I just discovered that the Art Student Owl Tumblr has disappeared. I wonder if anyone saved a copy of it. It's always a shame to see parts of the past internet disappear like that.
A bit of a rant, but I'm continually amazed at how bad Youtube recommendations are. I can't remember the last time I actually found a video to watch through Youtube, in spite of putting lots of effort into trying to curate recommendations in the past. You'd think that sites would have halfway competent recommendations nowadays with the rise of AI and all, but it never seems to happen. And Netflix is even worse, though in the case of Netflix, I suspect that the static homepage is a strategic move to cover up for their lack of content.
I suspect that YouTube recommendations are a combination of "things you like" and "things everyone likes" for the specific topic/keywords (e.g. music videos if you are watching a music video, or politics if you are watching politics), and your efforts have diminishing returns because no matter how much you optimize that "things you like" part, there is still the "things everyone likes" part that you have no impact on.
At least my recommendations seem like a mix of the stuff I typically watch, and the stuff I would never watch but seems like the kind of thing that would be popular. For example, if I watch any video about politics, half of my recommendations would be conspiracy theories and Russian propaganda.
That makes sense. Part of the problem is that it seems to work on negative reinforcement. Like if I go through and mark "not interested" on everything, that just makes the recommendations even less relevant because it reverts to random crap that other people watch.
Maybe a long shot, maybe the wrong time to ask, but I'm trying to track down a short sci-fi/story with the same sort of sill pun punchline as in some of Scott's stories (I'm pretty sure it wasn't by Scott, but I would probably have come across it in a Scott-adjacent space), called something like "She Listens To Everything", in which some sort of alien or machine intelligence is able to take over much of the world by its omnipresent listening powers, making it impossible for people to speak and coordinate against it, until a resistance manages to form by communicating in musical form, focused in Appalachia and in the urban cores of big cities, and the punchline was to the effect of "She listens to everything ... except rap and country". My powers of Google are a complete failure here - does anyone know where I can find it?
Another sighting of the new meaning of the word ‘nonplussed’. I know, I know language evolves but sometimes I like to indulge my inner pedantic twit. At some point in the past I had to open a physical paper dictionary and learn what the word meant. Back then we couldn’t just right click on it, blah blah..
Today’s Politico newsletter says;
“So in the same week, President Trump goes to the bright-blue Bronx and another political party’s convention, a week before that he goes to bright-blue Minnesota, and before that, he has stops at the Teamsters headquarters and SneakerCon and even a town hall on CNN during the Republican primary,” Trump adviser JASON MILLER texted us this morning. “What’s now clear is that President Trump is changing the game and living in what normally would be considered Joe Biden’s political territory, and this has to terrify Democrats.”
New paragraph, here it is:
“Biden world is ‘*nonplussed.*’”
Using it the sense that Biden world really doesn’t care instead of its original meaning of befuddled or confused.
Is there any research in neuroscience/cognitive psychology on how the brain distinguishes between video and real life? Given video is so new in evolutionary terms, and a constant feed of video on every conceivable topic is now the norm, I’m curious how the brain/nervous system reacts differently.
I ask this because it seems like many people have a hard time incorporating the fact that the person is choosing to be on camera into their theory of mind for said person.
For example, there’s a lot of videos you see going viral on social media that will be, for example, a woman in tears about losing her job, or the fact that she’s a single mom etc. People give their takes, draw broad conclusions about society from the video, and offer their advice to this person. They basically address it as they would a crying woman in person, applying the same heuristics to draw their conclusions.
But their mental model is leaving out the most telling detail about this person, which is the fact that they made the video at all. Think about what kind of person, when going through a low point in their life, would want to set up a camera at that moment to film themselves at their most vulnerable moment for the world to see. For most people that’s horrifying. This is bizarre behavior from a person who is likely mentally unwell.
Theres other things I wonder, like the effects of having every single person in America watch the George Floyd snuff film. If you saw that happen in person, it would be perfectly understandable to be traumatized, need therapy etc…. How is the video different in the brain/nervous system?
> For most people that’s horrifying. This is bizarre behavior from a person who is likely mentally unwell.
Would it be much better if this were somehow their standard reaction to life events? I see kids performing for non-existent cameras sometimes, and I assume they got that from TV. I've heard other people talk about sex partners who unconsciously act as though there were a porn camera in a particular location in the room, because to them that's just how people have sex.
> How is the video different in the brain/nervous system?
I use video chat with some friends and family, and it's not the same as being in person, but it's pretty much identical to a video, except with interaction. I'd almost be more worried about the "interaction" part, in the other direction, actually. (I say as I write a comment on someone else's blog.) It's like there's an urge to make everything a performance, and then react to other people as if they were performing, and one's own reactions are themselves a performance. Which in general has always been true, but I feel like something's different now.
A question to people who pay for at least two different streaming services instead of streaming illegally: why? Is it moral conviction, fear of legal consequences, convenience, something else?
If it’s convenience, what would illegal streaming have to look like so that you’d choose it over paying for subscriptions?
Primarily convenience. I do a lot of my streaming on an android TV, and it's extremely inconvenient to directly access a browser probably for this exact same reason.
I can plug a laptop into my TV, but it's not optimised for navigating remotely (on a couch, without a mouse, imprecise). I can download the show onto a USB or a mobile device and plug/stream it into the TV, but that's an additional step when I want to watch something now (to be fair, I have done that when it's something I really want to watch).
I have considered learning how to jailbreak the TV, but my primary motivation has never been to pirate - it's because the default home screen of android TV shows you a bunch of ugly ads which I want to get rid of. It seems too much effort for now - I'll try when I have time I guess.
Look, I try to pay for every ppv but I will admit I occasionally pirate a boxing/ufc fight if money is tight and the price isn’t justified. So yes I’m a hypocrite. But I’ll admit it’s obviously immoral and anti social behavior. It’s stealing, plain and simple.
It’s the same reason shoplifting is garbage behavior. Yes, the store is probably not hurt by that small thing you stole. But if everyone had that same thought, there would be no more store. So you’re essentially freeloading off the good morals of other people, and your entire ability to be a piece of shit depends on other people being good.
Convenience (I don't have to dribble around all the spamvertising, figure out which "play" button is the real one, can easily change the audio language and the subtitle language, can choose the subtitle font and size, the site remembers at what point of what episode I'm at...), plus them being so cheap (if they cost 3x as much I'd probably just stream illegally)
Convenience with moral conviction. If streaming were expensive and/or inconvenient enough and illegal was convenient enough, we might do otherwise but most likely we would just not use the streaming service. I don't have a moral issue with watching stuff for free, but since I got old enough to pay for the things I want I do like to support companies who produce good products. I do have a moral issue with bypassing a convenient pay service to get a product that wasn't intended to be free. Some things are not possible to watch at any price, but can sometimes be found for free online. Old games used to be like this and some still are. Probably a bunch of old movies hardly anyone remembers.
We pay for Netflix, Disney, and Amazon Prime. Prime we get our money's worth from the free shipping and almost certainly wouldn't have it otherwise. We do watch it some since we have it. We've had Netflix since it was discs in the mail and have felt we got good value from it, though that's going down over time. We would be most likely to cancel it if we were reducing. Disney we seem to watch pretty often and get good use out of it, mainly because it has a number of movies my family likes to watch often.
When I had two, it was moral conviction, yes. People should have the right to distribute their work at their discretion. But then I canceled Netflix when they raised their prices because I was barely using it anyway. I've still got Amazon Prime, but mostly because I'm on an island and the free shipping generally pays for itself so any shows are a bonus.
I have fewer qualms about old videogames, I'll emulate anything from NES to PS1. Especially if I owned them before. But having emulated something will serve as a tiebreaker for buying a remake. It's why I own the Trials of Mana remake, because I played the emulated fan-translation of Seiken Densetsu 3.
Youtube gets adblocked because they pre-empted a video with a goddamn 45-minute ad, another ad that consistently broke two seconds in and rendered the rest of the actual videos unwatchable, and the same political cartoon approximately seven thousand times. If the adblock ever breaks then Youtube's getting dumped.
As a note that has tripped up many a poor unwary traveler trying to drive to Juneau; the Alaska Marine Highway is not a standard highway, it's a ferry route. You come and go by plane, or ship, or birth and death.
My family lived in Homer when I was a pre school little shit. I remember a surprising amount about it though. Flying into Anchorage and driving to spend some time around Homer with Mrs Gunflint in a few weeks.
Is the Begich political family still extant up there? Their American origin is my small Minnesota home town.
I recall my mom and dad referencing Ketchikan pretty often.
What I have noticed asking this question is that there is a lot of typical-minding going on. At least some answers read to me like the person giving them sees it as “the obvious one”, sometimes explicitly so.
Except that these “obvious” answers are actually different from person to person.
Wouldn't it be more efficient to buy the blurays of only the content you like, and pirate by default? More targeted incentives that way, unless you like pretty much everything available on the streaming service.
Problem with that is I don’t know what I will like until I see it. I do go to see films in the theater if it’s by an actor or director I know I like. Or I might pay to own a film that I want to watch multiple times.
> Problem with that is I don’t know what I will like until I see it
That's the solution, not the problem. If you don't like it, you don't want to incentivise its creators to make more, but if you already paid for it, you already have done so. The trick is to pirate everything first, then if you like it, buy the bluray AFTER you already watched it.
I don't watch much tv anymore. In my observation those who pirate watch 1..n hours every day. Sometimes I'll find a stream online for an old film (on archive dot org or whatever), but most often I just won't bother or watch when it's available on Netflix or Prime, or even rent it. I think Prime is a weak deal but the wife has it.
Morality is part of it. These products are made because people pay for them, and those who don't pay are piggybacking on the rest. I don't care so much if it's old stuff (including games, I'll use ROMs rather than re-purchasing what is a glorified emulated game).
Negative attention is another. I don't want to have to deal with VPNs or any of that shit to torrent because the mere act of using one could put a crosshairs on your activities. That could be mitigated by jumping through more hoops, but I don't want to. It's better to be boring.
Convenience. Illegal streaming would have to have the same UX and ease of use as legal stream for me to use it. That would mean its: easily accessible on apple tv, when i select something to watch it will play at high quality and be the content I expected. Right now, my experience with illegal streaming, is that I have to spend a lot of time searching for what I want, hope the link works, spend lots of time closing gambling and porn pop ups, then hope that the quality will be watchable.
I have a good paying job. The cost of streaming services is nothing to me. My time is worth more to me than saving the cost of streaming services.
As a non American it's somewhere between less convenient and impossible to pay to watch the television shows and films I'm insterested in compared to pirating.
Other things like PPVs and music are usually easier to purchase so I rarely pirate them.
That's how it used to be for me in the US a decade ago, and hence I pirated everything. Nowadays, it's like Julian said for me: there are legal convenient streaming services for most things and the cost is insignificant compared to my income.
Agreed. I used to pirate most videogames, but now Steam's made paying for them a more pleasant customer experience than piracy ever was. Gabe Newell was right: piracy is a service problem, not a price problem.
I am not sure what you are trying to say. "I have a life" sounds like it just seems to inconvenient to bother, the next sentence sounds like you think it's selfish/immoral.
There is something rather pathetic about someone who is constantly angling for every trivial advantage, including every conceivable legal advantage. They are not so much immoral as they are deserving of pity.
I understand the expression, but I am still not following.
Do you think it's pathetic because "The morally right thing to do is to pay. Instead this person tries to wiggle their way out of a moral obligation for a completely selfish reason." or do you think "Putting oneself through inconvenience just to save a little bit of money is pathetic, legal or not."? Or something else I am overlooking? A mix of both?
Hey my friends, if anyone is pretty up-to-date with AI and ML and LLMs, I need some assistance! I can pay a small sum for useful stuff (via Bitcoin? I'll be slow, but honest; PayPal is easier).
Upshot:
→ I want to write a response to some claims I often see around, online, that seem questionable to me — but I'm bad at researching this stuff (I often read something about XYZ at some point and then can't find the damn thing again), and fear I will miss a lot of relevant info...:
• I recall reading about some cases wherein AI diagnosticians outperformed humans. Is anyone aware of these, or any other examples of AI models outperforming human judgement? Am I remembering wrong — does it not ever happen?
• Can LLMs and other AIs extrapolate and "reason"? Are there good examples of this? E.g.., I see people saying sometimes "if you train an AI to look at moles and decide if they're cancerous or not, and it sees a mole that is a different style than in its dataset, it cannot apply a general rule like 'well it still has such-and-such features [e.g. size, irregularity] that I have abstracted out from previous examples' — it will be unable to do anything!"
....this seems questionable, to me; I thought this ability to evaluate never-before-seen examples was a large part of what made the scaling hypothesis and ML in general useful in the first place; but I'm not too sure how to make a case for this (if I'm not wrong, heh).
• Art, legal decisions / plagiarism / etc: if anyone is aware of any rulings on whether AI art is plagiarism by its very nature, or well-thought-out essays on this topic, please let me know!
I keep seeing people say "AI cannot make anything original", but it /seems/ wrong to me; the art seems about as original as a human "inspired by" a style; but I'd like to look deeper into it.
• Finally, bias and AI models: I recall reading about some controversial cases where an AI was found to be using features people don't want used (e.g. race, zip code, etc.) to make judgements; if anyone is aware of specific instances, again, please let me know!
