own values are correct and you raise independent happy free thinking kids and you've had their whole childhood to share your perspective, they're gonna end up close but not exactly where you are in all probability. And if they don't, that's a thing you really don't have control over.
And if they end up trans anyway, which is a 1/50-1/100 chance roughly, they'll be trans and happy.
[Edited to correct typo in chances]
Yes, I know several trans people personally, and interact with others I don't know well fairly frequently (I live in a very left-wing city currently). I think this thread is probably not the most productive place to debate the (un)desirability of people identifying as transgender -- it's a starting premise for the question I'm asking that this is bad for oneself. (OTOH, the *causes* are relevant -- if, say, transgenderism was mainly caused by environmental pollutants than social contagion, then one might prefer to live in a liberal city rather than a conservative rural area, counterintuitive as that might initially be.)
That said, I do generally agree with your other advice. I have no desire to indoctrinate my children, both because I think it would be wrong and because I think it would be ineffective, and I will love them no matter what choices they make.
Teaching your kids to be really good independent skeptical thinkers and also teaching them religion in a serious capacity seem to contradict each other.
I agree that that is a good solution but I don't think everyone can implement it.
The trans rate has absolutely exploded over the last ten years and is now something like 10x that IIRC?
I genuinely accidentally tacked on an extra 0 by mistake. Its 1-2%. Adults in the US has remained steady at ~1% for a while depending on how you count (many demo sites list 0.5%) , youth has doubled over the last 10 years to ~2-3%, again depending how you count.
Edited post to correct.
>On the other hand, anecdotally many woke ex-Christians (or ex-conservative Christians) are rebelling against growing up in restrictive conservative environments.
In my experience, at least some of the most strident atheists I know come from rural or less-inhabited areas and are the children of secular families in areas that some religious group (in Finland, typically Laestadians) dominates strongly, or at least families who don't belong to the specific group in question. People who have left such a religious group tend to be less across-the-board antireligious and more specifically against *that* particular group.
Right next door to John and Jane Psmith. :^) Seriously, I'm not Christian, nor religious, but I find living in rural America to be perfect for me.
From what I have seen, Austin Texas. :)
Interesting -- someone else specifically said anywhere in Texas that is not Austin. Can I ask why you think Austin is a good place for this?
They will learn from your example, not from your words.
If I am happy and emotionally well regulated and I don’t regularly express contempt and disgust for others, i think my kids will pick up on that.
If I am angry about the world, anxious about the future and dismissive of others, I think my kids will call BS on my claims to believe that I’m trying to be like Jesus.
I live outside Cincinnati, where I grew up. Mark Twain said he wanted to be here when the world ended because we are always “20 years behind the times,” which is maybe a good thing if the culture is running off or a cliff. I definitely recommend it as a good place for raising kids.
I want my kids to understand Marx and feminism and progressivism and understand why those ideas are appealing. I will keep centering, “remove the plank from your own eye before the splinter from your neighbors”, because I really think Christianity would be far more popular and powerful if we did a better job following His example.
Thanks, I appreciate the perspective. And my natural inclinations are similar for teaching the appeal of ideas I reject. I have to admit though that the last decade (the decade of Trump, BLM, transgenderism, covid, etc.) has shaken my faith in human reasonability, as I have seen so many of my friends and family who are otherwise intelligent and sane adopt what seem to me insane (and often harmful) beliefs. And this has made me somewhat less charitable in how I think about other people's beliefs, because in some cases it seems to me that widely believed [insane thing] is not actually prima facie appealing at all, but instead believed for totally arational reasons like social desirability.
Yes, I think this is true too. But we fortunately have to excellent teachers, admired by history. Jesus tells us to fix our own models rather than try to adjust or judge the models of people. And Socrates tells us the essence of wisdom if knowing we have a deep capacity to fool ourselves, and we do it all the time. I think it only takes a small number doing the right thing, and as long as they do it without anger or contempt or disgust, but with love and respect, others can’t help but follow. I think we shoot ourselves in the foot when we express disgust or anger at people for thinking the wrong way. But that’s much easier said than done.
Hmm. I'm not American. I was raised a moderate evangelical Christian. I am now fairly socially conservative, not really a Christian but a theist with a Christian-inspired personal theology, and have never been an atheist or rebelled in a significant way (unless you count a short time around 19 calling myself a Marxist). If it's acceptable for your children to turn out like me, a few random thoughts:
1. Tell them they have a right to believe whatever they want. I can't emphasise it enough. I don't think we can overstate the extent to which being told you're not allowed to question destroys someone and makes them an extremist. It's the exact reason the wokists are such widely hated scum.
2. Condemn your side's extremists. It's not enough to not hold horrible beliefs yourself. I remember how bewildering and horrifying it was to discover the things many Christians believed. I was angry, and scared, seeing things like "God will eternally torure everyone who dies without believing the exact right things, and this will be wonderful and just!", and what I wanted (which I got some of but could have used a lot more) was an unequivocal "the people saying this are *evil* and completely fake Christians and false prophets".
3. I don't know about location. I grew up in the suburbs of Melbourne in the 2000s. I'm not sure what the American equivalent is to "progressive-leaning but in a relaxed kind of way" but I'm guessing maybe New England?
Interesting, and I definitely agree on #1 and #2.
On #3, is Melbourne still that relaxed nowadays? I read about things like the "Let Women Speak" rally last year and the suspension of Moira Deeming from the (right-wing!) Liberal Party for attending the rally and it looks to me like the city has gone off the rails.
I would tend to think of New England as a bit more easy-going (with the Pacific Northwest a closer American analogue to contemporary Melbourne) though there's plenty of craziness there too (but maybe more confined to college campuses?).
Yes, the government's gone off the rails recently, that's why I specified the 2000s. Though my sense is that the average person is a lot less politicised than the average person in say San Fransisco. Also, though I don't follow the details of what politicians say or are censured for saying on a daily basis, there's a much stronger effect (due mostly to our electoral system) of major parties sticking closer to the centre, *especially* when they've lost a few elections in a row (which the state Liberals have). By comparison, the federal Labor government around 2010 was aggressively opposing gay marriage, cracking down on territories' attempts to enact civil unions and binding every one of their MPs to vote against it (this was their first term after losing four elections). Needless to say, this didn't reflect their actual positions.
(And also, parties exert much more control over their members' public statements and votes than in the US).
As someone raised in a similar religious background, I wanted more #2 but found the adults in my life were fairly incapable of actually backing up that claim scripturally. Now a couple of my siblings have moved to just accepting statements like that (probably not 'wonderful', but certainly 'just'). Slim odds I know, but were there any resources (books, essays, etc) that made that case to you - the case that the bible doesn't say that most good people go to hell?
On the broader point: I agree exposure to a wide array of ideas is much preferable to sheltering. I read the Communist Manifesto and Atlas Shrugged in the same year as a teenager, and now think I'm immunized against both poles of extremity - I expect similar exposure plus open discussion would prevent most people from becoming extremists.
"Slim odds I know, but were there any resources (books, essays, etc) that made that case to you - the case that the bible doesn't say that most good people go to hell?"
There are perhaps three distinct issues here.
1. Whether God permanently punishes some people without eventual forgiveness (which amounts to universalism being false).
2. Whether this permanent punishment is simply destruction (anilihation) or hell.
3. Whether the thing they are punished for is some evil action, or simply not being a saved Christian.
It seems hard to find much support for 1. On 2, however, my memory is that pretty much throughout the Old Testament and through most of Paul, the fate of sinners is described as death, perishing, or not inheriting the kingdom of God. And there's little or no reference to hell.
Most references to hell I think are from Jesus (ironically, supposedly the most loving manifestation of God) and Revelation. Moving on to 3, the two parts of the Gospels that I remember being most explicitly about hell are the "sheep and the goats" in Matthew, and the "rich man and Lazuras", and both are clearly about punishing rich people who ignored or oppressed the poor. References to punishing those who don't believe are less explicit.
So, there seems plenty of support for denying the fundamentalist position on 2 and 3. The fundamentalists would read "perish" as a metaphor for hell, but others will just as easily read "hell" as a metaphor for perishing. And it's most clearly invoked for rich people mistreating the poor, but obviously that doesn't fit very well with the worldview of those who tend to be fundamentalists, so they disregard that and instead focus on punishment for not believing in Jesus, (or not believing in the right way).
Thanks for the detailed reply!
1. I've always had a much better opinion of the universalist religions / sects because infinite punishment for finite crime (or, in the case of pretty good thoughtful kind people who just don't believe the human sacrifice of some dude a couple thousand years ago absolves them of their sin, arguably no crime at all) seems wrong. Alas, the Christian bible seems fairly conclusive on this not being so, and I doubt my family would ever be convinced on that point.
2. seems more promising, I'll look more into the annihilation vs torture claims in the bible - I also remember that the OT was pretty mild on hell. I'm totally fine with my family thinking that I'll be annihilated after I die (as I think this is also the most likely outcome), it's just the "thinking it's correct that I forever be tortured" that's a pretty hard pill to swallow from people I love.
3. My family's theology also seems quite convinced on this one, being good or bad isn't the key factor, believing in Jesus is. The serial rapist who repents in prison goes to heaven, Gandhi goes to hell.
I'll keep an eye out for essays / books / etc (ideally from a Christian perspective as that's all that would be convincing) making the case for 2 that nonbelievers just get annihilated.
IMO, a truly benevolent God could not send people to hell forever, and the benevolence of god is frequently repeated dogma. But then again, I ended up atheist.
I too ended up atheist, but it sure would be nice to not have most members of my family (with whom I am still surprisingly close) think I'm going to hell to be tortured forever and that's *somehow a good thing*.
Thus the looking for biblical arguments against that particular theology (otherwise I'd have pretty little interest in biblical arguments).
In a great coincidence, just found this song on my ride home today, the thesis of which is that those beings who allow hell (God/ angels) are sadists:
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=H6SL_OpnrCY&feature=shared
Yes, New England generally fits the bill. Look at states like MA and NH consistently electing Republican governors while sending moderate/reasonable Democratic congresspeople to DC.
Salt lake city maybe? But I haven't actually lived there enough to know how crazy it really is. It seemed like an unusually balanced and reasonable place when I've visited.
An interesting suggestion. I've never been to Utah but I could believe this -- Mormons seem like a pretty ideal social group to grow up around.
I have given this a lot of thought over the last few months.
We don't want to end up with fragile beliefs that persist only because we never allow ourselves to hear arguments that contradict them. I can't imagine anyone who wants to still be monitoring and influencing their kids' media exposure by the time those kids are 20.
At the same time, we all understand that seductive ideas introduced before the kid has enough context or perspective to properly evaluate them could lead them down dangerous and self-destructive routes.
[EDITED TO ADD: I would consider a child who turns away from transgender rhetoric because "my daddy told me that was bad" to be probably initially necessary, but strictly worse than a child who can say, "that's bullshit because X, Y, Z". Not just because one is a more mature response, but because knowledge of X, Y and Z are going to make them more robust against other bad ideas or ideological attacks that I as their father are unaware of.]
I'd love a way to quantify at what point a child is intellectually robust enough to begin reading bad/enemy ideas. I don't believe it will end up having anything to do with that child's age, and a lot more to do with what mental models the child has in its head that tell it how to deal with new information.
I remember reading someone suggest that we teach all kids to be Flat Earthers at 15, so they have the experience of finding later on that it doesn't add up and realising that some strongly held beliefs can be bullshit.
There's another possiblity, and it might be as simple as: poisonous ideas were seductive when they first came out, purely because the consequences weren't known and/or the incumbent ideology hadn't got the concepts or vocabulary to hand to identify the mistake/spot the dirty trick the idea was making.
So while the transgender meme did definitely spread across society, and definitely ruined the lives of a lot of people, society might eventually become "immunised" to it and your kids can be allowed to read all this stuff with a clear conscience because the culture it's landing in is a different shape now.
This would be very nice, if true. Am I going to bet my kids' future happiness on it? Probably not.
Yup, it sounds like we're in similar places. I've also been tempted by the same line of thought about transgenderism but I'm also not confident it will work out that way.
My current thinking about how I would like my children to be exposed to transgenderism in particular is for them to learn that there are people who (for various reasons) pretend that they're the opposite sex, and that the rest of us have to figure out how to relate to them. Then we can have a conversation about how different people think about that issue (e.g., do we use preferred pronouns etc.). That is something that my children will have to figure out and if they come out in a different place than me then that's okay.
What I would like to avoid is my children seriously considering whether *they* are transgender, and there I do feel like being around fewer (especially) same-age peers who have bought into that idea may be helpful. I think this is consistent with my desire that my children be exposed to serious intellectual ideas from a variety of perspectives. That kind of intellectual pluralism doesn't imply that it's healthy for children to be in an environment that prompts them to seriously consider various forms of self-harm -- e.g., I would similarly rather my children didn't find themselves seriously asking the question "should I cut off my limbs?".
Yes - even if transgenderism slides from grace, the belief system behind it will only go underground and throw up some further lunacy in a few years' time. So hoping for the best is definitely not my favourite option. In fact it enrages me when other parents adopt that approach by default. (These are your *kids*! Don't you care at all who's shitting in their minds?)
On the other hand, most be-childrened people where I'm living now aren't paying attention, but low-key aren't pro- this kind of stuff, so hopefully the company my offspring end up keeping won't be too bad of an influence.
My biggest concern right now is probably media. I believe that the same agenda going on in Disney, et al. is also being pushed in children's programming - and without any kind of indignant fan backlash that might check its progress.
My current thinking is that I might just fill a hard drive with a few thousand hours of the TV shows that I remember from my own childhood, and restrict the child's options to that. (We ourselves don't have a TV in the house, or any kind of streaming service subscription, so that makes it a lot easier.)
I would do the same with children's books, but it's a bit harder because we see a lot of those being sold at fairs and the like, and when a child is old enough they'll start wanting them of their own accord. I always stop and flick through a couple, and I would say maybe one in three includes some kind of progressive sensibilities I don't like.
I actually think there's an awful lot of value sitting on YouTube. I'm thinking of scraping a few hundred channels - things like Veritasium, Colin Furze, etc - which are great content. It's not fair on the content creators, of course, but I am not interested in giving my child unsupervised access to Youtube proper.
> what point a child is intellectually robust enough to begin reading bad/enemy ideas
Many (most?) ideas are bad, but I'm hesitant to label any ideas as 'enemy'.
> while the transgender meme... society might eventually become "immunised" to it
The fact that plenty of seemingly-intelligent college kids call themselves communists ~30 years after that was definitively proven to be a terrible ideology suggests to me that such immunization is not guaranteed - I suspect it's not even coin-toss odds.
> I'm hesitant to label any ideas as 'enemy'
I'm comfortable giving that label to ideas that advance the interests of the propagating party at the cost of the receiving one.
For example, a fair minded guy talking about class economics or gender politics might say a bunch of stuff and a lot of it could be wrong. As that guy gains life experience and builds better models of the world, he's going to change his mind and become less wrong.
But a class warrior telling just-so stories that spread resentment towards the factory bosses, or a lesbian feminist teaching a classroom full of young boys to hate themselves, I would count as enemy ideas. Both those individuals are *not* dumb and would gain no benefit from changing their behaviour. (It is a *good* idea to teach self-limiting beliefs to people whose own interests conflict with yours.)
But they are clearly doing something malign, from the perspective of the people receiving the memes.
EDIT: A non-political example of an enemy idea: "This nice salesman is offering me a deal but the offer isn't open for long so I gotta decide right now - well as he says, sometimes you just have to Follow Your Heart because after all you only live once."
> I'm comfortable giving that label to ideas that advance the interests of the propagating party at the cost of the receiving one.
Well argued. You've changed my position, thank you. Looking back, I think my former position was an over-generalization of my heuristic that we should be slow to label people as enemies (far too often people see even the majority of their own countrymen as 'enemies', which seems quite bad to me), but you're right that ideas that match that definition are enemy ideas.
> plenty of seemingly-intelligent college kids call themselves communists
You're not wrong. But I'd allege that in Victorian times when these ideas were first proposed, we not only didn't know how it would go, but we didn't even have concepts of groupthink, organisational incentive structures, or the free market as a discoverer of value. Those ideas probably existed, but they weren't arrayed out there in the public consciousness, ready to hand to explain what communism was doing wrong.
Which is why back then it was the brightest minds of the realm expounding the ideology, not just idiot college kids.
"Those ideas probably existed, but they weren't arrayed out there in the public consciousness, ready to hand to explain what communism was doing wrong."
Read up on Bastiat and especially his debate with Proudhon. A sincere recommendation of a great man, who did great work. In the 1840s.
+1 to the recommendation on Bastiat. Reading his work and comparing it to the Communist Manifesto (roughly contemporaneous), it's hard not to get the feeling that Marx was by far a lessor mind.
One of the things I most remember from ACOUP is how he said that the Roman model of governance was "find the most virtuous people and put them in charge". If things go wrong, it means your leaders weren't virtuous enough. They had no concept of designing institutions to work with flawed humans because it just wasn't part of the intellectual water like it is today.
Its a fairly Christian idea: all are sinners, and fallen short of the glory of God and all that.
I should point out that from an evolutionary perspective, "my daddy told me that was bad" is just about the best possible reason to reject something.
The reason for this is that culture transmitted from parent to child must be helpful to the family, because it reproduces when they do. Culture transmitted from peer to peer is free to be harmful to its hosts.
There was a blogger, EvolutionistX, who coined terminology that focused this difference, referring to vertically transmitted culture as "mitochondrial memes" and horizontally transmitted culture as "viral memes".
> I remember reading someone suggest that we teach all kids to be Flat Earthers at 15, so they have the experience of finding later on that it doesn't add up and realising that some strongly held beliefs can be bullshit.
This is already a pretty conventional strategy, called "Santa Claus".
I would rather like to cheat evolution, by having all of my kids survive and reproduce without allowing dumb chance to kill them off in ways I could have prevented.
An adult becoming transgender just to rebel against their parents is unlikely, that’s more of a child social contagion thing. Your priority should be getting them to adulthood safely, and being able to accept that you will have little influence on whether they become woke or trans in the long run. Spending their childhood around Christians seems the best way to ensure they won’t have those values during childhood.
Top advice has some grounding in science, what follows is pure speculation. If you don’t want your children to rebel, there seems to be three keys. Give your children a happy childhood, be someone your child likes, and don’t lie to them. Every adult I met that has rebelled had one of those traits, and all three are decently in your control. The trickiest one is not lying, because I’ve met adults who consider just being raised Christian to be lying, since they became atheist.
If I suspect I have mild autism making it more difficult to make and keep friends, is it worth visiting a psychiatrist to maybe get a diagnosis? Is there anything practical they can offer that would actually help? And should I be worried that a formal diagnosis would make me less employable or more likely to be involuntarily committed?
Has anyone in the history of the world been involuntarily committed for having mild autism? Are you kidding?
People have been involuntarily committed for saying true things to psychiatrists when they were supposed to tell the socially expected lies (e.g. rounding off your occasional existential musings to "No of course I do not ever have suicidal thoughts"). And autistic people are at least somewhat more likely to miss the fact that society expects them to lie about something.
I agree that this risk is probably very low in this context, but it isn't zero.
I can't see why you would be involuntarily committed for autism unless you think you have some other issue as well, or unless you are extremely anxious and worried about such things.
It might not be any harm to see someone about such anxiety.
I have a general unfamiliarity with the mental health system, such that I do not know whether "has a diagnosis for a mental illness, nevermind that it's totally unrelated" is enough to shift an edge case to the other side . Hopefully I won't get into any edge cases, but I'm pessimistic enough about what the gains could be that even a mild downside is worth considering.
In that case, note that our host is a professional psychiatrist with significant experience with the inpatient mental health system, and has written an informative guide titled, well...
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/03/22/navigating-and-or-avoiding-the-inpatient-mental-health-system/
I’m sure other people will have better answers than mine, but I have mild autism myself, and in my personal experience: going to a therapist/psychologist if your autism makes you feel like crap is good, since it helps understanding better what is actually making your life difficult, etc. Someone with training in CBT could also help you improve your ability to make friends or do other stuff. In my case, doing all that involved getting a diagnosis: I showed up to my therapist because some things that turned out to be consequences of autism were making me miserable, and I had no clue why I was behaving like that, so the therapist thought that actually making sure whether it was autism or not was valuable. But in the general case, you can get therapy for "I’m crap at making friends and I think it’s because I’m autistic" without needing an actual diagnosis. I also don’t think you’d have to share your diagnosis with anyone, if you get diagnosed. Since being diagnosed doesn’t make your symptoms worse, you’re still as employable as without a diagnosis. At any rate, discrimination against high-functioning ASD isn’t that massive, compared to other disorders? So, overall, I don’t think there’s really anything wrong with getting a diagnosis. On the other hand, I talked about therapists while you talked about psychiatrists: if your therapist is properly trained, in psychology, maybe CBT, etc., the only advantages of seeing a psychiatrist instead is that the psychiatrist can give medication, focuses more on treating disorders rather than on managing them, and is (even) more expensive. So, for uncomplicated autism, which can’t be ‘cured’, there’s not much point in seeing one. It is also slightly easier for a psychiatrist to involuntarily commit you, but that doesn’t matter as much as you seem to think: both would be pretty much legally obliged to commit you if you say you intend to kill yourself and won’t change your mind (and some are more or less willing to take risks on that front), but no one will commit you just for being mildly autistic (once again, a diagnosis doesn’t make your symptoms worse: if you’re not crazy right now, you still won’t be if you get diagnosed! :-) )
Thank you, this is helpful.
I don’t have the same issues as you, but I’ve seen psychiatrists for a while. I could envision an SSRI being helpful for someone like you. It’s helped me to lower my anxiety and neuroticism which improved my social fluidity. I feel more like a normal person now.
Do you work for the federal government or another highly regulated industry? If not, I wouldn’t be worried about it affecting your employment. They won’t involuntarily commit you unless you’re a danger to yourself or others.
I had a fairly traumatic life event happen recently. It's made me think about whether I'm really leading the life I want to. I fill my life with lots of fun and educational media, and I value learning new skills a lot. I play several instruments and have several other hobbies, and I love getting better at these things. I'm a very successful software engineer at a big big tech company, building very niche systems, striving for operational efficiency and delivery of small new features.
But it almost feels like I'm filling my life with valueless hobbies, and wasting my time. These fill my time and keep me busy and somewhat happy, but they don't really make the world a better place or bring me closer to the people I love.