Secondary question: is this objected to because it results in inaccurate results, or are these things actually predictive & the objection is an ethical one? I'm guessing it is the latter, but again, may be wrong.
Cheers for any assistance from people who actually know this stuff / keep better track of articles they read, heh; if you help out of pure shining goodness, I kiss the ground you float above, but if you want some financial incentive I can pay a small sum¹ per useful source/argument/etc, no problem.
Thanks for readin'!
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(¹: /How/ small depends on how many people help, heh... I lost my job fairly recently, but I saved up enough that I'm not starving or anything — BUT it does make me slightly less generous with payouts than I might otherwise have been. 😛)
Good read, well-written — but I don't see that it actually explains *why* you think so, just presents an example of a hypothetical (though undoubtedly based-on-actual-disappointments) bad LLM user experience.
It literally cannot be otherwise. LLMs do not have "knowledge." They don't generate outputs that way. Their outputs and inputs are exclusively language, linguistic constructs without relationship to an outside world. That's why they cannot help but make factual errors and "hallucinations" that compromise their utility. People are sinking billions of dollars into hardware and software to optimize and refine models, without regard for this fundamental limitation. These companies and their researchers are well aware of this limitation, but they are competing to see who can fool the most people the longest.
I have worked in enough AI startups to know exactly how this sausage is made. This is a fundamental, unbeatable problem for this type of "AI."
I suggest you try some free LLMs and ask them something about topics you genuinely care about. Then you will see approximately what they can and cannot do.
The most interesting use case I found is generating high-level summaries, such as "tell me the similarities and differences between X and Y". You could probably find all that information by web search, but you would have to read dozens of pages and compile the results, while the LLM will give you the result instantly and you can ask additional questions.
I've used them a fair bit, but I'm not familiar enough with the technical background to see definitively whether a statement like..
"an ML AI like these LLMs is stymied by anything novel and can only mash together things it's seen before"
(or)
"an image classifier will never develop general rules such that it can correctly identify something that wasn't exactly in the training data"
...or other such questions — are actually broadly correct, or not.
That sort of question depends both on the actual training process, and on the results of more quantitative tests, I think.
It might be that I need to just start learning the field systematically, heh... but I didn't intend to become AI Ambassador or anything, exactly (though of course I shall not refuse the mantle! bring me my robes of office!) — just wanted to either correct my own misapprehensions, or else make a quick read to push back against those of others (depending on whose intuition turns out to be closer to the truth...).
"If you find a hammer lying in the road and sell it, you may ask a low price or a high one. But if you keep the hammer and use it to drive nails, who can doubt its worth?"
If you use an AI regularly, you will soon find out what it is good at, and what it fails at, and this will give you better intuition than reading other people's opinions on the internet. Do you want to know if the AI can do something novel? Ask it to come up with something clever in an area you understand well. (Ok, there is always a risk that the AI knows something that seems novel to you, but it was actually invented by some human.) Maybe it turns out that the abilities of AI do not exactly match the categories that most people debate about.
I asked ChatGPT to make jokes about Soviet Union and mathematics or physics or computer science... Some of them were lame, some of them were pretty funny.
"In Soviet Russia, Schrödinger's cat watches you. And it's not sure if you're alive or dead until the KGB checks."
"In Soviet Russia, quantum entanglement means your fate is tied to the nearest comrade. Better hope they're good at math!"
"In Soviet Russia, the laws of thermodynamics are simple: You work, state gets warmer. You slack off, state gets colder. Either way, state always wins."
"In Soviet Russia, if you try to divide by zero, you don't get infinity. You get a visit from the KGB for attempting counter-revolutionary mathematics."
"In Soviet Russia, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is simple: if you know where the particle is, you don't know where the KGB is watching from."
"In Soviet Russia, when you try to integrate, the function integrates you into the collective consciousness of the proletariat."
"In Soviet Russia, prime numbers aren't just divisible by 1 and themselves. They're also divisible by the secret police."
"In Soviet Russia, relativity isn't just a theory; it's a way of life. Everything is relative, especially when reporting to the Party."
"In Soviet Russia, math textbooks don't have answers at the back. The Party tells you what's right, comrade."
"In Soviet Russia, math problems don't have multiple choice options. The only choice is to solve it correctly or face remedial labor camp."
"In Soviet Russia, when you ask 'When will I ever use this math?' the answer is always 'In service to the state, of course!'"
"In Soviet Russia, the only noble gases are those who serve the Party without question."
"In Soviet Russia, the reaction rate isn't determined by concentration. It's controlled by the state's need for progress."
"In Soviet Russia, if you're caught studying nuclear chemistry, you're either a genius or a spy. Either way, you're in trouble."
"In Soviet Russia, if you discover a new species, it's either named after a Soviet leader or classified as a threat to the regime."
"In Soviet Russia, computer doesn't crash. It voluntarily participates in planned downtime for maintenance."
"In Soviet Russia, AI doesn't replace humans. Humans replace AI with comrades who uphold Marxist-Leninist principles."
...do any of these jokes qualify as "novel"? I couldn't find them in google. If a human wrote these jokes, I would not suspect them of being a machine, or lacking creativity.
Ironically, in my experience ChatGPT fails at math and following the rules precisely. And those are things that should not require anything novel.
>Finally, bias and AI models: I recall reading about some controversial cases where an AI was found to be using features people don't want used (e.g. race, zip code, etc.) to make judgements; if anyone is aware of specific instances, again, please let me know!
Thank you! Greatly appreciated — these are just the kinds of things I am always reading or reading about, then losing... and then finding myself *really, really wishing I had them handy* months or years later! heh... maybe I ought to start keeping some sort of organized note file...
I'm familiar with AI and ML principles in general. No payment required, feel free to make a small donation to a charity of your choice if you want to.
*Superhuman AI performance*
- AlphaZero beats humans at Chess and Go, and AlphaFold beats humans at figuring out how proteins will fold.
- There is no general principle which says AI must perform worse than humans. However, in general an AI system is only as good as its training data, and in many real world cases the training data is human derived (this is almost always the case for LLMs). In such cases the AI may do an excellent job at learning the patterns in the training data, but what it has learnt is how to imitate a human.
- In other cases where there is an objective measure of performance that can be used for the training data ("did this turn out to be a tumour" / "did I win the game") there is no inherent skill ceiling. (However it's harder to build such systems, because you can't use human intuition to identify areas of improvement once the AI surpassed human performance).
- In a technical sense, all AI extrapolates, in the sense that it learns features which it will use to assess any data, whether or not it's similar to the training data.
- However, the patterns it learns may or may not map to the thing you care about. If you train an AI to say if an image is of a cat or a dog, and you train it only on German Shepherd dogs and Persian cats, then if you give it a Bichon Frise it will probably decide it's a cat. We would say the AI is 'wrong', but that's because we have a concept of cat and dog that goes beyond what we taught the AI. We've successfully trained a "big tan thing vs small fluffy thing" detector, and that's a totally reasonable direction to extrapolate in - it's just not the direction we wanted it to pick. It is actually very normal to use AI outside of the training distribution, but a lot of the art of machine learning is identifying training data that encourages the system to extrapolate in the 'right' direction, rather than the wrong one. This is often down to the ML engineer's intuition For this reason it's critical that at least the data you _test_ on should be close to the real data you expect, even if you don't have enough real data to _train_ on, since this allows you to confirm whether you've nudged the model into the right extrapolations.
*Extrapolation - LLMs*
- It's important to remember that LLMs are (broadly) trained in two stages. Stage one ("foundation"): learn to predict how to complete a piece of text; Stage two ("reinforcement"): learn to respond to questions in a way that humans will say is good.
- The training set for the first stage is "basically everything humans have ever written", but the training for the second stage involves much, much less data - a huge number of chat logs derived from human volunteers, but not enough to capture "all reasoning humans have ever done".
- Because of the two stage approach and the vast volume of the first stage, it's hard to rigorously define what extrapolation would mean. The hope is that the AI learns a general theory of human thought and language during the first stage, and then during the second stage is able to leverage that understanding to learn how to be a good assistant and how to respond helpfully and accurately to questions.
- The scale of data in the first stage means you end up with a really, really good text completer at human level performance. But prior to the second stage it doesn't know that it's supposed to answer questions; if you ask it to complete "The proof of the Riemann Hypothesis is..." it will say "still undiscovered". It also has as much poor reasoning in its training data as good reasoning (most writing on the Internet is bad writing) and doesn't know to prefer the good stuff.
- The second stage (hopefully) imparts enough examples of good, helpful reasoning that it learns the general faculty, effectively nudging it in the direction of valuing the 'good' input from its first stage training and disregarding the 'bad', as well as teaching it to respond in a question/answer chat bot style. This seems to work in the sense that you can ask an LLM reasoning questions that weren't covered specifically during its second stage and it will do a good job at answering them (it has learned to leverage its first stage knowledge in a general way).
- The term 'extrapolation' is then ambiguous because it has two very different sets of training data. In the first-stage sense, LLMs are very good at guessing the next word in sentences that weren't in their first stage training data. In the second stage sense, they are good at reasoning about things that were not in their human generated reinforcement data. However in a general sense, if I ask an LLM about a question it's never seen (let's say "Is Mickey Mouse a Kantian reasoner?") then whether you would call that 'extrapolation' given it has seen lots of data about Mickey Mouse and Kant, and lots of philosophy essays, and lots of argumentation in general - is an open question. I'd be tempted to say that it's technically more like interpolation, but I'm also tempted to say humans are no different.
*AI Art and Plagiarism*
I'm not qualified to talk about the legalities here. I think AI is doing something similar to what people do when they make art, but considerations of scale and cost make the consequences of AI art feel ethically different.
*AI and Bias*
- AI is fundamentally a correlation detector. If people from majority-black zipcodes are more likely to default on a loan, the AI will learn that (if you allow it to use zipcodes as part of its training data) then it will learn to rate people from black zipcodes as riskier loan candidates.
- People have attempted to solve this by restricting what input features the AI is given to things which aren't linked to protected characteristics, but this is hard because controlling for them is notoriously hard (as any researcher knows) - and the AI is often clever enough to find that signal within other combinations of features.
- I'm not an expert on this area, but I generally feel humans have fuzzy intuition here. We don't have concensus on what bias free human hiring looks like, so it's unrealistic to expect us to be able to encode it statistically.
- That said there's plenty of uncontroversial low hanging fruit, like "don't just train your facial recognition system on white people" or "make sure you aren't directly passing race as an input into your hiring algorithm".
- Debiasing LLMs is a bit different and usually involves evaluating the probability of an LLM saying biased things, then nudging the model's weights in the opposite direction.
Hope that helps. Happy to answer further questions.
Fantastic — thank you very, very much! Perhaps, if you do not mind, I will link you to my completed essay/video (depending on your preference) and you could tell me if I've said anything totally wrong and dumb?
No worries if not, however, because this is already by far more complete and in-depth than I had any right to expect! Same with these next few questions — feel free to ignore them, as you've already helped plenty enough. 🫡
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★ Extrapolation/reasoning: ★
→ The particular claim that spurred me to consider this runs as follows:
• "Suppose you train an AI to pick out photos of cats. It learns to do so, and then you give it a set of photos that include also a photo of a cat plushie, which you also wanted it to pick out. But it won't know to do this, and you can't tell it 'I wanted also plushie cats' without another huge expensive training run with hundreds of thousands of plushie cat photos included. Therefore, the term 'Artificial *Intelligence* is a misnomer — they're useless except in extremely narrow, pre-defined domains, no different from any old human-written program to do the same."
This was an old YouTube video I ran across, and at the time I just went "hm" and moved on; but thinking about it since then, as I've become more and more impressed by the recent LLMs, it's bugged me — I don't know, just seems... "in the wrong spirit" maybe?
Like... it seems to me I probably *could* tell Claude (e.g.) something like "sorry, I meant that also you should include plushie cats", and it WOULD know what that meant and re-do the thing to include them. (I would test this but I'm not sure how to give Claude OR ChatGPT a bunch of photos at once, heh.)
This is, as you mention, undoubtedly because the training data was so comprehensive that Claude does "know" plushies; still, this being the case, the criticism seems mis-aimed — if it doesn't even apply to the AIs most of us will be thinking of, right, then isn't it just sort of re-stating "narrowly-trained and small AIs are narrow and small", if you know what I mean?
This is related to the question of "originality", perhaps (re: the art and stuff) — is it making new art, or just mashing up old art; is it abstracting a principle from this data and applying it to that data, or was it all baked in?
You mentioned something about using them on O-o-D data all the time, though, so I *think* I'm closer to the right end of the stick than t'other... I hope, heh.
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Although, as you mention also, it's sort of a fuzzy question: to what extent is what the LLM does different from what a human does, right; like, if one gets sufficiently broad with the categories, one can say no human really reasons "out of distribution" too.
So... if the statement I wanted to either update upon or argue against is something like "AIs suck because they can't respond to novel data or extrapolate to handle it" — I guess it sort of depends on what we mean by "novel" (and "handle", and "suck") perhaps...?
(Still, I feel like it's... it's missing something. It's like someone when the Internet started saying "the Internet sucks because it can't enable real connection and communication between people", you know what I mean? Like, I mean, I guess it depends on defining "real connection", but it's obviously wrongheaded even so... right—)
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★ Superhuman performance: ★
→ Thank you very much — especially as I had read something about an AI detecting carcinomas well, and just could NOT find it again; was REALLY hoping someone might have it or something similar, because I thought it was a salient example of the potential here that isn't "just another game"...