I wonder if I should be doing something greater with my life, to try to make the world actively better, instead of just existing in it. There must be something I can do. I feel like I worked so hard to become an engineer in big tech, and my skill set includes management skills, design and coding skills, and business skills. I'd like to leverage those skills in some way. How did one leverage skills such as these to try to do something that is more impactful? The sheer magnitude of the question paralyzes me, and I never end up making progress on it
These sort of traumatic life examination-prompting events happen every few years, and I usually just eventually go back to existing and doing what I'm doing. I don't know if that is if either me getting over the trauma which allows me to go back to normal, or if it is me chickening out from a greater calling, choosing a selfish comfortable and non impactful life over trying to actually make the world better. I have had also many traumatic (in a different way) events in the past that have ended up making me scared about my ability to maintain my life as is, so striking out on something new (especially if I don't even know what it is) is extra terrifying to me.
Edit: Thanks for the replies so far, everyone! I'm trying to sort out my own feelings right now, and what I feel is impactful. I also agree with many of you, that it might be enough just to have a good life with family, and not hurt people. That's how I've generally lived so far, but what if I wanted to go further than just that? I guess maybe part of these traumatic experiences are making me believe that fostering (not necessarily romantic) love between people is the most important thing that I shouldn't lose track of, and extending people's lives so that they can feel each other's love as long as possible, or making it so that people can more easily care for others in some way. I want to do something that helps people live longer, or reduces suffering in the world by allowing people to better care for those they love. I don't really want to go into healthcare tech, though, because it's a total nightmare of legacy systems and red tape. Maybe that's just indication that there be dragons in the whole notion of "making people live longer", and it's not worth trying.
I too work in Big Tech and frequently have the same problem. Some vague thoughts:
Thinking "I will change and improve the world!" is not, generally, a good way to improve the world. Volunteering at a soup kitchen or similar hard work that must be done is more likely to be helpful and is much more achievable.
Similarly, spending more time with your friends and family - real, in-person time, not everyone staring at their smartphones - will probably make you happier and more fulfilled. This can be difficult, especially for people in Big Tech, but it's also incredibly valuable.
And finally, try making something physical with your own two hands. I've noticed that working with bits makes me feel tired and unmoored, while working with atoms makes me feel more satisfied and centered. I work with textiles, and it just feels good to make something beautiful and functional that I can touch and will be around for many years. Humans spent hundreds of thousands of years working with physical objects and we find it satisfying in ways that moving colored lights on a screen is not. So maybe give that a try.
I actually do all 3 of those things. I just think maybe I could better leverage my actual skills to have more impact
Anecdotally, a similar feeling for me (common on weekends in college) went away once I got more regular exercise.
> I'm a very successful software engineer at a big big tech company
Unless you're doing something obviously parasitic (i.e. crypto scams), you are likely already improving the world more than the average person. Many problems of the past were solved more by gradually increasing wealth and automation than by people who set out to solve those problems explicitly. (E.g., consider the role of electrical appliances in women's liberation.)
It sounds like you have a nice, productive, stable, happy life. Don't throw it away just because your brain has some unscratched itch about the vast unexplored horizon. It's not up to you to fix the world. Learn to cultivate your garden.
If you feel that something is missing in your life, you shouldn't ignore that feeling. But it's not necessarily the first thing that comes to your mind that you are really missing. Often the feeling that something is missing is genuine, but the idea what exactly is missing is just a meme coming from your friends and culture.
Note that you can make the world a better place also by doing smaller things, and actually it might be better to start with smaller things and get some practice. (And by also donating some money to EA causes, so you can have both strategies in your portfolio.) As a software engineer, you also didn't start your career by trying to build the most complex software ever.
To achieve something, you usually need to cooperate with other people. But those will probably have ideas of their own. So maybe a good way is to listen to other people's dreams, and support them using your skills.
I've been going through something similar recently, so I can relate to a lot of what you say. I'm also a successful engineer in aerospace and was fortunate enough to live in several different countries and cultures. My thinking has been quite different though: I'm starting to feel that instead of trying to make the world better, I'd be happier and perhaps find more meaning if I just live with less big ambition and focus more on finding a lifestyle I actually want.
As for what you say, I can only advise that huge questions like this are impossible to ever answer in satisfactory way. It's better to instead ask what smaller changes you could make over the next few weeks and months. Instead of trying to change the world all at once, perhaps try changing something smaller first?
"But it almost feels like I'm filling my life with valueless hobbies, and wasting my time. These fill my time and keep me busy and somewhat happy, but they don't really make the world a better place or bring me closer to the people I love."
May I offer a counter? Don't try to "make a world a better place", there lie demons. If you strive not to hurt people around you, and mostly succeed, you are a good person already. Avoiding doing bad things is far more valuable and achievable than trying to "do good"...
Whichever action has value owing to impact, as you would judge, is not necessarily one that scales with your particular set of skills. Sites like 80000hours try to match skilled job seekers with "high impact" roles, so that may be of interest, but very often not if the desired skills don't match your preferences and experiences.
Giving to charity goes a long way. That's value, it saves lives. You may also volunteer locally, and as much as advocates say it "shouldn't" be about you, the predictor for whether one feels they're "wasting time" or not probably has to do with how much you like it. By which I mean: some people find tremendous value in receiving gratitude *in person*, in being around the people they help, and that's great, but it doesn't necessarily reflect the quantifiable impact of the work.
I think meaning and impact is the rationalization we use to explain our negative feelings, but that is rather abstract. Mostly I think it comes down to sense of social harmony. This is why if we're told that keypresses done miles away from everyone can save lives, our day-to-day still does not feel "meaningful", especially if the action involved is dull. The abstraction of people being helped somewhere out there is cold reassurance.
Maybe you just have unmet social needs. Speaking for myself, hobbies feel "pointless" when I'm too isolated, or if my actual job sucks. If you're a musician, start a band or join a jam group. If you're a writer, join a writer's group. Etc.
Do you have a wife and kids? For me having a family is the biggest way I'm impacting the future.
It may be worth spending time on the question, “what really matters to me?”
Maybe you don’t need to drastically change your life, if you find a cause that you’re passionate enough about that you can pour hours into work on it, on top of your existing job.
If you can’t find such a cause, maybe keep looking?
I think I'm in a similar situation to you (maybe less experienced), I'm out of university and a software engineer since 2018.
What you said resonates with me. Wanting to do good hit me like a truck in 2022 when spending a weekend with many people from LessWrong.
I've gotten involved with Effective Altruism over the last two years, and I'm happier than ever. I feel like I'm actually improving the world a tiny bit. Maybe check out 80,000 hours and see if their writings or podcast resonate with you: https://80000hours.org/
While you judge your options, you may find it worthwhile to make small talk with strangers. Because your concerned about making a better world, might as well get to know the space, the people.
Has anyone had the experience of learning and replicating what a normal brain feels like from a psychiatric medication? I have two examples.
1) I used to have really bad speaking anxiety (I would shake, my voice would crack etc). I got beta blockers prescribed and my talks suddenly went amazingly. But the weird thing was that I lost the anxiety completely because I no longer had the expectation of a bad experience. I ended up only using the beta blockers 3-4 times but have not had any issues for over a decade.
2) I was also diagnosed with ADHD a few years ago (standard forgetfulness, procrastination symptoms). I got prescribed concerta and was shocked at what it felt like to just sit down and do what I intended to for an hour. The adderal shortage eventually spilled over into concerta too and I haven’t managed to get medication in 6 months. The weird thing is though that I feel like I’m much more organized and able to stay on task than I was before I took the medicine. It feels like I’ve learned what a normal functioning brain is like and have somewhat managed to replicate that.
I’d be interested if there’s literature on the idea of training your brain by giving it the example of normality to mimic through medication.
That's an interesting idea, and seems intuitively plausible to me. An alternative explanation to your brain-training theory is that the person loses their dread of situations that used to cause them trouble, and no longer pictures themselves as someone who will end up in a swamp of confusion, and that alone is enough to keep them from relapsing.
On the other hand, in support of your brain training theory, here' are a couple of examples of brain training (though not brain training via drugs): After someone has had a first panic attack, they are much more likely to have further ones -- it's as though their brain has learned the way to that awful place. And a positive example: anorgasmic women who finally manage to have an orgasm have an easier time getting there from then on.
Later thought. On the other hand, there's actually research that tests your idea in one situation: People with phobias were given an anti-anxiety drug, and then presented with whatever they were scared of -- spiders, sirens, whatever. Those on the tranquilizers were in fact much less anxious and willing to tolerate higher and longer contact with the phobic stimulus. So the question was -- would that experience lead to their being less anxious around the phobic stimulus when they did not have an anti-anxiety med on board? And the answer was no. (I'm a psychologist, by the way.)
Anecdatum:
When I was first diagnosed with ADHD a decade ago, I went through three weeks of dose adjustment to dial in my Ritalin prescription. I still take it intermittently, but I’m convinced those three weeks of medication were enough to create lasting change (even more so if they had been combined with complementary therapy, as with ketamine and psilocybin - alas, I just got the pills.) There is clearly great value in experiencing a target state, as opposed to fumbling towards it based on verbal instructions. I literally did not know that it was possible to be calm and productive at the same time; now I cannot doubt that it is.
I’ve been on the fence about trying beta blockers for a while, with a vague hope that I might get experiential evidence to break the vicious circle of being nervous about being nervous about…
No literature to share, but this post has nudged me off the fence, so thank you!
How bad is the file draw effect?
Could there be important areas where the published data and unpublished point in completely different directions?
Should you ignore results if you think the alternative would not get published?
You should look for a meta-analysis with a funnel plot - if studies show an average result of X, then the individual studies should follow a normal distribution around X, some higher and some lower. If this distribution is heavily skewed to one side (everyone publishes results above X, nobody publishes below), then you have reason to suspect the file drawer effect.
I am thinking of things where the literature points to a weak effect which smart people would assume is null, but actually there is a strong effect in the opposite direction.
I thought the funnel plot showed the relationship between sample size and effect size. Of course everyone publishes results above X for very small (possibly negative) values of X that never actually occur, the question is whether larger sample sizes give results closer to X or further away.
Ever since I started reading ACX a few years ago, there's something I've been finding a bit bewildering and a bit disturbing, that comes up now and then in Scott's writing, more often in the comments, and absolutely saturates any Less Wrong discussion that is linked from here: the obsessive reference to "status".
The first few times I saw this I thought little of it. Then it became clear that it's a pretty ubiquitous concept in this rationalist community. I've been kind of expecting that my issues with this concept would be addressed eventually as I read through Scott's old posts and bits of the Sequences (although I find the latter a pain to read and absolutely hate the writing style, but that's a separate issue that I've complained about before). But I don't think they really have been. I have three main issues with the way "status" is discussed around here.
1. Where does the idea of status, and the extreme focus on it, come from? I'm assuming there is some post or series of posts that lays out the concept, defines it, and argues for its pervasive importance, and that the community's obsession with the concept follows from that. But I don't think I've seen this post linked. The "blue tribe red tribe" jargon comes from Scott's Outgroup post, which is linked constantly. Other foundational concepts like "tabbo your words" are routinely linked to their founding post. Where is the founding post on status? All I can gather is that it seems to mostly come from Robin Hanson, but every post I've seen from him, EY and Scott, all just seem to take this concept for granted and not define or argue for it. And so does everyone in the comments who talks about it.
2. Following on, what *is* the definition of status (as people here are using it)? It strikes me as a weirdly useless term by being far too vague and far too broad to be of much clarity. Does it mean power? Respect and prestige from society? Having individual people personally like you? Being morally approved of? All of these are completely different things and "status" seems to sloppily lump them all together. One reason this is annoying is that more precise forms of status have much clearer definitions and are much easier to talk about. For example "power" has various clear definitions in political science; one I've often seen is "A has power over B if A can cause B to do something B does not want to do". That's a very clear concept that can be analysed in depth.
Another reason this is annoying is that the discussions about status can seem to be about one thing but actually be about another thing. The people talking about status often seem to introduce it as an important concept for the functioning of society, like they're basically talking about power. But much of the resulting discussion comes across as incredibly trivial, like a banal self-help book: how to be a boss, how to dominate people and achieve your goals, how to "achieve success" (vomit). Worse, sometimes it seems like what they're *really* talking about is sex, what with all the focus on reproductive fitness, and this makes it even creepier, like "wait, the whole time this was really just about how to seduce people?" (Note: I'm in no way calling it creepy to openly discuss sex, and don't want to endorse any kind of censorship of free discussion; it's only creepy or disturbing when it's done surreptitiously. If you want to discuss PUA-style "advice", by all means do so but do so *honestly*, and don't pretend you're talking about something else).
3. But the main thing that disturbs me here is that whenever discussions of status come up, all notions of morality seem to completely disappear. It's as if everyone becomes a moral nihilist (or an advocate of Master Morality or Objectivism) the moment they start talking about status. People talk about how this or that form of expressing romantic interest is high-status or low-status, or how X can be used to increase your status, or what behaviours can make you higher status than another person (even someone close to you) and I'm waiting for someone, *anyone*, to say that a person who treats all their interactions as struggles for status, even with friends and family and romantic interests, is, um, a bad person. Right??? Or, if they're consequentialists and have no concept of moral character, at least focus on using an understanding of status to do good, to prevent high-status people from getting away with their crap. Not simply to advance your own self-interest.
I get the sense that the attitude behind this is often a kind of cynical "everyone is *really* concerned with increasing their status, and if they think they're not they're just deceiving themselves". For one thing this radical claim requires, I think, *far* more evidence than is usually provided. But more importantly, I just can't comprehend the kind of person who responds to the revelation that almost everyone around them is a manipulative hypocrite, not with an angry "I'm going to expose these disgusting hypocrites", not with "let's try to create a rigorous rational method to keep people moral and honest", not even with a depressed "people are all horrible and you can't trust anyone", but with an enthusiastic "great, *I* can be a manipulative, dominating hypocrite as well!" Just...who thinks like that? That's how these discussions usually look to me, like I'm seeing a conversation among sociopaths. It's...kind of...completely terrifying. Unless I'm misunderstanding something fundamental.
(By comparison, there's a group of very prominent people who almost everyone agrees do everything with a sole concern for raising their status: politicians. The reaction of most people is to either adopt permanent distrust and dislike for politicians, or to advocate burning the whole political system to the ground. *Not* to happily become like a politician themselves.)
Can anyone shed some light on this rationalist weirdness?
> But more importantly, I just can't comprehend the kind of person who responds to the revelation that almost everyone around them is a manipulative hypocrite, not with an angry "I'm going to expose these disgusting hypocrites", not with "let's try to create a rigorous rational method to keep people moral and honest", not even with a depressed "people are all horrible and you can't trust anyone", but with an enthusiastic "great, *I* can be a manipulative, dominating hypocrite as well!" Just...who thinks like that?
You've already got a lot of good responses to other parts of your comment so I just want to concentrate on this particular part.
I am someone who tends to model people as status-maximisers but I don't think they're being manipulative hypocrites, I think they're being blind puppets led around by instincts they don't understand and aren't conscious of. They quite honestly think to themselves "I want to become a doctor so I can help people" instead of "I want to become a doctor so that I have high status in social interactions".
Or they quite honestly think to themselves "I should spend twenty thousand dollars on this watch because I find all the tiny gears to be beautiful" instead of "I should spend twenty thousand dollars on this watch so that I have high status in social interactions".
I know that my mind craves social status just the same way that I know my body craves sugar. By understanding how this works, I don't seek to conquer my desire, I just want to make sure I'm diverting that desire in good and healthy ways that don't hurt me or anyone else.
The best introduction I ever got was Zvi's book review of "The Elephant In The Brain": https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/12/31/book-review-the-elephant-in-the-brain/. In short:
1. The study of status in this community came from Robin Hanson. Like David Friedman, he analyzes things from the economist's point of view. One of the key pillars of that point of view is signalling. A signalling based view of the world is far more understandable & useful to people like us (noticeably autistic) than the standard explanations for why normal people do what they do. E.g. from https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/13/book-review-legal-systems-very-different-from-ours/:
"Whenever I read a book by anyone other than David Friedman about a foreign culture, it sounds like “The X’wunda give their mother-in-law three cows every monsoon season, then pluck out their own eyes as a sacrifice to Humunga, the Volcano God”.
And whenever I read David Friedman, it sounds like “The X’wunda ensure positive-sum intergenerational trade by a market system in which everyone pays the efficient price for continued economic relationships with their spouse’s clan; they demonstrate their honesty with a costly signal of self-mutilation that creates common knowledge of belief in a faith whose priests are able to arbitrate financial disputes.”."
It's a very productive framework; you can apply it not just to other societies, but your own (which are paradoxically the hardest to understand, because you can't look at them with fresh eyes). And you learn something each time. E.g. Why do politicial movements on social media struggle with doing stupid & counterproductive things (e.g. infighting, unironically supporting positions beyond parody, being generally insane) almost deliberately? Perhaps because it actually pays off for the people being stupid:
"You are married, and want to take your spouse out to a romantic dinner. You could choose a place you both love, or a place that only they love. You choose the place you don’t love, so they will know how much you love them. After all, you didn’t come here for the food.
A middle manager must choose how to improve widget production. He can choose a policy that improperly maintains the factory and likely eventually poisons the water supply, or a policy that would prevent that at no additional cost. He knows that when he is up for promotion, management will want to know the higher ups can count on him to make the quarterly numbers look good and not concern himself with long term issues or what consequences might fall on others. If he cared about not poisoning the water supply, he would not be a reliable political ally. Thus, he chooses the neglectful policy.
A politician can choose between two messages that affirm their loyalty: Advocating a beneficial policy, or advocating a useless and wasteful policy. They choose useless, because the motive behind advocating a beneficial policy is ambiguous. Maybe they wanted people to benefit!
...
What these examples have in common is that there is a strictly better action and a strictly worse action, in terms of physical consequences. In each case, the protagonist chooses the worse action because it is worse.
This choice is made as a costly signal. In particular, to avoid motive ambiguity.
If you choose something better over something worse, you will be suspected of doing so because it was better rather than worse.
If you choose something worse over something better, not only do you show how little you care about making the world better, you show that you care more about people noticing and trusting this lack of caring. It shows your values and loyalties."
(from https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/L6Ktf952cwdMJnzWm/motive-ambiguity)
2: What is status then? We have why status, but what is status? Other people have given the technical definitions about Dominance vs. Prestige, but I'll give you the practical definition I use in my daily life: Status is Weirdness Points (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wkuDgmpxwbu2M2k3w/you-have-a-set-amount-of-weirdness-points-spend-them-wisely). The more Status you have, the more weirdness you can get away with. High status people can be themselves & be applauded for it, low status people get to pick between crushing peer pressure or crushing loneliness (or both).
(But this of course is the perspective of a borderline autistic person; for a stereotypical "Mean Girls"-style highschool bully, I'd imagine status is more of a weapon than a defence to them, something you use to beat up people rather than protect against being beaten. Or for a group leader, I'd imagine they'd view it as like money: everyone wants it, you can make people do what you want by handing it out, as the "government" you can print it out [but watch out for inflation!], and it tends to cause a lot of fights if you're not careful. Status is social currency, basically.)
3: So why does everyone talk so amorally when they talk about status? Because we're trying to understand people (well, normal people specifically, the most baffling kind to those like us), not judge them. It's the "Is-Ought" gap: this is how people behave, this is *why* they tend to behave that way, but moralizing about what they "ought" to do doesn't enter into it.
(Mind you, as far as I can tell basically everyone who talks about it in such horifically amoral terms does so because they disapprove of it and wishes life wasn't that way... but like Machiavelli, it does no good to criticize power the way it's been criticized a thousand times before. You have to dissect it so people can see for themselves what it's like on the inside. *Then* they can be horrified with fresh eyes.)
(Or if you prefer, us autistics are so bad at this sort of social thing that it appears to us as some sort of as some alien abomination you need to clinically dissect on the operating table, because it really is that alien to us. Dissecting it so is how we vent our frustrations & master our fear through the illusion of understanding & control... if you want to be uncharitable.)
BELATED EDIT: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1ccovje/comment/l17xvgc/ is an example of why it's good for us autistic people to talk about this sort of thing & share how we understand the allistic world (if we don't, who will?):
u/pleasedothenerdful
• 3h ago
I'm an undiagnosed but very likely autistic person without many friends, and I'm pretty sure that when I die, an autopsy will reveal that "most people intuitively understand that it's impolite to hold anyone to anything they say, ever. We don't say things because they are true, we say things to impress others and mark our territory and identify our tribe. Speech is not a contract; speech is a birdsong," was actually engraved on my bones.
That statement feels true on an almost scriptural level.
Obviously, it's a little hyperbolic, but on the other hand it also perfectly describes almost every conversation I've ever awkwardly excused myself from and also every time the conversation circle I was quietly a part of suddenly and mysteriously evaporated around me and then equally mysteriously recondensed a short distance away.
I'm kind of sitting here trying not to be actively furious that in 42 years nobody ever sat me down and explained this so concisely.
To me it seems that most people are obsessed with status, they just have a taboo against discussing it explicitly. People competing instead of cooperating even when there is little to win; celebrity gossip; people comparing themselves to others, feeling unhappy when they lose, and attacking the losers when they win; worrying about what the others will think of you; the instinctive desire to "worship" some leader or guru; unwillingness to admit a mistake even when the denial seems silly -- from my perspective, these are all weird and often harmful behaviors, and yet people seemingly can't stop doing them. And when you explicitly describe what they are doing, people get offended, and yet they can't stop doing it.
I want to understand how the world functions, and I see that I have a certain form of blindness, because these instincts are much weaker in me, and then people often surprise me, usually in an unpleasant way. The framework of "status" seems to explain a lot of that. Yeah, I am probably *talking* about it a lot more than an average person, but I am *doing* it much less. The only reason I am talking about it is to understand why other people are doing what they do.
A funny thing is that, politically, the right embraces the concept of status hierarchies, while the left in theory talks a lot about how hierarchies need to be eliminated... but in practice, if you look at a group of leftists, you usually see an obvious pecking order. People who just naturally treat others as equals are not really successful at politics.
Status has two basic forms, called dominance and prestige. Dominance is when you are afraid that someone might hurt you if you make them angry. Prestige is when you admire someone. High dominance: Stalin; high prestige: Einstein.
If you don't like talking about how to achieve success, how do you like the opposite, such as seeing good ideas rejected only because they came from the wrong person? I find the actual *practice* of status way more disgusting that debating the theory; and the practice is all around me when I start paying attention.