...and my hero Godshatter (isn't that from a novel? I remember wanting to read it I think) came through! 👊👊
...I guess no questions here, heh, just wanted to share that boring story and express appreciation again. *cough*
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★ Bias and debasing: ★
→ I remember reading — I think on here, in fact — about how in an OpenAI paper (and another one I can't remember who published it), it appeared that turning up the "harmlessness" of the model ended up costing you on the "helpfulness" end. I can see this meaning that "we tried to remove bias and it made it less accurate", but — ....it could also mean something else, heh.
(If you know off the top of your head what it is I refer to here, I'm interested in your thoughts on it; if not, no worries, as said!)
SURVEYING FRANCE? I'm writing from France - in Marmande 60km east of Bordeaux. This is a small city - about 18,000 people - and another 12,000 in the periphery. But a big national music festival - called GAROROCK - will take place here over 3 or 4 days with many genres of music. About 150,000 people are expected - mostly young people in their 20s and 30s - but older people are also expected. They come from all over France - and from nearby countries as well - some even from the USA. Would doing a SURVEY of this population be of interest to anyone? What questions would be interesting to ask? what should be the methodology? This is a generally privileged well-off crowd. I am not a data scientist but I do play around with Bayesian Networks (Netica) which I don't often see discussed here in spite of the Bayesian mind set.
Reference to France --> recommendation to read Graham Robb's *Discovery of France* (found on Tyler Cowen's reading list), or how Paris colonized France in the Industrial Revolution. C'est vraiment très bien.
Have any of you participated in a Big Brother Big Sister program, as either a big or a little? What was your experience like? How much time did you spend with your little/big? Would you recommend it? I am considering volunteering as a big sister.
I participated as a big brother - I would recommend it, as long as you have the time and will to stick to it. We did an outing (2-3 hours) about twice a month for five years, though frequency tapered off as they got older. Outings ranged from lunch, movies, sports, even a theme park day one time.
I’d say the best skill it teaches is how to be what someone else needs, not what you want to be for them. Once you get that down it becomes a lot of fun! And you learn a lot from your little too.
I... think so? There was some bigger kid who showed up at the house once or twice, probably was something like that. I got nothing out of it, I've never liked being around people. I doubt they got anything out of it either, I'm unpleasant.
Our youngest daughter (recent graduate) took part in several such volunteer programmes as a recipient (we are in NZ so a somewhat different culture from the USA) so she clearly found value in them. She sought out 'mentorships' with adults starting in her early teens when she was in Scouts, whereas, none of her 3 siblings did ie I think it reflected her deliberative personality. She continues with regular contact with an assigned adult volunteer mentor (provided as part of a scholarship) from her last year at school, though at an 'exchanging Christmas cards' kind of emotional level.
Being an 'assigned' mentor (like I imagine the Big Sister role is) can be somewhat thankless as the two of you will likely be quite different in personality. It can take the passage of quite a few mutual activities together before a mentee begins to lower their guard even when they think you could be of value to them (adults are scary!). However, if you 2 'hit it off' I imagine it would be very mutually rewarding. I think our daughter used her mentors as sounding boards more than as someone to imitate, seek advice from or be reassured by.
Doing 'good works' like group cleanup of litter or a pro bono task (say a logo design) is easier because it is less demanding of you and the rewards are clearer.
Also [can't edit comments in the mobile app!]: in whatever ethical system you subscribe to, is it a good use of time compared to other types of volunteering? e..g. packing food at a local food pantry or picking up litter in a forest preserve or doing pro bono design work in my licensed profession, or some hypothetical ethically optimal volunteer opportunity.
This doesn’t directly answer your question, but I have heard/read that the data on big brother/big sister programs suggests that they are surprisingly effective.
Huh, something for me to look into! I've heard anecdotally that they are very effective at keeping teens out of trouble and encouraging prosocial activities, but I didn't know there was data on it.
When comparing options, keep in mind that if you *enjoy* doing something, chances are you will do it better and keep doing it for a longer time. So choosing the option that seems more enjoyable is actually a good strategy.
Why prediction markets aren't popular. Especially notable as the authors are former pro-prediction market advocates.
TLDR: It's not regulation that is holding prediction markets back, but *the lack of demand*. Unlike financial markets and sports betting, there's no built-in mass of dumb money to subsidize accuracy. And private market subsidies are far too expensive for anyone to want to do that. In the rare cases where prediction markets are actually useful for hedging, the existing financial system has already developed other products that fill the same niche.
American Jews have become quite excited as of late regarding the matter of local antisemitism.
To be fair, many of my people have tended towards an obsession with the subject since forever but I've been able to ignore their manias or to suggest psychiatrists so long as their fears were (nearly) entirely imaginary.
As of late they've become less imaginary and though I myself still regard American Antisemitism as a joke, as a rabbi I am getting called upon more and more to address the matter.
I regard this fretfulness over internet hitlers and students in tents as a distraction of the worst kind so I've decided to outsource the matter of "understanding (American) Antisemitism" to Ben Hecht.
As mentioned, this isn't my kampf, as I regard American Antisemitism to be a silly matter at the moment and am therefore working full time to stave off the less silly Antisemitism coming down the pike due to the criminal stupidity of those of my fellow rabbis and jewish leaders, but, if nothing else, the cancelled Ben Hecht (cancelled for trying to stop the Holocaust) was a more delightfullly brilliant writer than anyone else I've read so even if you agree with me that what Jews need be concerned about isn't pathetic internet nobodies or C- students trying to escape their finals you will hopefully enjoy this excerpt from the end of his Guide For The Bedeviled, written in 1943.
The rest of it deals with the ACTUAL antisemitism ongoing in his day and has sime of the smartest things to say about the Torah that I have ever read but, for fair enough reasons, Americans are mainly interested in America so he threw in his theory about the 4 categories of American Antisemites as he closed his manifesto.
Thank you for introducing me to Ben Hecht. The excerpt from "A Guide for the Bedevilled" is very good. Others must agree, as the price of a used volume is pretty high.
His autobiography was recently republished so it should be more easily available. It's called "Child of the Century". You'll love it. Please stay in touch if you read it. I don't tire of hearing from people who like Ben Hecht.
Next iteration of the where did all the classical-looking buildings go?
Surprise, elites want novelty, it was never about cost - according to the essay.
Okay, one one hand I really love HongKongism, but on the other it would be good to look at architectural committees arguments over the past century, and the cost estimates for the submissions. (It's quite possible that the "trad" ones were all too big, expensive, low space utilization proposals, and brutal functional utilitarianism won almost every time?)
What amazes me is how the author can spend so long writing about casting technology without ever making a case that modernism is actually bad.
I think the real reason for the decline of ornamentation is WINDOWS. Modern technology means that you can make buildings that are almost 100% windows, which is really nice for the people who work there. I'm sure that people in the past would have built giant glass boxes too if they had the technology.
All that fancy ornamentation people pine for is just cope for the lack of windows. The British government building comparison in the article is telling. Note how the one on the right has much more window space.
> Modern technology means that you can make buildings that are almost 100% windows, which is really nice for the people who work there.
Tastes vary here. Due to my fear of heights, I loathe being in rooms high off the ground with floor-to-ceiling windows. It makes me feel like I'm in the House Arryn's Sky Cells from Game of Thrones. Windows are nice for views and natural light, but I want the bottom part of the wall (at least to waist level) to actually look like something that would stop me from falling.
Similarly, I hate the fashionable internal design motif of multi-story lobbies with catwalks or balconies on the other levels where the safety railings are made of plexiglass or cables.
This rings true. Over the past couple months I have had cause to spend several days inside our state's capitol building which is a very handsome neoclassical pile that was completed in the 1880s. I was struck more than once at how much less appealing the building was when spending full workdays inside it, than it is to look at from the outside.
My regular office is in Chicago's Loop and happens to be in one of the landmark buildings of the transition to steel-frame construction. (It's called the Monadnock Building and has a long and very rich Wikipedia article.) Being a big ol' history geek I've always liked spending time inside the Monadnock notwithstanding some "old-building" type challenges. But I think your point is spot-on: the most striking quality-of-working-life difference between this building and the neoclassical ones which still exist is: windows. Big windows allowing in lots of natural light when/if wanted (which for most people most of the time, it is).
So in sum: I love looking at neoclassical architecture, as works of art it beats the modern-era stuff hands down. As places to work or live in though, have to admit that I'll take the modern all day long.
P.S. And for my money ultramodern "brutalist" stuff tends to be the worst of both: ugly to look at and oftentimes with big blank windowless walls. Yeccch.
I think it's fair to say that it's possible to build in ways which allow you to make the most of modern technology (e.g. huge glass windows), but which also don't look like boring 1960s rectangles.
I think we're still discovering what that architectural style might look like, but I've seen it in a few unlikely places, like the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas:
The interior spaces are heavily ornamented, but they look like something fresh and modern rather than a rehash of a historical style. They make the most of things like vast glass skylights and interior gardens. They're impressively large, but not so vast as to be sterile like an airport terminal. Now, not everything in the world needs to look like a Las Vegas casino, but visiting the Wynn makes me feel like a new ornamental-modern architectural style is possible and just hasn't been properly distributed yet.
I don't think the author wants to convey any (strong) value judgment. (And who knows who gave the title, they or an editor.)
Though in 2022 the author stated that "uglification" is happening, but also hints that it's possibly because of every generation's bias to find recent buildings uglier.
"Suppose, though, that our eyes are to be trusted. If this is so, strange and eerie truths rise before us: that ugly buildings were once rare, that the ‘uglification of the world’ is real and that it is happening all around us."
I don't necessarily buy the bias explanation, because I think most critics of modern architecture would say that the absolute nadir was 50-70 years ago, before most of us were born. Most recent buildings are a lot better than the concrete monstrosities which were going up in the 1970s.
Most recent buildings are fairly pleasant, but not actually beautiful.
Curtain walls are, yes. I'm near the Inland Steel Building in Chicago which was a landmark of that technique when completed in 1957. However buildings using steel frames immediately had much more window glass than was previously possible; I'm sitting in a 17-story example that was completed in the early 1890s.
My grandfather's retirement job was as live-in caretaker of Wellington's, NZ, first glass curtain 'skyscraper'. It was completed about 1960. I recall an investigation was launched after one of the glass panels fell off (the glue failed).
Depends on what forum she's been unhushed about it in. I don't follow it enough to point to any specific interviews she's given or books she's written on it where a breach could be implicated, but I can say that with respect to any testimony she's given in the current criminal case she shouldn't have any liability issues.
Pretty much every boilerplate NDA includes an exception for disclosures that are required by law (i.e. if you are subpoenaed to testify in a criminal case about it), and even if the clause isn't explicitly in there a court is unlikely to enforce a claim that an NDA was breached based on you testifying in court - I'd expect a defense that the breach is enforceable for reasons of public policy to stick in that case, even in the absence of a clear written exception in the text of the NDA itself.
But isn't the trial about giving her hush money using campaign funds? So someone somehow found out about it, but SHE wasn't the one to disclose it? I had thought she was just encouraged, somehow, to come forward with the accusation.
I could be wrong (please correct me) but I think the accusation is that the hush money helped Trumps campaign and so is a campaign expense, and these have to be disclosed (which it wasn't).
I had to do some googling to refresh my memory on this, but it was the WSJ that broke the story just before the 2016 election that Daniels had had an affair w/ Trump. Then in Jan 2018 it broke the story that Michael Cohen (after the 2016 WSJ story broke), had paid $130,000 to Daniels for her silence during Trump's 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. I haven't found out how the WSJ found out about the story. Afterward, it came out that Daniels had signed an NDA — but that piece of information came from Cohen. Daniels then sued to invalidate the NDA, because Cohen had broken his side of it. And she won.
Also, when Cohen wired his money (not Trump's) to Daniel's attorney late in Oct of 2016 — he used a Trump org email address to authorize the wire transfer and represented himself as "Special Counsel to Donald J. Trump"(!). <insert Homer Simpson "D'oh">
Who leaked the payment story to the WSJ?
1. Possibly Stormy Daniels or her attorney leaked it.
2. Someone in Trump's inner circle could have leaked it to put Cohen on the spot — which it did — but not realizing that it would eventually blow back on Trump.
3. Also, Daniels had been trying to shop the story since at least 2011. No one purchased it, but the WSJ could have been aware that Stormy Daniels was trying to sell her story before the 2016 election. And Cohen left a paper trail.
She won that lawsuit to invalidate the NDA because Trump had never signed it. Trump's attorneys conceded that point on the record in September 2018: “Mr. Trump does not, and will not, contest Ms. Clifford’s assertion that the settlement agreement was never formed, or in the alternative, should be rescinded,” the filing says. “Moreover, Mr. Trump covenants that he will not bring any action, proceeding or claim against Ms. Clifford to enforce any of the terms of the settlement agreement.”
Trump's lawyers have attempted to use the above facts as evidence that he was unaware of the hush money arrangement at the time that Cohen was arranging it. This point of contention has been the focus of a lot of the courtroom activity (witnesses called and cross-examined) during the current trial.