Status is not just about sex, although ultimately all human instincts are somehow related to reproduction -- otherwise, how could evolution have created them? By the way, "creepy" and "low-status" are almost synonyms, so you are using the concept of status to criticize debating the very concept. But I agree with your judgment -- people who discuss status explicitly are usually the ones who fail to understand it instinctively, which usually means that they fail to get it.
I think you may be confusing "promoting immorality" with "pointing out that other people are immoral". (Is/ought distinction.) It is definitely my opinion that people who treat everything as a status competition are horrible beings! I also think that most people are like this instinctively. And I am not different because I am a saint, but merely because my instinct is broken. I do not want to make a status competition out of everything. Heck, I suck at status competitions. But I have learned that it makes sense to assume that other people will make a status competition out of everything.
Being seen by others as low-status sucks. At worst, it means that they feel free to hurt you, and consider it quite funny. At best, it means that they dismiss all your ideas without even listening to them. The best option would be to stop doing that. The less people do this, the more I like them. The second best option is to make sure that your status is... at least average. Just avoid the worst mistakes. It is a stupid game, but sadly you sometimes play for real prizes, and it sucks to lose.
So many good responses, and I have lots to say some of which is to everyone (which the threaded structure makes difficult) and some of which is specific responses. I'll probably mix up the responses to some people's points in responses to others, so apologies in advance.
I'll start with you because I remember we've talked about status before.
First, (and this is a serious point not a joke) who is expressing higher status in a thread like this? Am I lower status by begging for an answer to a question, or higher status by bringing up a topic and causing people to discuss it, or a mixture? By replying to you first, am I giving you status, or recognising your existing status, or begging you for status, or something else entirely? It seems that if one is going to read status into every interaction there need to be answers to these questions. And I haven't got a clue which way this would supposedly go if we're not (as I'd naively assume) discussing as equals, or perhaps arguing as equals.
Second, following on from that, isn't thinking about status a bit of a potential infohazard? Like a postmodernist who starts deconstructing everything they see, or someone who takes determinism too seriously, or Marxism, or feminism, or Jewish conspiracy theory, etc etc? I can't imagine thinking like I did in the above paragraph, constantly every day, without going insane.
Third, some specific points, some of which apply to other people's responses too.
"To me it seems that most people are obsessed with status, they just have a taboo against discussing it explicitly."
Yes, this is probably true to some extent. But at the same time, this can so easily lead into "if you say you're not an X, well an X *would* say that!" that is the source of every extremist's thinking. Where X can be "racist", "serving the devil" or "maximising your status". I just think this kind of thinking should be approached with FAR greater care and caution than it often is.
"People competing instead of cooperating even when there is little to win; celebrity gossip; people comparing themselves to others, feeling unhappy when they lose, and attacking the losers when they win; worrying about what the others will think of you; the instinctive desire to "worship" some leader or guru; unwillingness to admit a mistake even when the denial seems silly -- from my perspective, these are all weird and often harmful behaviors, and yet people seemingly can't stop doing them."
I feel like half of these aren't necessarily about status at all, and the other half could just as easily be phrased as being about "pride". It seems to me that talk of pride instead of status would not only be more intelligible to the uninitiated, but would also signal much more clearly that these behaviours are (usually) bad. You could even say it's a higher-status way if talking about status!
"A funny thing is that, politically, the right embraces the concept of status hierarchies, while the left in theory talks a lot about how hierarchies need to be eliminated..."
This is definitely true of the far-right and far-left, but the centre-right is more likely to ignore status, and the centre-left to explicitly see it everywhere, to the extent of calling "free speech" and "free markets" positions not only things that in practice propagate status, but things one could only possibly support for status-protecting reasons. Which I don't think is a constructive way of discussing them.
"By the way, "creepy" and "low-status" are almost synonyms, so you are using the concept of status to criticize debating the very concept."
That's an insightful point. I agree that words like "creepy", "sleazy", "base" and so on are ways of saying low-status, and that's the point of them! A central part of the project of civilisation is creating moral taboos against self-serving animalistic behaviour that is bad for society as a whole, e.g. promiscuity. This involves shaming the doers of these things, originally in explicitly moral terms, but as shared moral principles unravel we're left with only vaguely defined status-based insults to discourage those things. Thus I (unconsciously) reached for one of the latter instead of a term like "immoral" which in the context of sex would likely cause people to dismiss me as a preacher.
I wonder: do you think further weakening these taboos (by explicitly identifying their status-basis, which is all that's left) is a good thing for society? What about for even more destructive behaviours like lying and cheating? If moral language has no pull with someone, and all you've got is status-language, is deconstructing the latter good on consequentialist terms? These are serious not rhetorical questions, and I don't know the answers myself.
"I think you may be confusing "promoting immorality" with "pointing out that other people are immoral". (Is/ought distinction.)"
As I said in a follow-up, I was never saying that. I only want more discussions like this one, explicitly talking morality, and questioning the moral and practical uses of the concept of status on a meta-level.
"Being seen by others as low-status sucks. At worst, it means that they feel free to hurt you, and consider it quite funny. At best, it means that they dismiss all your ideas without even listening to them."
I'm just not sure how consistently true this is. What looks like a total counterexample is martyrdom. The martyr accepts the absolute lowest status possible, is humiliated, rejected, tortured and killed...and both him and his ideas typically gain *unimaginably* high status in later years or centuries.
More narrowly, some of the most (eventually) powerful and renowned people are those who can genuinely say "for a long time they all laughed at me", which increases both their power and credibility. Wheras people who are clearly trying to maximise their status from the start get far less respect even if they win, and if they lose get *completely* despised and forgotten.
Basically, it seems like some people here are "discovering" that the world runs on Master Morality, which arguably hasn't been true for a millenium or two. Focusing on Slave Morality (as a positive thing, or if you prefer "Christian morality" in the secular sense) may be a better way of becoming a master, even if you don't see its intrinsic moral value. Or, if you want to actually follow Nietzsche, you should be rejecting *both*.
I'm not convinced that the martyr gains high status centuries later. More often, some caricature and associated bundle of ideas tenuously related to the original martyr gains status. Occasionally the caricature is less cartoonish, but even then the status seems to accrue mostly to the institution and its ends.
First of all, thank you for posting your question. This has been a useful clarifying discussion for me as well.
> I feel like half of these aren't necessarily about status at all, and the other half could just as easily be phrased as being about "pride". It seems to me that talk of pride instead of status would not only be more intelligible to the uninitiated
And part of Viliam's reply (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-325/comment/54044542)
> it seems to me that pride is basically "claiming high status because of your (supposed) strengths"
I agree that use of "status" in the LW diaspora could sometimes be rephrased in a more familiar-sounding way with "pride" and other evaluative adjectives. An attempt at rough equivalencies (treating status as binary for ease):
-portraying yourself as if low status: humble
-portraying yourself as if high status when truly high status: self-assured
-portraying yourself as if high status when truly low status: pretentious
-portraying yourself as if high status, whether truly or not, in a way that is ignorant of norms/context about self-portrayal: arrogant
-portraying yourself as if high status, whether true or false, and deserving of that high status: proud
I also agree with B Civil (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-325/comment/54035285) that optimizing-for-community, with status following this, is a useful way of seeing a lot of status-related behaviors. Following this thread, we can then get ourselves confused about the relationship between status and identity - another would-be master concept for human interaction. (If anyone has written anything concise but useful about this, I would appreciate a pointer to where!)
One other point: status might have slightly more explanatory power in some cultures than in others (https://twitter.com/kaidi_wu/status/1778461270532047207). If true, this could be for long-term reasons and/or reflecting the length of time since scarcity was widespread.
> First, (and this is a serious point not a joke) who is expressing higher status in a thread like this?
Ah, I usually do not analyze these things in such detail, so I will try my best here but I have little practice.
As I understand it, we need to distinguish between the current *situation* and the *moves* that individual players are making. Imagine chess: we distinguish between which player has an advantage right now, which player made a good move, and which player ultimately wins the same. For example, you can make some good moves, but lose anyway, because your opponent made even better moves. And I suppose the moves can be mixed, like one could simultaneously show that they consider their own status to be relatively high, but not too high. (And I am aware that the more caveats you add, the less falsifiable the theory becomes. I do not claim to be actually good at analyzing this.)
So, you asking the question is a mixed signal. On one hand, it requires some courage to make a top-level comment on Scott's blog. Not much, but I can easily imagine a person too shy to do that. Someone who would be like "oh, it seems like some very smart people are debating here, and I am not one of them, they would probably laugh at me if I wrote something". By making the comment you signal that you are *not* this shy person, and you consider yourself at least equal to the people who are debating here. Setting the topic of the debate is a high-status move. You even go further and suggest that rationalists are wrong about something. I am sure you meant it completely factually, but the social norm is that saying that someone else is wrong is equivalent to claiming higher status than them. But you mitigate it by making it a question, instead of e.g. just saying that everyone is an idiot. -- I guess, the analysis concludes that you are claiming status, but not too much.
Similarly, I claim high status by replying to you, actually quite dismissively. (Sorry for that, it was a midnight post, I didn't have the capacity to reflect on that. Talking to someone else like that in a different context could easily get me in a conflict, where I would be surprised why the other person is suddenly so hostile to me. This is why ignoring status is not a safe option.) Again, somewhat mitigated by admitting weakness, but it was a status claiming move regardless.
You, replying to me, respectfully, and even taking my proposal seriously, are giving me high status. Moves are about (1) claiming or giving (2) high or low status.
"Discussing like equals" in practice means that our moves are balanced. The polite version is giving each other high status. But, technically speaking, two people hurling insults at each other at a similar rate are also discussing like equals.
> Second, following on from that, isn't thinking about status a bit of a potential infohazard?
It definitely is. Just reflecting on our discussion from this perspective made me feel bad. On the other hand, never reflecting on my interactions from this perspective could easily make me come off as arrogant (which would hurt me in long term; I have seen that happening to other people). So... I guess it is best to only think about these things sometimes (about the long-term trends in relationships), plus when something goes wrong? Also, you need to thing about these things more when communicating with people who are more sensitive to this.
> [claiming that people have a taboo against discussing status explicitly] can so easily lead into "if you say you're not an X, well an X *would* say that!"
Yeah, so the specific prediction is that when you start discussing status explicitly (in general, not talking specifically about people present in the room), many people will react with hostility (as opposed to mere calm disagreement or boredom). They will not just consider you wrong or the topic uninteresting; they will call you a bad person for discussing the topic.
> It seems to me that talk of pride instead of status would not only be more intelligible to the uninitiated, but would also signal much more clearly that these behaviours are (usually) bad.
Yes, talking about pride would be more specific, which usually makes the discussion more sane. But if we dig deeper, why are people proud, what is the difference between pride and factually talking about your strengths, etc... it seems to me that pride is basically "claiming high status because of your (supposed) strengths". This explains why e.g. people overestimate their strengths (because that makes the status claim stronger), why they get angry if you correct them even if you are right (because you just indirectly lowered their status).
> do you think further weakening these taboos (by explicitly identifying their status-basis, which is all that's left) is a good thing for society? [...] If moral language has no pull with someone, and all you've got is status-language, is deconstructing the latter good on consequentialist terms?
Deconstructing useful mechanisms is harmful, at least in short term; and in long term it depends on whether a better alternative is created. But sometimes the existing mechanisms hurt innocent people as a side effect. (I don't want to discuss Peterson's "chaos and order" here, but basically that applies here.) If some behaviors are harmful, I would prefer to call them "harmful". But I guess the word "immoral" basically means that someone in the past has concluded that certain behaviors are harmful and therefore should be suppressed.