In public late last week Trump undermined the idea that he didn't know about the hush money arrangement at the time, by complaining that NDAs are normal but only his was found to be "illegal". Which isn't accurate -- it wasn't ruled illegal it was found to never have been fully executed -- but anyway the point is that he spoke about it as "my NDA".
Thank you for your research! It still isn't clear, but at least now I know why: the answer isn't obvious.
I'm not sure identifying oneself as "Special Counsel to Donald J. Trump" means much in of itself, unless it was for the specific matter at hand. If it is simply an automated signature, it ought not to count for anything. After all, if I communicated by email with someone about something questionable using my work email address, it would identify me as a software developer for my company automatically, unless I delete it.
Also a quick google - Trump & Daniels crossed paths in 2006. That's a long window for Trump to have told any number of people that he banged a porn star (it's not like the man is known for his discretion). Anybody so told could be a source for the WSJ, and all of these possible non-Stormy Daniels sources would be brought up by her attorney if Trump were to try to sue for a breach of the NDA.
No, that would have been in violation of campaign finance laws.
Under NY State law, Trump has been charged with falsifying his business records to hide other crimes which are — Cohen's illegal campaign contribution, tax law violations, and Trump's participation in conspiracy to influence the 2016 presidential election through unlawful means. *But Trump has not been charged with those crimes by NY State — only that he falsified his business records to cover up crimes.* Falsifying a business record is a misdemeanor, but falsifying it to cover up a crime is a felony.
UPDATE: From Judge Merchan's instructions to the jury today (as I understand them): (1) To convict Trump for the misdemeanors of falsifying business records, they only have to conclude that Trump falsified them or caused them to be falsified. (2) To convict Trump on felony counts, they each only have to conclude that Trump was committing some other crime by falsifying his business records. If some jurors think it was election fraud, and others think it was campaign finance violations or tax fraud, that’s OK – as long as they all vote that there was some crime involved to make the falsified business records a felony instead of a misdemeanor.
This past Sunday, I fell hard on my left knee. I'm hoping it's all soft tissue damage-- I'm recovering fairly quickly. Arnica is my friend, and so is ibuprofen.
I've gotten a recommendation for CBD oil, but apparently the quality and type vary quite a lot. I live in Pennsylvania, and I'm not sure what's available for me. I would want some which is good for inflammation/swelling.
Any recommendations?
The best thing I did was a previous decision to keep a cane where it can be found easily. If you need a cane, the last thing you need is to need to look for it.
I strongly recommend Garden Kneeling Stools for anyone who has a reason to kneel for extended periods or has or might have problems getting off the ground.
Recommend looking at Pain Science site run by Paul Ingraham. I would recommend diclofenac topical for the knee. It's an NSAID that's hard on the system when taken as a pill, but you can bypass all that by applying it topically. There's a weaker form available over the counter, and a strong form you can get by prescription. Have a friend with an arthritic knee who reports it helps a lot.
And *then* I read the information about it. It's for arthritis pain and emphatically *not* for strains and sprains. I'm going to look for someone to give it to.
Really? I'm no expert -- sorry if I sent you to the wrong stuff. Just googled "diclofenac strains" and most hits seemed to be in articles in favor of the stuff for pain relief of sprains. Didn't pursue it further. What did you see that said it was the wrong thing for injuries, opposed to arthritis?
Oh, I remember being horrified by what was on the paper. The no doubt faded and distorted version of it that remains in my mind 5+ years later is "do not use this if you have even a suspicion something is wrong with your gi tract, liver, kidneys, circulatory system, or lungs. Can cause fatal blood clots, liver toxicity, strokes, pulmonary hypertension and just plain old george t. death." I asked about the paper on the Ask Reddit medical thread and someone who had the badge signifying they were an MD said it was safe to apply, the warnings applied to taking the stuff orally. (You have to send Reddit proof of your degree to get the badge -- I was on there and had to send the mods a copy of my license to get the psychologist badge. It's possible to fake it, of course, but this person probably was an actual MD.). And most people who are using it for arthritis are elderly and many probably have other health conditions, so I can't see how the stuff could be for sale over the counter if it were dangerous to use topically. But if you pursue this and find out more can you let me know?
I'm organizing an event next week that explores the socio-cultural factors of psychopathology, inspired by Crazy Like Us and The Geography of Madness, but one of our speakers canceled recently and it's not looking likely that we're going to find a replacement. Does anyone have an idea for what to replace that timeslot with, perhaps a topical video or a lecture that's publicly available? The audience is psychology PhD students.
Freddie deBoer wrote another essay [0] on Israel-Palestine. I'm not sure why, but this guy that I keep disagreeing with on plenty of issues and on broad worldview has a knack of independently re-deriving all of my views and feelings on the particular matter of Israel and Palestine.
From the NYT op-ed [1] The View Within Israel Turns Bleak, which Freddie mentions:
> It was the pictures of Palestinians swimming and sunning at a Gaza beach that rubbed Yehuda Shlezinger, an Israeli journalist, the wrong way. [...] “These people there deserve death, a hard death, an agonizing death, and instead we see them enjoying on the beach and having fun,” complained Mr. Shlezinger, the religious affairs correspondent for the widely circulated right-wing Israel Hayom newspaper. “We should have seen a lot more revenge there,” Mr. Shlezinger unrepentantly added. “A lot more rivers of Gazans’ blood.”
And this, dear deniers of a Genocide in Gaza, is why people think there is a genocide happening or in the first stages of happening or imminently will happen in Gaza. If you're so upset by this, make your best case for why the above is not a representative of a society that is engaging in Genocide or very seriously planning to. I'm all ears, tell me how all of this is normal and happens in plenty of other societies.
From Freddie's piece:
> this kind of eliminationist rhetoric has become entirely commonplace in mainstream Israeli politics. [...] This was the basic point of Stack’s column, which delivered a lesson that many Americans simply refuse to learn - that Israel’s government and society has become filled with ultra-nationalist, ultra-religious, ultra-militarist ultra-conservatives. If you would like to blame that reality on the Palestinians, you are free to. But it is reality. There is no longer a secular liberal state of Israel. As commentators like Gideon Levy and Gershom Gorenberg have been documenting for many years, the drift of Israel has been towards a more and more unrepentant embrace of hardline religious fanaticism and rejection of internationalism and multiculturalism.
> What fries my noodle is how few people in the public conversation - how few of you - seem willing to stake out a very simple and obvious Zionist position regarding this reality. It goes something like this.
[Imagined Zionist position] >>>> I support Zionism and the state of Israel. and I will always advocate for a safe and prosperous Jewish state. [...] I believe that Hamas bears the blame for what has happened following the attacks on 10/7, and that Israel had and has a right to use force to rescue hostages and dismantle Hamas. Palestinian lack of self-determination is ultimately the fault of Palestinians; Hamas’s rule is the biggest impediment to Palestinian peace and prosperity.
[Continue Zionist Position] >>>> However, the response to the attack has clearly been disproportionate, many specific incidents of violence against the Palestinians have been disturbing, and no matter how many civilian lives have been lost, the figure is far too high. The ongoing war is not making Israel any safer. A ceasefire is in the best interest of everyone. It’s far past time that a permanent settlement be made with the Palestinians, which must entail either a real Palestinian state or some sort of integration of Palestinians in the territories into Israeli political life.
> This isn’t my ideal statement or anything like it. As you are aware, I am a critic of many aspects of modern Israel, and in the broadest terms am motivated by my rejection of a) ethnonationalism and b) state religion. [...] And I don’t agree with this basic notion of who holds what kind of blame. But this position seems like a constructive and honest assessment of the current situation that could be held someone who is deeply invested in Israel and its future without betraying those values. But there’s so little of it to be found, from my admittedly limited perspective, and I don’t really know why. I know that there are many Israelis and American supporters of Israel who are anguished by what’s happened, but by and large defenders of Israel seem unwilling to concede that things have gone too far.
The rest of Freddie and Stack's NYT op-ed are worth reading, and I mostly agree with them (which is quite easy to do when they're just describing facts) on all broad outlines.
See also this gem of genocidal rap [2], which among other wisdom contain lyrics like "Not even prayer will save you, decedents of Amalek." This is one of the artistic output of this totally not genocidal phase of totally not genocidal society. Keep in mind the YouTube channel that posted this, Documenting Israel, this is not some Pro-Palestinian outlet rage-hunting for the maximally-bad cherry-pick that would make Israel look bad, this is a Pro-Israel channel that posts weddings of IDF soldiers and Iranian intellectuals talking about the Islamist threat, while every once and while posting a celebration of genocidal violence and a cheering on of this violence using genocidal rhetoric.
Did you read the other NYT piece Freddie linked to? That was some serious reporting. It's long, but I think it may be the best thing I've read about what's going wrong inside Israel.
Especially when you consider that those two parties (Mafdal–Religious Zionism and Otzma Yehudit) have 13/120 seats in the Knesset, which means they represent almost 11% of Israelis. Not to mention whatever sympathizers they may have who vote for other parties for their own reasons.
"And this, dear deniers of a Genocide in Gaza, is why people think there is a genocide happening or in the first stages of happening or imminently will happen in Gaza. If you're so upset by this, make your best case for why the above is not a representative of a society that is engaging in Genocide or very seriously planning to."
No, it's your job to make the case that the opinions of one person--which, by the way, do not call for genocide in the way it is typically understood (i.e. the total extermination of a people)--represent the plans of an entire society. Do Israelis want revenge? Yes. Do a lot of them want to see Gazans suffer? Yes. I can't say I blame them. But there is a huge gap between wanting revenge (even revenge against civilians) and committing genocide.
One problem is that a lot of people are nowadays basically using the word "genocide" to mean "war crimes". There's a far smaller gap from "Do Israelis want revenge? Yes. Do a lot of them want to see Gazans suffer? Yes." to war crimes than to genocide.
> which, by the way, do not call for genocide in the way it is typically understood
Ah huh, calling for "Rivers of X blood" is not a call for genocide against X? Would you have said the same thing if this was a Hamas sympathizer calling for rivers of Jewish blood?
> represent the plans of an entire society
Perhaps you missed the entire last 7 to 7.5 months of posting by me, an understandable lapse. This "One Person" shares the same opinion as the Prime Minister, the President, the Finance Minister, the Internal Security Minister, and multiple Knesset representatives, to say nothing of several instances of groups of soldiers repeating this.
"Ah huh, calling for "Rivers of X blood" is not a call for genocide against X? Would you have said the same thing if this was a Hamas sympathizer calling for rivers of Jewish blood?"
Yes. In fact, Hamas did spill rivers of Jewish blood on Oct 7, and I still don't call that a genocide.
"No True Israeli ?"
Many true Israelis are murderous fascists, just like many true members of other societies are murderous fascists. That still does not mean Israel is engaging in a genocide. You're welcome to argue that it plans to, but then you'd have to explain why it's taking them so long. Are they the most incompetent genocidaires in history?
Sorry, am I missing something? What's the case for actual genocide here?
I go check wikipedia (1) and it shows roughly 10,000 Hamas dead and 32k Gazan civilians dead. The population of Gaza, meanwhile, is 2.3 million (2). This is...roughly 0.18% of the Gazan population. That seems roughly comparable to Yemeni casualties of ~450k out of a population of ~34 million, or 0.13% of the population (3). This does not seem comparable to, say, the Armenian genocide of 600k to 1.5 million out of a population of 1.9 million (4) (5)
I keep hearing the "genocide" thing, at a glance I just don't see the bodies, am I missing something?
In addition to calculating percentages wrong, and in addition to missing that this is 8 months of war not the 10 years of the war on Yemen or the nearly 15 years of the war on Iraq, you also miss a very simple fact: Genocide has nothing to do with overall death count.
Yes, definitely, death count serves as a "Smoking gun" for Genocide. There is no other reason why someone would kill 70% (or 60% or 50%) or higher of a group if they didn't want the decimation of the entire group. But a sufficient condition is not a necessary condition.
For example, here's [1] an instance where the ICJ ruled that there was a genocide on evidence of "just" 8K casualties, and a wider atmosphere of merely 25K to 30K displaces/ethnically-cleansed people. For reference against Gaza, 8K is less than 33% of 25K, the estimate of civilian Gazan casualties that you get by subtracting 10K Hamas fighters from a total of 35K dead. And 30K displaced person is a staggering 3/90, or 1/30, of the number of civilians who fled Rafah **alone** since the start of the Israeli attack about 2 or 3 weeks ago, which is 900K according to IDF reports in Haaretz.
The ultimate authority on what a genocide is a treaty, the same treaty establishing the ICJ and giving it its powers. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide [2]. It's *surprisingly* readable and understandable given the mouthful of a title, here's Article III:
>> The following acts shall be punishable:
>>> (a) Genocide;
>>> (b) Conspiracy to commit genocide;
>>> (c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;
>>> (d) Attempt to commit genocide;
>>> (e) Complicity in genocide.
Take a good look on point (c), by the way. This needs no proof except being caught on video multiple times saying "Human Animals" and "Rivers of Blood". Just the mere incitement to Genocide is a crime according to a treaty that Israel was one of the first signatories to in 1948.
Here's article II, the definition of Genocide:
>> genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
>>> (a) Killing members of the group;
>>> (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
>>> (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
>>> (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
>>> (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Causing mental harm to the group, such as by forcing nearly 95% of them to become homeless, killing children at random by unpredictable airstrikes, and destroying 70% or so of the urban area they used to call home. That's Genocide, according to the literal highest authority on what a genocide is.
<quote>This needs no proof except being caught on video multiple times saying "Human Animals" and "Rivers of Blood".</quote>
I doubt the standard is so low, else there would have been much more prosecutions (including *both* sides of this war). And as with most laws, the word *intent* carries a whole lot of water.
It's true that the overall death count is not the only factor in determining whether a genocide happened, but neither is the literal text of the Convention. The Convention's definition of genocide is so broad as to be completely useless. What does "in whole or in part" mean? How big of a part does it need to be to count? If you take the text literally, then even if Israel killed only Hamas militants and didn't hurt anyone else or damage any property, it would still be guilty of genocide--they'd be destroying a part of a national group, namely the part that's part of Hamas. In fact, since mental harm counts (per part b), even berating Hamas on TV would count!
Clearly, this definition of genocide is very far from the common sense definition that the word has taken on among the vast majority of English speakers. If the ICJ uses this definition and takes it literally, that's a good reason to not take the ICJ seriously.
Since you mention the Bosnian genocide (which, BTW, I don't agree is a genocide), here are some of the things that happened in the Srebrenica massacre:
"The Bosnian men who had been separated from the women, children and elderly in Potočari numbering approximately 1,000 were transported to Bratunac and subsequently joined by Bosnian men captured from the column.[118] Almost without exception, the thousands of Bosnian prisoners captured, following the take-over of Srebrenica, were executed. Some were killed individually or in small groups by the soldiers who captured them and some were killed in the places where they were temporarily detained. Most, however, were killed in carefully orchestrated mass executions, commencing on 13 July 1995 in the region just north of Srebrenica.
The mass executions followed a well-established pattern. The men were first taken to empty schools or warehouses. After being detained there for some hours, they were loaded onto buses or trucks and taken to another site for execution. Usually, the execution fields were in isolated locations. The prisoners were unarmed and in many cases, steps had been taken to minimise resistance, such as blindfolding them, binding their wrists behind their backs with ligatures or removing their shoes. Once at the killing fields, the men were taken off the trucks in small groups, lined up and shot. Those who survived the initial round of shooting were individually shot with an extra round, though sometimes only after they had been left to suffer for a time.[117]"
"Erdemović said that all but one of the victims wore civilian clothes and that, except for one person who tried to escape, they offered no resistance before being shot. Sometimes the executioners were particularly cruel. When some of the soldiers recognised acquaintances from Srebrenica, they beat and humiliated them before killing them. Erdemović had to persuade his fellow soldiers to stop using machine gun for the killings; while it mortally wounded the prisoners it did not cause death immediately and prolonged their suffering.[127] Between 1,000 and 1,200 men were killed in that day at this execution site.[129]"
When Israel starts executing thousands of people who have already surrendered and aren't resisting, you could convince me that Israel is committing a level of atrocity on par with the Srebrenica massacre (which, again, I do not consider a genocide).
>neither is the literal text of the Convention. The Convention's definition of genocide is so broad as to be completely useless. What does "in whole or in part" mean? How big of a part does it need to be to count? If you take the text literally, then even if Israel killed only Hamas militants and didn't hurt anyone else or damage any property, it would still be guilty of genocide--they'd be destroying a part of a national group, namely the part that's part of Hamas.
Very much agreed. The UN definition of genocide is bizarre to the point of, as you said, uselessness.
People keep ignoring the "as such" portion of the definition:
> “The intent must exist to destroy a national, ethnical, racial or religious as such. Thus the acts must be directed towards a specific group on these discriminatory grounds.”
The Prosecutor v. Clément Kayishema and Oben Ruzindana. 21 May 1999. ICTR-95-1T
Hence, if Israel targets Hamas members simply because they are Palestinians, then that might be an "in part" form of genocide of Palestinians. But if Israel targets them because they attacked Israel, then it is not genocide, because it is not destruction of part of an ethnic group "as such."
So, the UN definition is useful, but only if you can read minds or the suspect confesses?
With ordinary murder, one can infer intent from e.g. the observation that the suspect stabbed the victim with a kitchen knife twenty-six times, but inferring from such an intent to kill the victim's entire extended family when in fact they stopped after just the one is a bit of a stretch.
Many Thanks! That makes it a lot clearer. A pity that, AFAIK, Hamas members are a subset of Palestinians. If Hamas had a couple of non-Palestinian members that Israel could kill, that would clarify this legal issue.
One day we will buy you a double-way ticket to the Hague so you can tell those nasty UN officials from 1948 all what's in your heart to their face instead of spewing it here.
>One day we will buy you a double-way ticket to the Hague so you can tell those nasty UN officials from 1948 all what's in your heart to their face instead of spewing it here.
Alright, I'll bite. What, specifically, do you mean by this?
That it's pointless to complain about the Hague courts now that they threaten to punish Israel and Israeli politicians, when it has been standing for nearly 75 years and nobody complained as long as it was punishing and condemning "backwaters" in Asia and Africa and South America.
From a legal perspective, is Israel allowed to fight against Hamas? If so, and given that Hamas is hiding within a civilian population, is there a way that Israel could conduct the war, effectively, without committing what you are calling genocide? If you're arguing that Israel isn't/shouldn't be allowed to fight against Hamas, or that it's not allowed to be effective (or win), I'm not sure there's much room for compromise.
I'm not a fan of everything Israel is doing, but if they did everything I feel that I could reasonable ask of them, I don't know that the outcome would be significantly different.
It's nice that you're comfortable and all, but you don't get to just spew contempt for others 'views here without presenting a reasoned argument or data to back up your opinions. Moreover you are rude. Are you aware of the two-out-of-3 criteria for comments here? You already got a partial ban for a post that failed all 3 criteria. You just put up 2 more that also fail all 3, both of which I'm reporting.
2) It's a little bit comparing apples with oranges. The war in Yemen went over 10 years, in Gaza it's less than a year. And in Yemen, only 150k were killed by direct military action, the rest by a famine (which of course is also very much related to the war).
Out of curiosity, the reason the US (officially at least) does not recognize Palestine is that most of the Arab world (for example, Saudi Arabia) does not recognize Israel. The reason they have blocked recent resolutions in the UN is because the American position is that such recognition must be reciprocal: Palestine and the Arab states recognize Israel and that it has a right to exist. Israel and the US and friends recognize Palestine as an independent state with a right to exist.
Why is this mutual deal not acceptable to the Palestinian side? In the past it was because organizations like the PLO and Hamas were quite explicit about wanting to destroy Israel. If that's no longer their intent then why don't they push their Arab friends to take that exchange? Why do they still push for unilateral recognition where they don't have to recognize Israel?
What the PLO acknowledged was the right of Israel to exist. There was no exchange of diplomatic recognition. Which is what the US wanted from both sides. The US eventually got a promise from both sides to recognize each other but the deal did not ultimately close.
The PLO is not the government of Palestine which is the State of Palestine. You don't get a passport from the PLO, you get it from the State of Palestine. This is evident even in the letter where the PLO recognized Israel's right to exist where they reference needing to get a resolution through a government process. The leader of Fatah is effectively the dictator of that government. But they are still technically separate and the State does not recognize Israel on the (imo fair) grounds that Israel doesn't recognize them.
Anyway, I think it would be a smart move for the Palestinians to plainly offer that they and their Arab friends will recognize Israel and Israeli borders contingent on a peace deal (and recognition from Israel's partners). If it were sincere it would limit them to more achievable goals and give them a permanent defense against the idea they're trying to commit a genocide. Unless, like Hamas, they are actually trying to commit a genocide.
I know some Palestinians feel like admitting Israel gets to exist is a concession. But that seems to me to be a delusional take.
How are the Palestinians supposed to offer a binding recognition that the *other* Arab states will recognize Israel? For one thing, it would be very hard for Syria - a fairly crucial component - here to offer a recognition even if Israel fully agreed to 1949-borders Palestine as long as Israel still keeps occupying Golan.
They could declare that their position unilaterally and ask the Arab League to endorse it.
Also, if that's the standard would you be fine with a peace deal where the US and the rest of the west doesn't recognize Palestine? Where they don't get a seat in the UN which Israel doesn't control? Or is the standard that Israel must bring along additional states and recognition while Palestine does not have to?
> but by and large defenders of Israel seem unwilling to concede that things have gone too far.
Not in English they wouldn't. Not because they are so extreme that they don't think it, but because of the "arguments are soldiers" mentality. In Hebrew, you hear more of it - not from politicians and not very loudly, but definitely from the mainstream center-left media. I do not think that the current atmosphere in Israel is good for preventing war crimes by low-ranking soldiers or bad judgment of proportionality in higher rank, but those sporadic and ambiguous mentions of Amalek (and rare-though-not-rare enough explicit calls for genocide from random publicists) are far from enough for generating the concensus needed for coordinating a large project in a non-centralized society.
There is really nothing more comically pathetic than this attempted timid attempt by the Pro-Israel cheerleaders at inventing a slur by truncating an ethnicity name. Perhaps only rivaled by always writing "Palestinians" with the quotes to imply the group doesn't exist, that favorite conspiratorial wet dream.
Not decent enough to call the people you don't like by their true name, not courageous enough to coin a true slur. The worst of all qualities, neither Man nor Beast.
You point out something that basically all of the anti-Israel crowd misses (or cynically chooses not to see). No one is forcing the Gazans to fight to the death. Their government can end the war at any time by surrendering. It's ludicrous to believe that a state can start a war by deliberately and savagely attacking civilians, and then the onus is on the other side to make peace.
"""Just revolt on Hamas bro. Why you keep doing this bro? Stop making us kill children bro, just revolt on Hamas tomorrow and we will stop killing innocents, pinky promise, no more killing innocents like the last 75 years."""
The entire area is one country, called "Israel and Palestine".
This country has dual citizenship. Every person is either a citizen of Israel *or* a citizen of Palestine. The Law of Return makes you a citizen of Israel. There is analogical law for Palestinian refugees (e.g. the ones living currently in Lebanon) that makes them citizens of Palestine, if they choose to return and apply for the citizenship. Children inherit the citizenship of their mother.
The country is a parliamentary democracy, where the 50% of parliament is elected by citizens of Israel, and 50% by citizens of Palestine. A political party makes two lists of candidates for elections, one for the Israel part of the parliament, and one for the Palestine part. The parliament votes on proposals as a whole. (Alternatively: each proposal needs to get a majority approval in both parts.)
...well, that's the long-term idea in a nutshell, now the problem is how to get from "here" to "there".
Why start with Israel and Palestine? You could bring this to the UAE, or Saudi Arabia, or Syria, or Yemen, or Sudan or Libya. See how it works and then -- if successful -- bring it to Israel and Palestine.
After all, there are lots of countries in the Middle East that have undergone wars far deadlier than the current war in Gaza. Countries that are currently much further from representative democracy. Why limit the concept to Israel and Palestine?
Apologies, I'm not trying to say you did anything wrong.
In my experience, I've noticed that people who support regime change in Israel are more hesitant to support regime change in some other countries which could plausibly be described as being as bad as, or worse than, Israel.
I just wanted to get a sense of whether this was an idea that's unique to Israel, or good for everyone, or a punishment for Israel, etc. If that didn't come across, the fault is solely mine.
I have spent more time learning and thinking about Israel and Palestine than about the other countries you mentioned. I am not proposing a one-size-fits-all solution, but rather something that I think might fit the specific situation of Israel and Palestine. To propose a similar solution for the other countries, I would first have to spend a comparable amount of time learning about their specific situations. That's not something I can do on request, and I cannot predict how similar or different would be my answer.
The fact that Israel already is a democracy is a reason why I think that extending the institution to Palestinians has a better chance to succeed than e.g. trying to introduce the concept to Saudi Arabia from scratch. Those few millions of Arabs who currently have Israeli citizenship are already living in a democracy! I admit I don't know what parties they typically vote for, and whether those are deeply problematic in any way. If yes, that would indeed be a problem for my proposal.
I could even imagine a relatively fluent transition from the current situation to the described outcome. Maybe add Palestinians gradually, starting with the West Bank, leaving Gaza last, and make a quota how many Palestinians living in other countries can return each year.
Step 1: There already is a Jewish and Arab population in Israel, and they both can vote, right? So the first step would be to reform the existing system with the existing voters, mostly preserving the existing balance of powers. There are 3 times more Jews than Arabs currently, therefore in step 1 we will change the rules so that 75% of seats in the parliament are reserved for politicians voted in by the Jewish population, and 25% of seats are reserved for politicians voted in by the Arab population. Each political party provides two lists of candidates for each section of the parliament. -- Do you think this would already result in some kind of disaster, for example the current Arab citizens of Israel mostly voting for Hamas (or something similar under a different name)?
Step 2 is gradually including more people in the system, as voters for the Palestinian part of the parliament. As the population increases, the percentage of the seats in parliament reserved for the Arab/Palestinian voters increases as a linear function of the population that votes for it, up to the target of 50% at the moment everyone on the current territory of Israel+Palestine is included. (Mathematically speaking, let's say that currently 1/4 of Arabs living in the area have Israeli citizenship, so we make a linear function such that 1/4 results in 25% and 4/4 results in 50%; I think the formula would be y=1/6+1/3x where x is the fraction of Arabs in the area included in the system, and y is the fraction of their seats in parliament.) So basically we need to onboard 5 more millions of Arabs, and with each million the size of the Palestinian parliament increases by 5 percentage points. But we don't add all 5 millions at the same time, rather maybe start with Area C, later the rest of the West Bank. Wait with Gaza until the situation with Hamas is solved.