It seems like specific words make the situation clearer to discuss. When you call something "harmful", the natural question is to ask what kind of harm is caused and to whom. Calling something "immoral", the natural question is... uhm, according to which moral system? If you say "according to the Bible" and I am an atheist, why should that be relevant for me? If you say "according to the majority of people", I can find examples where the majority was wrong, or where the majority has changed its mind. Discussing whether something is "immoral" quickly deflects the debate to something abstract and not closely related.
On the other hand, discussing whether something is "harmful" invites clever lawyering. (What harm is there if I cheat on my wife if she never finds out? Is it okay to commit crimes for the greater good?) Calling something "immoral" expresses the cultural wisdom that these things usually have bad consequences, even when people believe that they have a good excuse and "this time it is different".
> The martyr accepts the absolute lowest status possible, is humiliated, rejected, tortured and killed...and both him and his ideas typically gain *unimaginably* high status in later years or centuries.
There are two different forms of status: dominance and prestige. From the perspective of dominance, to lose and to be killed is to lose the status. From the perspective of prestige, this is irrelevant. Killing John Lennon doesn't make his music less popular. In case of religion, dying for the idea can be seen as a very costly service to the community, that's the thing that generates prestige.
I am not familiar with Nietzsche, so I am not sure about the connotations of the master/slave morality. There is an aspect of "service to others" in prestige, but... it doesn't feel appropriate to call a rock star a "slave", even if he serves the community of his fans by making the songs. Or how Einstein served humanity by discovering relativity.
1. Huh? I don't even see how you could call your previous reply dismissive. It was long and addressed respectfully many of my points. If there's dismissiveness there, I didn't and still don't notice it.
2. I think I see your point (and others' points in this thread) about the need to have an explicit model of status if your project is a proper analysis of implicit social phenomena. So I'm convinced on that.
However...I'm still very iffy about consciously considering status (that is, in terms of that word or similar words) while interacting with people (real, online or otherwise). Two problems. One--you risk legitimising the struggle for status (whether in your own mind or to your social circle, e.g. online rationalists) to an extent far beyond what might be considered morally legitimate when status is kept solely implicit. Two--it may be unnecessary: to avoid offending others, seen as arrogant, and so on, there are a huge array of explicit *moral* codes, theories, etc, to choose from. Some of them have existed for hundreds or thousands of years. They have a level of social respect that self-helping theories of status will never have. They have been refined and tested for a long time. And they have value even if they fail (at least if you're not a moral nihilist).
Using explicit status models for your interactions instead of explicit moral theories or codes, strikes me as like trying to play basketball by calculating the equations of the ball's trajectory, or trying to play chess by calculating every possible game from every position. For an AI, that may be the best way, and if we're talking about alignment then yes I definitely see the value of status models. But if we're talking about people, doesn't it seem like you (a) risk doing morally bad things and (b) risk actually losing status (by looking slimy and selfish) by using status thinking on an everyday basis?
3. Regarding people reacting with hostility...that just seems to me perfectly explicable for the same reasons as the other reactions. Assume people *aren't* motiviated by status, and there's no taboo because there's nothing to taboo: why wouldn't people get angry if you advance a cynical theory that most people are always seeking status? Why wouldn't they feel personally attacked, even if you're not mentioning them specifically? Why wouldn't they perhaps assume that by advancing this theory you're revealing nothing about other people's motivations (because you don't know them), but you *are* revealing your own something about your own (unpleasant) way of interacting with people?
4. You may be right about pride. I vaguely feel like there are other ways of defining pride without recourse to status, but I can't think of them and they may not exist.
5. I agree with you about the way social mechanisms can hurt innocent people, especially if they're not explicitly acknowledged. This reminds me of the reasonable!feminist claim that sexual moral judgements fall harder on women than on men. This is a good reason to be critical of existing standards. But the proposed change from both feminists and rationalists seems to always be to achieve equality (either between men and women or between high- and low-status people of either sex) by further liberalising or abolishing the moral standards. And never by toughening them so they constrain all groups equally. When you consider that high-status people are likely to do well in a free environment where they can leverage their status, and that rules are created often to constrain destructive high-status behaviour, I think there's reason to approach this with great care. (The "rules" here, of course, are implicit ways of making certain behaviours low-status.)
6. Regarding "immoral" I was pretty consciously thinking from a virtue-ethical perspective in my original post. There's a bit of circularity here: I say seduction-game stuff is "creepy", you say that's an appeal to status, I say it was meant as an appeal to morality and I could say "immoral" instead, you say that doesn't clarify what moral system I'm using, and now I say I was (in that context) thinking of virtue ethics, where morality just is the kind of person you are, which wpuld suggest I use character-based word like "creepy"! Or "slutty", or "sleazy". I don't much like these words, and they all have slightly different connotations, but how else do I get at something like "manipulatively hedonistic"? I guess I could say that, but that has a slightly different meaning again and doesn't necessarily express the same moral force. I don't know...this topic isn't easy.
Basically, there are vauge moralistic terms in the water supply that can be used unfairly and can also have useful ethical functions. Should we abandon them?
7. Regarding dominance and prestige, I'm just going to reiterate that, even if the concept of status is useful and important (and I'm willing to accept it is, subject to the caveats above), the *word* "status" is FAR too vague and broad. Dominance and prestige look like sufficiently different things that they should probably not be put under the same umbrella, for example.
I also want to ask you: do * you* think power is part of status? Because @catmint below says it isn't, which I find very surprising.
8. Sorry about not explaining what I meant with the Nietzschean terms. Honestly, I don't have a detailed knowledge of Nietzsche myself and I think I was worried about annoying someone who does, if I presumed to define these terms and my definitions were less than accurate. So I guess I was prioritising the concerns of high-status-qua-knowledge-of-Nietzsche people over the concerns of low-status-qua-knowledge-of-Nietzsche people! My bad.
My rough understanding (where anyone who knows Nietzsche well will almost certainly say every word of this is wrong):
Nietzsche's a nihilist, so there is no "real" morality. Morality and knowledge and truth are all invented by humans (he's one of the inspirations for postmodernism as well). Master morality is the invented morality of the ancient world (e.g. Homeric Greece), where strength and power and domination are morally right, and weakness is evil. With Plato and especially Christianity, comes a shift towards slave morality, where weakness and suffering are morally exemplary. This, according to Nietzsche, remains the orthodoxy of modern civilisation even as it secularises (God is dead, but the shadow of God will remain for a long time). Indeed, things like socialism are further elaborations of slave morality. His own view is that slave morality is as incoherent and destructive as master morality (I think he's often believed to support master morality but this is I think mistaken), partly because it makes people hypocrites who continue to dominate while pretending to humble themselves, and partly because people are instinctively cruel, and if denied the ability to inflict cruelty on others they'll inflict it on themselves (asceticism). Progress, if you can call it that, will come when man finally recgonises the reality of nihilism, casts off slave morality in the same way as we did master morality, and embraces a reevaluation of all values (whatever that means), via a quasi-mythical figure of the future (the ubermensch).
Again, this is all probably wrong, but my basic point was that western society continues to run on slave morality, in some ways more than ever (cf. victimhood complex), and weakness and sacrifice are valorised. So the rationalist approach to status strikes me as a highly innacurate model, especially when it emphasises dominance so much. There's an exessive focus on the evolutionary past, to the detriment of inconceivable changes in moral and civilisatiinal thinking in recent millennia. (Nietzsche was writing after Darwin but I don't know what role the latter plays in his theories). And if rationalists want to go Nietzsche's route and say that the official morality of our society is hypocritical and destructive, then following that route does not advocate a return to master morality, but an embrace of new explicitly nihilistic values.
This is getting very arcane of course. I just want to add, randomly, that I *do* see the likes of rock stars, athletes etc as kind of like slaves in a certain way. I think these roles (e.g. performers at Persian feasts, chariot racers in Rome) were literally done by slaves in many past societies. What this says about your theory of prestige, and how that relates to status and morality, I'm not sure.
> I don't even see how you could call your previous reply dismissive. It was long and addressed respectfully many of my points.
The reply was a long disagreement, with no compliment to mitigate for that. I am happy that you didn't mind -- I probably wouldn't mind either in a similar situation -- but among normies, such behavior could drive some people furious. (The strategy "act towards others the way you would like them to act towards you" sadly doesn't work for an aspie interacting with normies.)
Remember that normies do not care much about the truth value of statements. Instead, they mostly agree to express respect, and disagree to express disrespect. So from their perspective, I wrote a long wall of text repeating "you suck".
The standard solution to delivering disagreement to normies is the "sandwich method", where you put the negative information between two actively nice things. Like this: "Hey, thank you for your message; you seem like a nice person and I appreciate your interest in math! By the way, two plus two does not equal five; it is actually four. I wish you a lot of luck at studying math, you seem very talented!"
> Using explicit status models for your interactions instead of explicit moral theories or codes, strikes me as like trying to play basketball by calculating the equations of the ball's trajectory, or trying to play chess by calculating every possible game from every position.
I agree. I usually do not have the computation capacity to consider all status implications in real time anyway. Normies do that instinctively. Sometimes it helps if I think about an interaction in retrospective. Sometimes there are easy rules to remember, such as "never disagree with your boss" (at least without carefully considering how to deliver the message respectfully, preferably in a way that will make your boss think it was actually their idea -- as usual, this is easier said than done).
> risk doing morally bad things
I think the risk is relatively small. First, it's not like I would do anything only to increase my status. It's more like, I try to do the right thing, but also try to be aware of the costs. Second, low-status people often don't achieve their goals. For example, you are trying to prevent a bad thing, but you know that doing so will make you very unpopular. In your imagination, the options are "do the wrong thing" or "do the right thing", but in reality, the options are often "do the wrong thing" or "express your concerns, get laughed at, and then the wrong thing happens anyway". If situation gets this far, I usually try to avoid such people in future. But from the consequentialist perspective, not getting involved in problematic situations is not the same as preventing those situations from happening; they still happen, only you are no longer there. Consequentialist ethics is difficult, and I don't have a good solution.
Or perhaps you had a different kind of situation in mind?
> the proposed change [...] seems to always be to achieve equality [...] by further liberalising or abolishing the moral standards. And never by toughening them so they constrain all groups equally. When you consider that high-status people are likely to do well in a free environment where they can leverage their status, and that rules are created often to constrain destructive high-status behaviour, I think there's reason to approach this with great care.
That is a good point. However, high-status people also do relatively better in constrained environments -- they are less likely to be accused of breaking the rules, less likely to be convicted, and the punishment is typically smaller -- because ultimately all these decisions are made by humans who instinctively take status into account. For example, there are strict religious communities with lots of sexual abuse, even if the abuse technically contradicts the holy scriptures, because no one believes a low-status victim accusing a high-status predator.
Also, freedom is valuable per se. We may trade it against other values, but there is some natural unwillingness, unless the advantages are obvious. Especially if you are not a typical person, you are at risk that the rules may be tailored to the more typical ones. For example, the rules may require doing things that are difficult for you, and then you get punished for breaking the rules.
> I say seduction-game stuff is "creepy"
And yes, you are right. But "creepy" means "done by people with low social skills". But what are those people suppose to do instead? You cannot improve your skills without practicing them, and practicing clumsily gets punished. What other options are there? For normal people, they learn the skills as small kids, when all kinds of transgressions are forgiven, because they are seen as "cute". When you stay behind the curve, at certain age suddenly the lack of social skills becomes "creepy".