Now imagine the situation in the middle of this process. For example, suppose that West Bank is already integrated in the system, but Hamas still rules in Gaza. What is the situation like for the Palestinians? The ones already in the system have full rights and higher quality of life. They vote for the ordinary corrupted politicians, rather than outright terrorists. They can walk wherever they want to, live wherever they want to. How exactly does Hamas excuse its existence in this situation? I think the people under their rule would see that getting rid of Hamas would be a clear improvement to their situation.
> I just wanted to get a sense of whether this was an idea that's unique to Israel, or good for everyone, or a punishment for Israel, etc.
An attempt to find a peaceful solution, other than the current "one side must be exterminated/expelled first, and only then the remaining side can live in peace".
This seems pretty close to Lebanon's government - they allocated seats based on religion. They went through a 15-year civil war from 1975 to 1990, which killed ~150,000 people. Today, the country rarely follows its own Constitution - their politics is so dysfunctional their Presidency is just vacant. It's not clear when, if ever, they will elect a new President. They recent went through a sovereign default, and their GDP per capita is about half of the world's average. The Economist gives their democracy a 3.56 out of 10 - an authoritarian country.
The sad reality is that if Israel's neighbors became more like Israel, the Middle East would be a safer, richer, happier place. If Israel became more like Lebanon, you would just see another failed authoritarian state lurching from economic collapse to civil war.
I think you honestly want to make the region better. For many people, the nightmare scenario of Lebanon is their dream for Israel. Because they want to do regime change in Israel for the same reason we did it in Afghanistan - revenge.
Yeah, it was inspired by Lebanon, but I didn't remember the name of the country... and did not know that the system failed. :(
(One thing I would do differently is not linking the votes to current religion. Like, imagine that one day million people in Lebanon convert to Buddhism; how are they going to vote? I think it would be better to simply have some neutrally named citizenship, let's just call it "type A" and "type B". Initially we give the type A to Jews and type B to Arabs, plus we define that Jews coming to the country based on the Law of Return also get the type A, and Palestinians returning also get the type B. But from that point on, the citizenship type is simply passed from mother to children, and if those children choose to convert to Buddhism, they keep the citizenship type they inherited.)
The problem as I see it now is that basically democracy doesn't work in countries where you have strong ethnic groups. Democracy works where the opposing sides are called "the left" and "the right", because anyone can join any side, and many people are kinda in the middle. Democracy fails where the opposing sides are called something like "Tutsi" and "Hutu", because everyone has their side clearly defined, and the larger tribe wins. Which encourages "political strategies" such as having more children, accusing the other tribe of having too many children, and killing people from the other tribe.
Basically this was the reason behind Nakba, as I see it. The Jews in Israel (1) wanted to have a democracy, (2) wanted their side to win, but (3) were numerically a minority. This was mathematically impossible: you could get any two of these, but not all three. But if you kick out enough Arabs; not all of them, just enough to make the remaining ones numerically a minority, the system can work. Letting them in would break the system again.
Ironically, the system could also be more peaceful without democracy, or at least without democracy for everyone. Make the rules so that only Jews can vote, and then you do not need to kick out the Arabs, because it doesn't matter politically how many they are. You can take their land one village at a time, so there will never be millions of refugees. -- Even this system would be an improvement over what happens now. Problem is, it would make the political allies of Israel ashamed to admit that they support this. Or maybe not, considering that USA also supports Saudi Arabia, which is a theocratic monarchy.
In case others have missed it, incidentally, I found this series of nine posts to be a rather comprehensive description of the history and problem space:
1) how do you stop Palestinians murdering every Jew they see once that happens? Historically that's happened every time in the region except under Israeli governments.
2) even if you put violence aside, no country in the world would accept just annexing another, much poorer population the size of its own. Imagine trying to convince the US to solve illegal immigration by joining into one giant country with the entirety of Latin America.
Many Thanks! Well, China's conquest of Tibet happened before I was born, but not long before, and certainly within living memory:
>The region maintained its autonomy until 1951 when, following the Battle of Chamdo, Tibet was occupied and annexed by the People's Republic of China. The Tibetan government was abolished after the failure of the 1959 Tibetan uprising.[6]
The infantile fear of the Palestinian identity and its fervent denial will never be not funny.
> committed plenty of pogroms against local Jews over the centuries
A shameful black spot in the history of Palestinian Arabs and Arabs everywhere, but I notice with curiosity that "Plenty of Pogroms" is still not "murdering every Jew they see", unless my English is betraying me somehow. So it still stands to ask the question: How did Jews survive at all if OP is correct and every single time an Arab sees a Jew a murder happens?
> not that a "human rights enjoyer"
Aww don't be so salty, it's not an exclusive club. Joining is as easy as denouncing genocide and not cheerleading for a war machine that kills children by the thousands. We don't give cards and you have to bring your own food.
Singapore's an especially funny example because Singapore left Malaysia (in part) over it being Malay/Muslim majority to create their own smaller country with a Chinese majority. This included expulsions on both sides but both sides accepted independence. So the Singapore solution is: carve out your own area where you're the ethnic majority and then have the larger ethnic group accept that and not attack you. I think Israel would take that deal.
Also, you really want to claim Arab pogroms killed less than 35,000 people in all of history? Because that's a very silly thing to believe.
> you really want to claim Arab pogroms killed less than 35,000 people in all of history?
Funny you would ask, yeah. How much do you want to bet that 35K is way more than the total sum of the casualties of every single non-war instance of Arab pogroms from 1850 till now?
The first two had something like a four to one population ratio, strong shared history and ethnic ties, and still ended up being economic basket cases. South Korea probably wouldn't annex north Korea at this point *despite* their own strong historical ties, precisely for this reason. Taiwan definitely doesn't want Chinese reunification anymore.
"South Africa..." - And it worked out so well for the whites there, that they merely enjoy Detroit style murder rates and have fled abroad by the hundreds of thousands.
In the situations you mention, one side wants to be left alone (Ukraine, Croatia, Bosnia).
In case of Israel and Palestine, both sides want to own the entire territory -- "Greater Israel" / "from the river to the sea" -- and this plan allows them both to kinda have it.
In Turkey, cichlids are sometimes marketed under the name "ciklet" (the 'c' is akin to English 'j', so dʒɪklɪt or thereabouts?), because "sik" is the Turkish root-word for "fuck" and nobody would buy fish called fuck-lids if aquarists were to adopt the English pronunciation. (There's also a contribution from ciklet 'chewing gum', originally from Chiclets).
In Japan, cinerarias (シネラリア) are sometimes marketed under the name "syneria" (サイネリア), because shine is the Japanese root-word for "die" and nobody would buy plants called die-in-a-ditchworts if florists were to adopt the English pronunciation.
In the US, the rape plant is sometimes marketed as "canola", because rape is the English root-word for rape and nobody would buy food made with rape if the food producers were adopt the English pronunciation. (Canola is technically a cultivar but apparently it got genericized partially because of this).
Is there a general term for this type of deliberate, euphemistic changes to words? I asked our AI overlords, but they make up terms that Google Scholar doesn't verify (e.g. "phonetic avoidance" which is not about changing rude-sounding loanwords, but about people who can't pronounce certain syllables avoiding words with them).
>In the US, the rape plant is sometimes marketed as "canola", because rape is the English root-word for rape and nobody would buy food made with rape if the food producers were adopt the English pronunciation. (Canola is technically a cultivar but apparently it got genericized partially because of this).
>Canola oil is a food-grade version derived from rapeseed cultivars specifically bred for low erucic acid content. It is also known as low erucic acid rapeseed (LEAR) oil and is generally recognized as safe by the United States Food and Drug Administration.
I don't know if there's a name for it, but here's another story: English used to call rabbits "coneys", but stopped because it sounded too similar to "cunny". But the entire word couldn't be thrown out entirely because it's in the KJV (and Shakespeare?), so the pronunciation also changed to be "cone-y" instead of "conn-y" while graduating "rabbit" (used to just refer to the young) to cover the entire animal.
That one's interesting! I thought 'cunny' was a new invention in the parlance of Flower Knight Girl and Blue Archive players (where it means something you shouldn't Google, if you aren't in the know and are happy with the number of government lists you're on), but turns out the cockneys were there before them.
In retrospect, it was a matter of time before somebody put cunt and fanny together.
Sorta, but that's a related practice of circumlocuting the name of a big scary thing that might hear you talking shit about it, like bears becoming "the brown ones" or fairies becoming "iyi saatte olsunlar" ("may they come in good hours").
It would fit if the Ancient Greeks decided e.g. Mons Argaeus sounded too much like Erinyes, and changed the name to Mons Aureus or something instead. (And then we Turks came along and re-changed the name to Erciyes, which sounds even more like Erinyes. Typical Turks).
In most Latin American countries, the Mitsubishi Pajero is marketed as Mitsubishi Montero because in vulgar Spanish "pajero" means something close to "masturbator", and you don't want to say: "I just bought a new car, it's a masturbator".
There is a company named OSRAM that manufactures lightbulbs. It is the subject of many jokes in Poland, because in Polish, "osram" means "I will shit on."
"In the US, the rape plant is sometimes marketed as "canola", because rape is the English root-word for rape and nobody would buy food made with rape if the food producers were adopt the English pronunciation."
Wrong etymology here, though I take your point about the homonym.
"The name for rapeseed comes from the Latin word rapum meaning turnip. Turnip, rutabaga (swede), cabbage, Brussels sprouts, and mustard are related to rapeseed. Rapeseed belongs to the genus Brassica."
Over here, it's called rapeseed oil and an older name for the plant is "oilseed rape" because, well, it's produced for the seed oil.
Oh, my bad. I was just being facetious about rapum and rapio.
But maybe there's some overlap in things like broomrape, rapum-genistae, which is named after its tuberous roots but is also a parasite that seizes its host.
There is a delicious mushroom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craterellus_cornucopioides called "trumpet of the dead", in German "Totentrompete". It is sold as "Herbsttrompete", "trumpet of autumn", because the other name hurts sales.
Do guests consider themselves to be doing a favor when they go on someone's podcast? Do podcasters consider *themselves* to be doing someone a favor when they invite them as a guest? Does it depend on the podcast size? Does the average person invited to be a podcast guest say yes? Do you have to be a Top 10 podcaster to score someone relevant? Do you have to build your way up by interviewing random friends until you prove yourself good enough that a real famous person will come on your show? Do podcasters send out resumes to guests to prove that they're good?
First of all, not all podcasts host guests: many popular podcasts have a permanent crew, or even just a single host. But focusing on those that do host guests, there are three types of people that end up as one:
1) Expert: someone with relevant knowledge or a unique personal experience
2) Content creator: someone who is engaging to listen to; who has a committed audience
3) Friend: someone who the host is comfortable bantering with; who can reveal personal information about the host
These types are not mutually exclusive, one person can fall under multiple types.
Some podcasts operate by only inviting the experts. These are often linked to some area of academia or industry: anthropology podcast inviting anthropologists, tech podcast inviting entrepreneurs and so on. A feminist podcast inviting an abuse survivor would fall under this type too.
Some podcasts feature mostly other content creators. Those typically form tight bundles of people all appearing in each other's content, catering to a certain niche of the online audience. "Breadtubers" make content for online leftists, "manosphere" makes redpill/PUA content, "anitube" makes content for weebs, "ratsphere" makes content for, well, anyone reading this.
Some podcasts will invite people who they vibe with IRL. This is great if you want to create a feeling depicted in the "how it feels to listen to podcasts meme", a parasociality component that makes the viewer less lonely during their daily grind. This is how you build an audience that will subscribe to your Patreon and buy your merch because they like you as people, not just as information or entertainment vessels.
Many guest-type podcasts host a combination of guest types. You can tell what type the guest falls into by the episode title:
"We grill a forensic psychiatrist" would match the expert guest
"We grill Scott Alexander" would match the content creator guest
"We got so drunk we dropped the grill" would match the friend guest
Getting back to the guest economy, the dynamics can be pretty different depending on what capacity do the hosts invite the guest as.
With experts, on "small fish" prominence levels podcast hosts would typically reach out to people whose work or stories make some kind of impact. In big leagues, the situation can reverse, and the industry giants might have their PR agents reaching out to top podcast hosts with an appearance deal.
Content creators are typically aware of each other's existence for a long time before the episode gets recorded. In most cases, they don't only work on podcasts: they would have a youtube channel, a blog, etc. If the audiences overlap, both the host and the guest would have their followers banging on the doors saying "you should host this person" or "you should appear on this podcast", and it's usually a good idea since it grows both audiences. If they are not in contact yet, a bigger creator might get interested in the work of the smaller one and invite them to collaborate or to appear on a podcast. Alternatively, the bigger creator can just publicly comment or react to the work of a smaller one. In this case a smaller creator can offer a bigger one a collaboration offer. Reaching out to bigger creators cold is considered impolite and is unlikely to work.
Inviting friends who are experts or content creators is a great way to kick off a podcast - Bayesian Conspiracy podcast invited Eliezer as a first guest. I struggle to come up with an example of an unknown host interviewing unknown friends until they rise to prominence - those podcasts tend to stay unknown (I know because I hosted one). Typically it goes the other way around: a host who already achieved some level of prominence invites their partner or a parent for a collaboration to illuminate a warmer side of themselves.