You should get good at seduction. Unfortunately, I don't know a way to get good without being bad first. Okay, maybe in a controlled environment, where you would interact with actors, who would then give you feedback, and you are only allowed to try it in the wild after the feedback is mostly positive. It would be nice if such training environments existed.
> the *word* "status" is FAR too vague and broad. Dominance and prestige look like sufficiently different things that they should probably not be put under the same umbrella, for example.
Mostly yes. Though there are some similarities, for example it can make sense to say "this person is likely to be excused if they break some rules, because they are at the top of a social hierarchy" without specifying whether it was a dominance hierarchy or a prestige hierarchy, because both have a similar effect.
> With Plato and especially Christianity, comes a shift towards slave morality, where weakness and suffering are morally exemplary.
I am not a Christian (nor a Platonist) but this seems like a strawman. Suffering, for the purpose of a greater good: yes. Obedience, to a lawful authority: yes. Weakness: no. The closest thing to criticizing strength would be something like "with great power comes great responsibility", which is not a criticism of strength per se. -- The only way you get from there to "weakness is good" is when you declare all authority to be illegitimate and oppressive. Which sounds like a leftist idea.
So I think that instead of "this [...] remains the orthodoxy of modern civilisation even as it secularises", I would say that this actually *appears* in modern civilization as it secularizes under the influence of left-wing ideas. It is a modern mixture of old ideas (sin, guilt) with new left-wing ideas (all power is evil). The God is dead, but instead of going full way to atheism, we replaced God with wokeness, and made power (both individual and systemic) the new sin, so now you can sin by being strong or by being white, and then you can flagellate yourself by constantly checking your privilege and buy indulgences in the form of anti-racist books that tell you how evil you are. (Nietzsche predates modern wokeness, but some forms of leftism were already there.)
> So the rationalist approach to status strikes me as a highly innacurate model, especially when it emphasises dominance so much.
Politicians are dominant, successful entrepreneurs are dominant, and attractive women fuck bikers. The dominance is not over, there is only much less of it socially allowed for the average man. Which perhaps makes it even stronger signal than in the past.
> following that route does not advocate a return to master morality, but an embrace of new explicitly nihilistic values.
I propose a fourth way. Rather than choose the one-sidedness of the "master morality" or "slave morality", or throwing all values out of the window, let's embrace the values (the ones we approve of, on reflection) and treat everything else instrumentally. The "master morality" is right about power being useful and therefore desirable. The "slave morality" is right about self-control being necessary for a civilized person, and in some way a form of our collective power. Become strong, use your judgment and self-control, and follow your (coherently extrapolated) values!
> Someone who would be like "oh, it seems like some very smart people are debating here, and I am not one of them, they would probably laugh at me if I wrote something". By making the comment you signal that you are *not* this shy person, and you consider yourself at least equal to the people who are debating here.
Interesting. This is why I have never posted on LessWrong, despite following it for years; I didn't realize anyone might perceive ACX the same way. Though I think of LW as "they would probably ignore me without answering", which would just be frustrating. Rather than the less bad (in my opinion) "they would probably laugh at me", which might at least be bundled with advice, insofar as pity fairly often comes with advice.
> The reaction of most people is to either adopt permanent distrust and dislike for politicians, or to advocate burning the whole political system to the ground. *Not* to happily become like a politician themselves.
This is incorrect. People adopt distrust and dislike for politicians that do not directly appeal to them, and for specific representatives like their local representatives, they are more positive than not.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/09/19/how-americans-view-congress-the-president-state-and-local-political-leaders/
And, if you take Bryan Caplan's Myth of the Rational Voter at complete face value, if you *refuse* the concept of status, there does not seem to be any way to explain:
1. Voters are ignorant about the political issues they talk about
2. Yet they hold very strong positions on those issues
3. Where they refrain those issues as others vs us, such as "rich people steal from us via trade" (despite the fact that people would happily go to the grocery store or otherwise buy some product) or "foreigners steal from us via trade, also it's much more suspicious that we trade with more foreign countries, like China, Japan and Mexico, instead of less foreign ones, like the UK or Canada".
4. There appears to be a constellation of instincts, which roughly seem to be in charge of evaluating social threats, or social opportunities, and that people seem to engage with far more often than their reasoning, and people seem to be more satisfied by indulging in them than not. Why would these instincts exist, and why don't we explicitly acknowledge them?
I don't think there's any way to make sense of the world without some notion of "status.
HOWEVER.
I do agree with you that just throwing the word status around is insufficient. It'd be like a bunch of social scientists throwing around the word "science" when it comes to engineering. "Oh, the space shuttle exploded because there wasn't enough science." Or "the study failed to replicate because it wasn't scientific enough" do not actually explain anything, yet could feel like they do, if you don't know any better about how science works.
When status "works" as an explanation, it's when you can point to the specific mental distortions that appear to happen, or you can start to simulate what's going on in people's heads by explicitly invoking whatever your own internal status instincts say.
You are correct that people do not make particular distinctions between the good examples or bad examples of status.
The "final" word on status, is likely the book Impro, I think the introduction to the book doesn't make any sense unless the word "status" is at least pointing at a shared accessible concept. The author talked about how everyone was stiff, stilted, and unfunny, until he said to pay attention to status, at which point everyone started being hilarious. Prompts for improv also got much better results when specific suggestions like "please play this scene with two people with similar status, except both think they are higher than the other" or "please play this scene with conventional social classes, except the low social class plays high and the high one plays low".
I think this is very hard to make sense of, unless you agree status is a concept that lots of people have access to, and is at least shared enough such that 20 or so unconnected actors can act in accordance with them.
I'll finally note that lots of American culture seems actively allergic to the concept of class or status, and that in Asian cultures, there's much much much more explicit talk about related concepts like face, and conflicts are often recast in terms of their social consequences instead of what an American would think of as their merits. Source: Me, my upbringing.
Thanks for the responses so far (is this a high- or low- status thing to say...?).
Let me clarify that I never meant to suggest that talking openly about status is at all immoral or sociopathic, though many seem to be taking it that way. Indeed, on pretty much any morality from standard virtue ethics to consequentialism, honesty would be a generally unalloyed good. I was trying to say that what comes across as kind of sociopathic is when entire discussions about status (and how to gain it and exploit it and so on) proceed without anyone mentioning morality! That, narrowly described, is what disturbs me. I want to see (and am often amazed I don't see) people saying "is this use of status morally right?", "I advocate using status to achieve this utilitarian goal" and things like that.
It's not like people around here (as everywhere) don't bring moral claims into every other kind of discussion, from politics to charity to whether a commenter is being annoying. But my weird impression is that the moment status is brought up, people drop all the usual moral language. That's what makes it seen so cynical.
We don't usually judge people for having preferences regarding who to spend time with, befriend or marry. Partially because the wish to do these things with desirable people stems from the (very understandable) fear of becoming undesirable and isolated.
Personally, I'm more annoyed that people bring morality into those other topics. It's far more interesting to analyze these situations from a top-down, sociological point of view, similarly to observing the behavior of animals. (Though, technically that's exactly what we're doing.)
I think you -expect- there to be moral language, which makes it seem cynical when it is missing.
But "status seeking behavior" is more like "sexual identification and/or attraction" than it is like anything else, it is inherent to the way people are.
"Most people like to be liked, some like to be feared, some like a combination of both." There's status-seeking behavior for you, in the language of "normies".
Most of the people here seek, at some level, an explicit understanding of what most people understand implicitly. For some, this is because they lack the implicit understanding, and explicit understanding is all they can get. Scott Alexander is absolutely fantastic at "explicit explanations of implicit phenomena", and I think disproportionately draws from this crowd; Robin Hanson's discussions about status are making things explicit that most people are uncomfortable discussing directly, but may be the only way a large number of people can come to an understanding of why people behave the way they do.
I appreciate the point about making implicit things explicit. I can definitely see its use in that regard.
I just find the concept overbroad; it could really use being broken down further. And I wish other ways of making social interactions explict, especially more consciously moral ones, were given similar consideration.
The subject is incredibly broad, so the concept necessarily must be. But also, to answer your request about making social interactions explicit, while also explaining why it "just isn't done", let's try to explicitly analyze the idea of romance.
So: Why do people find it un-romantic to, for example, ask what somebody wants?
Answer: Romantic behavior is fundamentally a demonstration of insight into somebody else. Giving somebody flowers is romantic, right? No! If you get somebody flowers they are allergic to, or otherwise hate, you're being negatively romantic! (They may appreciate the gesture on other levels, but not a romantic level) You are romantic when you get them flowers they like without them deliberately telling you what they like; you're demonstrating you have knowledge of their desires.
This is why things like "affirmative consent" are offensive to so many people - these norms undermine the basis of romance by trying to make implicit interactions explicit. "May I kiss you?" is, basically, an anti-romantic question; you're showing that you don't know whether or not they want you to. To the typical person, the chance of a "misfire" is the cost you pay for something they very much want, a set of reliable signals that a prospective partner actually understands them at some level.
Once you move entirely into explicit territory, you lose the ability to access or assess this. Implicit communication conveys important information that cannot be reliably communicated in an explicit fashion.
"Can't you just ask whether or not somebody knows what your favorite flower is?", you may ask - and the answer is, no. Because information is also carried in spontaneity - if somebody brings you your favorite flowers without prompting, this is telling you that they are thinking about you when they are not with you. You cannot get this information explicitly.
Implicit communication carries with it a lot of meta-information that is not contained in the denotative content of the communication itself, which is erased or at least devalued by explicit communication. By devalued, I refer to the idea that this information tends to have the quality that it is difficult or impossible to fake; I can't fake the thoughtfulness of getting you your favorite flowers without you asking, either I do it or I don't. (Ish - it's possible to have somebody else carry this mental load for you, or to outsource it in some sense to, say, a PDA. But that's a philosophical question about whether or not devices or people you utilize to augment your cognitive capabilities count as part of your cognition or not.)
Thus is the challenge in making implicit things explicit: Not all implicit information -can- be conveyed in an explicit manner, and even when it can, it may be very challenging to meaningfully replicate.
I agree with all of what you wrote. But I'm not sure what you're disagreeing with me on. You said status models are needed to make explicit the things that many understand implicitly. I said that other models, such as moral codes (I discussed this in my second reply to Viliam) could do that job as well. Just as well or better than cynical-sounding status ones.
Are you disagreeing with that? It seems trivial to construct an explanation of the romantic flowers in terns of virtue ethics. A person with the virtue of love (i.e. eros) will be thinking and obsessing over their partner, and paying great attention to them, and will thus know what they like, and will be wanting to get them things without being asked. That's a moral model of the same kind of thing, but this one doesn't sound at all cynical, doesn't encourage toxic behaviour, and isn't self-defeating to acknowledge: as has been pointed out, talking openly about status can lower your status, but talking openly about trying to be virtuous is generally itself a virtue.
So what disadvantages does my analysis of the flowers have compared to analysing them as a costly status signal?
"So what disadvantages does my analysis of the flowers have compared to analysing them as a costly status signal?"
One obvious one in this environment is that a card-carrying rationalist is a Benthamite and thus believes virtue ethics are wrong; consequently any argument rooted in virtue ethics will be seen to have failed on the first hurdle. Instead you need to analyze it as something more calculating and personal-util-maximizing so that it can be tabulated into the large, spergy moral numbercrunch. The "status" framing does this nicely, by postulating that you basically have a statusmeter whose level can be raised or lowered through the actions of yourself and others.
I'm not disagreeing, except with the idea that what is going on is cynical.
There are many ways of breaking things down; many maps of the territory. They're useful in different circumstances, for different people. Bluntly, if you have no trouble dealing with the implicit-communication-as-implicit-communication - the explicit breakdown isn't for you! It's for people who need the explicit breakdown in order to understand what is going on (or for people who find the explicit breakdown useful for other purposes, or for people who get an "epiphany experience" out of it, or any number of other purposes).
You're basically saying "Don't communicate this information in a way that a subset of the population needs to understand, communicate this information in this other way that they won't understand, because that other way is ugly." The purpose is to communicate with the people who don't understand.
One of my first LessWrong posts was about the general unhelpfullness of "status and signalling" frameworks.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vJbczBHtDPmbdgCcY/the-futility-of-status-and-signalling
But answering your question. Imagine, that you are a person who not only can and likes to reason about things on object level, but also generally considers it to be the only pure form of reasoning. Imagine, that every time someone appeals to emotions or makes a non-sequitur your mind either ignores it as substantionless or, on the contrary, violently pings, notifying you that there is a reasoning mistake.
And then you meet regular people. A lot of them are unable or unwilling to separate form from the substance, object level arguments from other concerns. What are these people doing? They are not optimizing for truth. And yet they are totally getting along, and are successful. When you try to correct them, they are looking at you as if it's you who is an idiot and missing the obvious thing. They seem to be optimizing for *something*. And "status" is what tries to capture this optimization target.
Could you give some concrete examples of these kinds of things?
It's not at all obvious to me that people who think emotionally aren't trying to optimise for a kind of truth (such as moral truth, or aesthetic truth, or "genuine" self-understanding), and even if they're not, surely they're optimising for things other than personal status, like social cohesion, or ideological goals?
I definitely see status as a useful concept, in light of what many of the responses here have pointed out. But I still maintain (at the moment) that people are far, far too quick to appeal to it (when other explanations would work as well or better).
I would say they are optimizing for *community* first, and status inevitably follows.
Others have explained the theory and its origins, so let me elaborate a bit further.
The interesting thing about status is that status is *everywhere*, but not *everything*. All the time when we interact with others, we unconsciously track their attitude to us (approval, respect, etc.). That's the basic mechanism of status. When you see it that way, you can see that it's constantly operating. Ex. you gain status on ACX by posting insightful comments, and it feels good when others validate that.
But — and that's the part that status enthusiasts often forget —, it's not *everything*! As a motivation, doing things for status feels hollow. When it becomes the main motivation, others perceive it, and see that you are "status signalling", and then it doesn't work so much anymore. Status is just one socio-psychological mechanism among many. There are plenty of other reasons why we do stuff.
Rationalists like to separate description from judgment. You don't want your idea of how something works to be clouded by judgments about how it should be. That can sound quite cynical to outside ears, because in common discourse, talking about something without judging it usually means you actually approve of it. When it comes to status, the descriptive part is getting some understanding of how dominance and prestige work in yourself and in others. Then, if the theory makes some sense to you, it's your choice what you do with it. Ambitious types may decide to consciously pursue social status to better achieve their aims. Creative types may use this theory to consciously avoid status motivations to be truer to themselves. Lazy types may learn to selectively ignore or use status to optimize for an easy life. And so on and so forth.
There are also funny second order effects. A person who genuinely doesn't care much about status can be perceived as high-status, because the implicit communication is "I'm secure enough that I don't need your validation". Which means that caring visibly about status becomes low-status, hence the notion of "fake coolness". If you've ever found yourself appearing cool but nervous inside, this might be the explanation.
This is a comment on your parenthetical at the end.
Don't a large number of people accept that managing competing interest groups, allocating limited resources to unlimited demands for those resources, making laws, and so on, are extremely complicated undertakings, and our elected representatives being human and fallible do the best they can while failing often.
Or is this a hopelessly minority view? :)
Imagine you are at a charitable event, for a charity you don't really care that much about, where all your friends and family are. Everybody else you observe donates $5 (to a cause you don't care a lot about). Attention turns to you; you are reasonably certain your friends and family will think less of you if you don't donate. Do you donate $5?
You're on Reddit. There's a conversation about a topic that doesn't matter, but do have some particular knowledge of. You can contribute a comment which will garner you a bunch of upvotes - the topic doesn't matter, mind, so your contribution doesn't add or subtract anything to the world. Do you make the comment, purely for the upvotes?
That's how status actually cashes out for most normal people.
I definitely stay away from downvotes (or at least ones that I anticipate) on Reddit. It’s fairly pointless anyway as your comment will be effectively hidden.
Hmm not sure it's rationalist, but have you read any Rene Girard and mimetic desire?
This comes mostly from Robin Hanson, but I think he knits it together from many pre-existing concepts eg in evo psych.
It combines things like "wanting to keep up with the Joneses", "wanting to be somebody", "wanting to be respected in your field", "wanting to be popular", "wanting to be a high-value romantic partner". Not all of these are exactly the same, but they're correlated > 0. Compare wealth, where there are lots of different kinds of wealth (liquid wealth, illiquid wealth, estimated future cash flows, etc) or intelligence (verbal intelligence, mathematical intelligence, etc) where they correlate enough to often be useful talking about as one concept, even though when we need to we can break them down.
I don't think this is sociopathic any more than talking about eg money is sociopathic. When you talk about the economy, you assume that people will generally try to make money, because even though some people want other things, it basically averages out this way, plus the people who do want money will be the ones who most move the economy. In the same way, not everyone is a claw-your-way-to-the-top sociopathic status seeker, but most people will prefer easy ways to get more status over less status, even if they think of this as "fitting in" or "being liked by my friends" or "being respectable" or something else non-sinister-seeming.
Mostly I find status talk useful as a corrective to models that assume everyone is just after money all the time.
A few points.
First, I'll acknowledge an instance of apparent status-play here: I felt a strong obligation to respond to you much more than to others in the thread, which perhaps only makes sense in terms of you being the highest-status responder. (I do think there may be other explanations for this though, but drawing them out would take time and effort).
Second, it seems to me that the kinds of things you put under the umbrella "status" are much less clearly linked than different forms of wealth (which are all things you can use to get goods and services, subject to slightly different conditions) and different forms of intelligence (which are all things that tangibly assist in gaining or transmitting knowledge). Is there anything like a similar one sentence unifying descriptor for types of status?
Third, I don't know a lot about economics, but isn't one of the most pervasive criticisms of the entire field that it is built on assuming simplistic models of human behaviour for the sake of analysis, that quite clearly don't hold up in reality? I've known many people who hate economists precisely because they assume everyone only wants to maximise their wealth. Thus building a theory of status on economic foundations is already building on a shaky foundation, and risks introducing even more noise and unsupported assumption into the ultimate theory.
Fourth, that's a really good point about a corrective to models based on money. I think if theories of status-seeking were explicitly limited to being extensions of theories of wealth-seeking, they would be unquestionably useful (and introduce more accuracy and more nuance). My worry is that because status is vaguer and broader, people will be tempted to apply it to a far greater range of situations than they would ever plausibly be tempted to apply considerations of money. Which would lead in the end to a less accurate and more reductive theory of behaviour than the original flawed money-based one. And I think some of the discussions about status is in this community provide evidence of this happening.
This is tangential, but it's a bugaboo of mine:
"I've known many people who hate economists precisely because they assume everyone only wants to maximise their wealth."
This is just not at all an accurate description of what economists believe. (Well, I shouldn't speak for all economist's personal beliefs. But its not in Mas-Colell, Whinston and Green, and therefore is not canon.)
Yeah sorry, I meant to say that people hate economists because *they think* economists assume that. I wasn't saying economists really do assume that; I don't know enough about it.
"Mostly I find status talk useful as a corrective to models that assume everyone is just after money all the time."
That's a good insight; thanks. Simplistic models are always dangerous, but frequently necessary. And for a simplistic model of human behavior, "people seek money and status and can to some extent trade one for another" is still reasonably tractable in most situations but much more accurate than "people seek money".
I can't think of a third thing I'd want to add to that list offhand. Except probably security, in contexts where it is in serious doubt.
It's from Hanson, he pretty constantly brings up status/signaling a lot as an explanation for basically all human behavior. I agree that most human behavior is not motivated by status/signaling in any but the most perfunctory sense. This is the closest I could quickly find on his blog to an explanation of status: https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/actors-see-statushtml
It doesn't explain scratching your butt when it's itchy. I can't find the link to where he gave that as an example of an action which has least to do with status, in part because he's used it surprisingly often in different contexts.
Do you scratch your butt in public? Would you do it on a date?
I think that's precisely why Hanson chose it as an example. Although now I recall more precisely that he used it as an example of something not motivated by signalling.
I don't get it.
We have to eat and drink, or we die. But the details of how we do those things, and when and where they are appropriate, are enormously wrapped up in status. How is scratching my butt (before I shake the President's hand) any different?
Eating & drinking are highly social activities. Scratching yourself is not. Among chimpanzees it is social to have someone else remove parasites from your fur though.
Does this Hanson post qualify as providing definitions?
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/prestige-is-mob-enforced-dominancehtml
1. Here are two decent Robin Hanson posts on status that might help you.
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/a-theory-of-statushtml
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/status-explains-lotshtml
2. Status is Dominance and Prestige, two other hard to define words, but neurotypical humans are really good at measuring both very quickly. It is best to think of it in terms of Evolutionary Psychology. Neurotypical humans have an innate urge to gain Status, as in Dominance and Prestige, since both factors greatly improved evolutionary fitness. The most dominant and prestigious humans tended to have the most kids and those kids tended to live long enough to have kids of their own. Further, people that obeyed Dominant and Prestigious people also had slightly higher evolutionary fitness, then those that rebelled. Because of this, gaining status ended up as an innate urge, weaker but similar to hunger and a sex drive. This does not mean you have to be a slave to your status seeking urges, any more than you have to be a slave to you sex drive and cheat on your spouse.
3. I think the urge to have status is a really stupid evolutionary urge to follow, but knowing that most people do want and respect status is useful to achieving my other goals, money and helping people. Status is a part of every position’s compensation package, and it is the reason a lot of people take Low Pay High Prestige positions, like journalists and activists. I went the opposite route, and got a career in government HR, low prestige and high pay. But once I get to high levels, HR has a surprisingly high impact on how well an organization functions. If I can help get HHS staffed by EAs in key roles, it’s possible I can greatly improve our pandemic response. To get to a high level HR role, I need to cultivate HR Status and keep getting promotions.
This is probably why a lot of people here talk about gaining status; it is instrumental to achieving other goals, often just dates. It is best to think of it as a necessary evil; we are mostly consequentialists, so the ends literally justify the means. But if you want to try and dismantle the status framework, more power to you. I’d love to live in a world where status didn’t matter. I just worry that such a world couldn’t have humans.
I love this line of questioning.
“Status” as a concept seems to have a high ratio of “people using the concept” to people trying to define it, work our contradictions etc
"Status" is defined and discussed at length in the book "Impro" by Keith Johnstone. That's one of the main sources I've seen cited.
Was this meant to be a reply to something? It doesn't seem to make much sense as a standalone comment.