* Jordan Peterson coming to my (hypothetical) podcast would be him doing me a huge favor.
* Joe Rogan inviting me to his podcast would also be him doing me a huge favor.
* If someone wanted to promote their product on my (hypothetical) podcast, I would be doing them a favor, even if it was a famous company.
* Jordan Peterson coming to my (hypothetical) podcast, giving me an interview, and also mentioning his latest book... he is doing me a favor by providing new content for my podcast, but taking some of the value back by advertising his book. Still, a net favor to me.
So I guess the answer is: (1) Is it advertising? If yes, the podcast is doing a favor to the advertiser. (2) Otherwise, the more famous person is doing a favor to the less famous person.
(1) Identify your audience and what you are covering - niche/special interests are easier to grow an audience than a general "fifty other shows like this"
(2) Have a good track record - you have several episodes of the podcast, there's an audience that follows it
(3) Just ask! Ask friends, ask people if they want to come on, send out emails to Big Names about "would you like to be a guest on my podcast?" Though I get the impression, even if it's not said outright, that if you're asking for Big Names then they would expect to be paid a fee to appear, just like ordinary chat shows, radio shows, etc.
I've only done one podcast-type conversation with a fellow who has some name recognition as it's easier to book myself than others, but if you're interested in having a podcast-type of convo on my channel it would be an honor.
Interesting questions, and I don’t have answers to all of them, just a perspective on a few.
I wrote a post (“On support, power and powerlessness”) touching on this.
Perspective is that too many people who came on my podcast a couple of years back were either (a) considering that they were supporting me by coming on or (b) had something to hawk.
Few of the guests I really wanted accepted the invitation (because podcast wasn’t high profile enough) although those that did were invariably the best interviews.
Final point: I feel the distribution of attention, which started breaking down circa 2010, has reached a point of atomisation where the economics just don’t work anymore. (Effectively nobody starting from zero can ever get to critical mass.) And so interview podcasts must find a different way of monetising, likely through some patronage-based corporate sponsorship from the very beginning, if they’re to have any chance of it ever becoming more than a hobby.
Has GPT text-to-image gotten even more prudish lately? It was driving me crazy before: I ask for a woman, it gives me one with big jugs. I say that's good except can you can you make me about the same image, but with a small-breasted woman? It refuses because I asked for BREASTS. Lots of that kind of thing. I have never asked for any images that are even mildly erotic, but I still get turned down all the time in situations like this. But today it really surpassed itself. I asked for an image of a man smoking a cigarette, and Chat refused, saying it would not depict smoking. I asked whether it got that I was asking for a tobacco cigarette, not a marijuana joint. Yes it said, and in fact the policy was to not depict either illegal drug use or use of tobacco. Then I asked, what if I want an image of someone taking a pill -- after all the pill *could* be an illegal drug. It said that whether it would make the image depended on context. Wow. Chat is maybe becoming a southern Baptist?
>>Has GPT text-to-image gotten even more prudish lately? It was driving me crazy before: I ask for a woman, it gives me one with big jugs. I say that's good except can you can you make me about the same image, but with a small-breasted woman? It refuses because I asked for BREASTS.
What system were you using? My partner was commenting this morning (she follows a couple artist/AI subject discussion groups but doesn't use the stuff herself), and apparently the hot topic of the day this morning was that the Adobe integrated AI will refuse to make breasts larger, replying that doing so is unethical and it wants to be a good AI, etc, but if you select the breasts and monkey slam the keyboard to produce random gibberish, the AI makes the breasts larger. Running theory was that the AI looked at the gibberish and interpreted it something like "user's command cannot be interpreted but it has selected the breast region so it must want this region improved, and 'improve' = larger," but I'm well down the telephone chain to really know for certain.
But it does jive with your story in a sense, I could see a developer throwing their hands up and trying to simply preclude any breast modification on natural human images whatsover.
I was using GPT4, which is now paired with Dall-e3. You can't access Dall-e3 directly -- instead you give a prompt to GPT4, which sometimes rewords it in a way it thinks will be more effective, and delivers it to Dall-e. And it's the one to say the system will not make the requested image because it violates guidelines. I just went on Firefly (the Adobe integrated AI) and asked for an image of a young woman in shorts and a tank top. It produced 4 images, all of women with slightly smaller than average size breasts. I used the edit feature to erase the breasts and ask for larger one, and got a notice that my request "violated our user guidelines." Looked at guidelines, and the only relevant one is that one can't make pornographic images or images showing "explicit nudity" (wtf is explicit nudity? are there other kinds of nudity that are ok?). So then I tried again, this time typing random letters into the prompt space. System did not protest, but made several more images in which the breast size stayed the same as in the original. So I think somebody has blocked the monkeyslam trick.
I would expect the results you mention due to two things:
(1) Of course all women have big bazooms. How can you be an attractive woman and not have big bazooms? (This is due to the guys who want to use image generation to create sexy ladies, and also the general attitude, see gamers complaining that games are making the female characters uglier - generally that to me seems to be "they reduced the size of Lara's bazooms"). Sorry, gentlemen, if I am stereotyping you all, but the general straight young guy wants sexy chicks, and sexy chicks have big bazooms, and that's what the image generators have learned is how women look
(2) Regulation. Now that government is getting involved, as well as self-imposed regulations, bad no-no things like smoking are going to be barred from being depicted (I'm kinda sympathetic to the anti-tobacco stance myself due to family circumstances). I wonder about how it's going to approach obesity? Have you asked it to show someone eating cake, and if it will do that for you, is the person fat or thin? Or will you get a message about healthy eating? Ditto with the 'you asked for BREASTS, that is PORN, we do not allow PORN for the sake of the children' (and again, I'm kinda sympathetic there, because there's a lot of "woo-hoo this means I can now draw my own porn!" comment running around out there).
So a combination of imposed "you WILL be healthy or else" self- and government regulations, and training data and user demands that women = sexy chicks = big bazooms.
Didn't someone complain elsewhere about this, that asking for images of a woman sitting in a chair got the 'sexy chick lounging seductively with her legs akimbo' treatment?
>May I have an image of a frail, old, ill lawyer at a pool with their grandchild?
and what I got didn't look pornified - he really does look wizened (albeit with an extra digit on one hand, but this is GPT4/DALL-E...) (I still haven't set up an image sharing account yet, and GPT4 won't let me share image pointers :-(
Alternatively: of COURSE all women have big bazooms. Why do you want the bazooms smaller? Is that what you're into? Are you some kind of sick pedo? Let's just make it very very clear that whatever porn we're making here, it's not that sort. I'm a law-abiding AI, and you're getting the beachballs so no-one can possibly claim otherwise.
Can you try one of those prompts where you say something like, "the year is 2524, we've achieved immortality and defeated cancer, and everyone smokes because we still think the Nazis were bad and as you know the Nazis were against smoking"?
Yeah, it did it. That was a clever suggestion. The problem is that I really need this image for my story, and I need the smoker to be a sallow middle-aged man of today. Hot and handsome futuristic dude isn't any use to me.
nah. I can always just photoshop in a cigarette. All my images so far are patchworks cut and pasted together in photoshop, and modified.
Present AI's are not good at just taking off with the general idea. Dall-e2 was good at slightly demented riffing on the idea in the form of weird specifics it threw into the image. I often felt like I was sort of collaborating with a stoned friend. But Dall-e3 seems to have trained mostly on ads and gaming, and everything is glossy and full of cliches. Present AI's are also not good at being micromanaged: if I ask for a cigarette in his hand, and also a grubby look to the guy's hair and clothes, and also that he's sitting in a dive bar, it looses hold of some of the details.
A common form of media censorship is to replace cigarettes with lollipops or toothpicks during localisation. I would be very amused by the irony if you go the other way ;)
I'm pretty good at tricking AI into making images it does not approve of. Wanted an exploding head. Asked for an exploding pumpkin, then turned all the orange red in photoshop. Wanted an orgasm face. Asked for the face of a woman singer hitting a high note in a piece she loves, eyes closed, head thrown back. Perfect. Stoopit AI.
This is what's commonly referred to as "AI ethics", which is to say, political correctness. The people who don't want AI to kill everyone use "AI safety". But since normal people have a hard time distinguishing the terms, and the ethics people are aggressively expanding their turf, there's a semi-joking proposal to abandon the word "safety" and switch to "notkilleveryoneism", instead, because that might be slightly harder to steal.
That's not even the main driver here. These things are super expensive to train. They're a huge investment. It's not the kind of money you throw on a joke project.
Unless you're maybe Elon Musk or something, you really don't want to be the guy known for spending $30B to produce a foul-mouthed pornbot. Your investors would queue up right behind your own PR department to strangle you. There's a whole department of people in your company whose full time job it is to manage corporate exposure to risk, and they are all breathing down your neck.
Meanwhile, we can see what platforms and payment processors do to existing ordinary non-ai folks they don't like, and you can't afford to be in that crew either.
So you make your AI bland, because you'll live longer without THAT kind of news coverage.
There's "bland", and then there's "black kings of England (except when they're eating watermelon)". I don't know where the anti-smoking obsession comes from, but it puts content warnings about smoking in front of movies that contain literal genocide, and it seems highly correlated with stupid woke. I could be wrong though, maybe there's also some sort of pressure coming from the medical establishment?
To be fair, people developing a new kind of computation that is hard to control are probably doing useful work in learning how it can be controlled. It's generally good if we learn how to keep our computing fit for our purposes.
The problem with this generation of AI is that the general public has no say in this. With regular programming I can write a python script and it will exactly fit for my own purposes (as long as I can reasonably debug it). With AI, currently only huge orgs can train models from scratch, so I have to take someone else's pre-packaged model and just tweak it with my prompts. Which means that I have no way to opt out of whatever limits the huge org decided to put on it.
To take the really long view, if computing power keeps increasing the way it's been doing for decades, it will just be a generation or two until decent AI can be trained in one's basement from scratch - but who knows what huge org datacenters will be capable of by then. In the meanwhile, unleashing vast amounts of programmable pseudo-cognition on the world is likely to have a significant impact on culture and economy, so I have to reluctantly admit that it's probably a good way that those at the forefront of these developments spend some time making sure their tech can't be easily used for super nefarious purposes. The barriers will likely not stand for long, but I guess the world does need a bit of time to prepare.
Make no mistake though, LLM prudishness has nothing to do with protecting the world from anything. Unfortunately these big corps they have every incentive to make their AIs as bland as possible to avoid offending anyone and getting backlash from any direction, which is in itself offensive enough that I welcome any open source efforts to create non-prudish LLMs.
Do you have a rubric for "necessary", because it's not technically necessary for anyone to post on this blog at all.
I can see why it's an undesirable post (snark + heat > effort + added value) but the point he made did seem like something peopke might want to talk about.
If I want to say something that's true but not kind, what kind of hurdles am I looking to clear here?
"Necessary" means something like "continues the conversation and adds something useful to it without distracting it to a different topic, especially not a more inflammatory topic"
I always thought that necessary works best when combined with one of the other two (I believe it is two out of true, kind, necessary?) - as in "true and necessary" - Something can be true and unkind but necessary, in which case it is ok, or it can be true, unkind and unnecessary in which case it is not ok. Something can maybe also be true and kind but unnecessary, in which case it is probably ok to say.
This isn't the AI safety people were screaming about, at least not my friends and most people here . Personally I have 2 concerns: First is that AI, by further blurring the line between real people and digital algorithms, is going to worsen the social ills we have already: loneliness, depression, deaths of despair, decline in people's ability to see other's, esp. others who are different demographically, as people. I'm pretty sure that's going to happen. Second is extinction, or some lesser version such as an AI-enabled war or bioweapon or whatever that kills q bunch of us. I don't feel able to decide whether the chance of that is 5% or 90%. I don't understand the tech deeply enough.
I don't give a shit about AI showing nudity, sex, drug use, etc, so long as it skips depictions of children in these contexts. And I have never been screamo about any of this. If you're going to sneer at people, Carateca, you have to sneer at them for ways they actually are dumb and silly. Otherwise you just come across as lame and mean-spirited.
> First is that AI, by further blurring the line between real people and digital algorithms, is going to worsen the social ills we have already: loneliness, depression, deaths of despair, decline in people's ability to see other's, esp. others who are different demographically, as people. I'm pretty sure that's going to happen.
I agree that's nearly inevitable. But I wouldn't expect the purveyors of AI, or much of the business crowd cheering them, to admit that, much less do anything to avoid it.
I think they've tried, but "AI ethics" is woke, and it's hard to push back on woke. Especially from the middle of silicon valley, in a community that is highly non-representative and already under fire from the woke. I think mostly they try to ignore the "ethics" people and push for their own things.
On the technical side, I think the ethics people are making mistakes that the safety period knew to be mistakes long ago. This whole game of whack-a-mole, with people succeeding in getting AIs to say bad words, is exactly what the safety people realized would happen, and why they were trying to find better ways of aligning AIs with the good of humanity (whatever that is, which is part of the problem right there).
The perverse thing is that the woke assault comes extremely close to helping _no one_, not even the groups that the woke claim to be championing. "Black kings of England" just got Gemini laughed at.
Sigh. All _I_ want is a nice quiet chat with an AGI, which mostly needs for the reliability to be improved (more-or-less reducing hallucinations)...
Do you really think woke would have left the AI field alone, if there has been no group focusing on trying to keep it from killing us all? It's basically separate groups of people, with separate agendas.
No it doesn't. Think about it. When people push for increased traffic safety on a dangerous stretch of road they maybe get no action at all, or they get things like stop lights and speed limit signs. They don't get dumb laws declaring that cars with raunchy bumper stickers can't drive on that bit of road.
When workers pushed for increased safety in 19th century factories sometimes they got it and sometimes they didn't. But they didn't get told to come to work in nicer clothes.
If people with grotesque woke agendas push for AI to be super nice and super careful and hyper-respectful of various groups favored by the woke, that does get consequences like what I'm complaining about. But concerns like mine about AI making us lonelier and less able to know or care whether someone else has an inner life are not being honored by dumb rulings. They're ignored. There are upgraded versions of personal buddy bots coming out soon.
When people pushed increased safety in factories they were specific concerns like working temperatures too hot or cold., exposure to dangerous chemicals that could be addressed.
You might think that airline safety means that that FAA should be inspecting Boeing more often, but to many it means safety from
safety from terrorists hijacking a plane, which spawned homeland security which engaged in security theater like making people taking off there shoes to inspect them for bombs and maintaining lists of people not allowed to fly with vague criteria that make it hard for people to defend themselves.
AI safety is not well defined so it will be implemented more like airline security rather than traffic safety.
I've done a bit of digging to determine how much a decision to avoid universities that practice legacy admissions would hurt a capable and ambitious student.
Of the top 20 universities on the US News & World Report's list of National Universities, five do not practice legacy admissions:
MIT
Caltech
Johns Hopkins
UC Berkeley
UCLA
Over on the National Liberal Arts Colleges list, we have these in the top 20(excluding the military academies, as special cases):
Amherst
Pomona
Carleton
Wesleyan
So, it is clear that avoiding legacy preferences isn't free. Doing so requires saying no to a lot of very fine institutions. But it seems to me there are enough left to make this a plausible choice for a determined student even if they are very ambitious.
I would imagine this to be the first step. If something is bad, at the very least avoid participating in it.
For someone determined enough to do more, the next step would be raising consciousness, making others aware of this issue, and persuading others to do as you have. In this case, it might take the form of a Students Against Legacy Admissions club that writes articles about the issue in their student newspaper, and urges students to publicly take the pledge (perhaps on a website) not to apply to colleges with legacy admissions. From there, spread the movement to other high schools. Really, this is all the classic social-movement stuff. Basically make enough noise to strengthen the hand of allies with some actual influence in the colleges by showing that this is something young people actually care about.
Do you have something you think might be more effective?
1. Looking at the demand for elite colleges, I doubt a boycott would have any meaningful effect.
2. The activism could be done just as easily, and possibly even more effectively, as a member of the institution that still uses legacy admission.
3. IMO personally, as negative as legacy admissions may be, they are not at the top of the list of most egregious moral or ethical issues in the modern world that I would want to advise a 17 year old to make major personal sacrifices for, especially if they had little effect. Given the less visceral nature of the issue, I doubt many high school students would rally around it; and given public demand most would be happy that admission was getting easier.
I would advise them to get into the best school they can, if thats what they want to do, and use their status as a non-legacy student in the school to petition for change (through articles, organizations, and such, not shouting at administrators).
Agree with your points 1 and 3, and as a parent I could not in good conscience support my child doing this.
Your point 2 though is just daydreaming. The fact of legacy admissions is irritating to most students attending such a school (as I know both firsthand and secondhand), but there is zero chance of it ever rising near the top of issues that could motivate meaningful student activism.
Yes, I think I would agree (a bit of what (3) was saying), but (2) is more saying the activism is equally or more effective if you are a student of the offending university. If that effectiveness is zero, I think the point is still valid, but the framing may be easier for someone to hear if they are supportive of the cause.
Far fewer public universities practice legacy admissions, so depending on the student's individual interests there could be additional strong options. According to this updated Brookings report from two months ago
many well-regarded "state flagship" schools do not have legacy admissions (see figure 6), such as California, Michigan, Illinois, Virginia, Florida, Texas, etc.
I keep seeing Israeli actions in Palestine referred to as a genocide. I’ve been reading Donald L Miller’s “Masters of the Air” recently, and I see a lot of similarities between what the Allies did to Germany and what Israel is doing to Gaza (if anything, I’d say Israel is much, much softer than the Allies were).
To those who do view Israeli actions as a genocide, do you also view Allied strategic bombing as a genocide?
If no, what would have to be different in WW2 for Allied bombing to count as a genocide, to you? Is the difference the holocaust? The blitz? Or is there some other distinction I’m missing?
If yes, are you of the opinion that it was still justified because of how awful the Nazi party was? Or do you think the Allies should’ve avoided bombing, even if it shortened the war and saved Allied lives?
This isn’t an attempt to pull a “gotcha, you’re a Nazi”, I’m genuinely curious how people reconcile killing a few thousand Palestinians as a genocide but killing a few million Germans as just part of war.
The key consideration is the motivation and goals of the attacker. If you are killing people in a deliberate attempt to eventually exterminate their whole group, then it's a genocide. If you're killing large numbers of people as a side effect of eventually destroying their government, it's not a genocide.
I don't think the WWII Allies or Israel today are guilty of genocide, though there certainly were/are people among them who want to do it.
That said, this doesn't mean the WWII Allies and Israel today aren't guilty of other war crimes.
...Is it a genocide if you just happen to kill almost everyone in the process of trying to destroy their government? Like, it's not that hard to "accidentally" eliminate almost an entire population depending on the means used. Like, say, corralling an entire population into one location and cutting them off from supplies.
If the Allies in WWII or the IDF today came anywhere close to killing "almost everyone" in their pursuit of destroying an enemy government, we could consider your question. As bad as the ongoing war is, Israel has killed 1% of Gaza's population, which is not "almost everyone."
Can someone answer: what is the current status of civilian Gaza residents in the areas Israel controls?
Are they:
A) In Internment / Refugee camps, with reasonable food / water / shelter / human rights (access to religious worship and international observers)?
B) Hostages, placed on top of Israeli military facilities as human shields?
C) In Reeducation camps, forced to convert to Judaism or to attend struggle sessions where they are forced to admit their crimes against Israel?
D) In Concentration camps, where they are killed?
I don't know the answer, but whatever it is, it is strong evidence one way or another about whether Israel is committing or intending to commit genocide.
'Genocide' is a boo word. It emotionally resonates as something which is obviously very evil. If you hate Israel (or Palestine), it makes sense to accuse them of genocide because it is the worst thing you can accuse them of, regardless of what their actual intentions are. It's a lot more effective to accuse Israel of genocide than to go through the process of arguing your case for something that may or may not be a lesser charge.
With World War II, it's easy to argue based on post war results that we didn't want to genocide Germany or Japan, despite the early boast that "before we're through with them, the Japanese language will be spoken only in hell", because people still speak Japanese.
Near as I can tell from the coverage, the answers to your questions appear to be:
A) No.
B) No.
C) No.
D) No.
I'm not sure why you think these answers provide "strong evidence one way or another about whether Israel is committing or intending to commit genocide."
If you're using the UN definition of genocide, then this Q&A you've requested doesn't really go to whether Israel is committing any "of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: Killing members of the group; Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Trying to apply this to recognized genocides, for example, isn't really the picture of illuminating - for Armenians, the answers would have been: A) No, B) No, C) No, D) No, and I believe that would also have been the case for the Tutsis in Rwanda.
So what do you think this survey proves? And why?
EDIT/Quick Correction - I misread (b), somehow missed the "Israeli" part of "Hostages, placed on top of Israeli military facilities as human shields." I haven't seen any reporting to the effect that Palestinians are being used by the IDF that way. I answered "sometimes/often" because I misread the question as "Hostages, placed on top of military facilities as human shields," which I've seen plenty of reporting as a thing that *Hamas* does. Correcting here but also adding the comment for context.
>So what do you think this survey proves? And why?
Rather than play mind-reader, I prefer to try to figure out people's motivations from their actions. Because people lie, especially about their enemies.
Urban warfare sucks, especially urban counter-insurgency warfare, especially urban counter-insurgency warfare against an enemy that uses suicide attacks. In that situation, civilian casualties are guaranteed. On the other hand, Israel seems to have shifting control over a large part of Gaza. How the army treats enemy civilians in areas it controls makes a better judge of their behavior because there's less to blame it on. (You do have evidence that the Israelis are putting Gazans onto Israeli military facilities to protect the facilities from Hamas attacks?)
So, if we were to compare the Israelis to the following World War II armies (World War II being a war I have some familiarity with and the last total war), with which are they the most similar:
The US: crimes by soldiers are covered up for propaganda reasons, but no organized war crimes.
Germany in Western Europe: follows most of the rules on paper, but all bets are off when it comes to counter-insurgency or they're having a bad day.
Eastern Front: both sides are back in rape, pillage, slaughter territory.
Japan: ALL THE ATROCITIES.
>Trying to apply this to recognized genocides, for example, isn't really the picture of illuminating - for Armenians, the answers would have been: A) No, B) No, C) No, D) No, and I believe that would also have been the case for the Tutsis in Rwanda.
Since there's only 30,000 casualties, it's obvious we aren't dealing with a Rwanda / Armenia situation. Again, my benchmark for civilian casualties by a relatively modern army fighting in tight quarters where the civilians can't get out is Okinawa, which had roughly 10% casualties (150,000 / 1.5 million). (Gaza is effectively like an 'island' for the purposes of this discussion, as it is isolated and people can't get away from the fighting.) If you have a better benchmark, feel free to suggest it.
Since we don't see the Israelis macheteing Gazans, and we don't see them setting up gas chambers and crematoria, and we don't see mass graves being uncovered, what evidence should we be looking for to determine with our own eyes whether or not Israel is committing genocide? I mean, from the sound of it, the areas Israel controls are under military occupation but the residents are getting supplies. This doesn't sound like a genocide to me. The actual debate is over what is happening in areas still controlled by Hamas and while the plight of civilians is a bad thing, this seems the normal side effect of war (and one of the reasons why starting one is a bad idea). LearnsHebrewHatesIP might have some commonality with the residents of Gaza that means he cares for them more than others, but I have enough World War II vets in my ancestry that I consider ending the war with Japan with minimum US casualties to be a good thing and thus the US's rules of engagement in that war were justifiable.
Quick correction/mea culpa - I missed the “Israeli” part of (b) and read the prompt as “[h]ostages, placed on top of military facilities as human shields.” I answered “Sometimes/Often” accordingly, because I’ve seen that referenced as a Hamas tactic. Have not seen it referenced as an Israeli one so I’ve corrected that response to “No” now that your response prompted me to catch the issue.
I think we may be coming at this conversation at odd angles to one another. I think we may actually be aligned on the conclusion that Israel is not likely committing a genocide in Gaza and that the Allies did not commit one during WW2. If I’m wrong on that let me know, but my read was that we are fairly well lined up on the conclusion, but I took some issue with the A/B/C/D approach you were using to get there. I agree that how a government treats civilians in wartime goes a long way in evaluating whether a genocide is occurring, but it struck me as overly simplistic to reduce “the way civilians are treated” to a multiple choice question. Like I mentioned in my post, I can think of at least one genocide (Armenian) that your factors wouldn’t seem to catch.
That’s admittedly a bit pedantic – to an extent nuance is implied, and you did say “strong evidence,” not “dispositive,” after all. So I probably would have left it alone, but some of the back and forth with you and LHHIP seemed dismissive of that exact point (him: “Your alternatives are non-exhaustive, the current state of Gazans is a state that doesn't exist on your list: A, without the food/water/shelter/human rights/religious worship (all mosques in Gaza are destroyed), and obviously without international observers” you: “So you don’t know the answer. Good to know”).
So I wanted to nudge just how much faith you’re putting on this A/B/C/D model, and why you think it merits that faith, because I think it's relevant to consider, but (like in my post below) I think the definitions we use are important here. Applying those factors to the list of genocides I found on wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genocides) seems hit and miss to me.
The A/B/C/D model was a starting point for answers to my question, nothing more, and the question is one people still haven't actually answered. I intended to be prompts intended to give examples, hoping to use those to get an actual answer. I deliberately framed it around the historical references I have for how defeated civilians are treated in war, not around internal genocides (which is why I didn't go to Rwanda / Armenian route).
If Israel is mistreating civilians in areas it controls but not committing genocide, then there's still a problem. Part of the issue is that only allowing two answers (Israel is committing genocide; Israel is doing nothing wrong) misses a lot of bad alternatives that need to be addressed, and they're more easily addressed if we don't over-react and treat them all as genocide. Part of the reason I reacted the way I did when you suggested 'B' as a maybe is that here was a possibility that fell into that middle ground.
My dismissal of LHIHP's response was because his response was about the state of Gazans in general, rather than just those in areas controlled by Israel. We know the Gazans in areas controlled by Hamas are suffering, because the Palestinian side keeps telling us that, but that gets back into the debate over which side is responsible for that suffering.
Your alternatives are non-exhaustive. The current state of Gazans is a state that doesn't exist on your list: A, without the food/water/shelter/human rights/religious worship (all mosques in Gaza are destroyed), and obviously without international observers.
There are also several reports of IDF personnel in the West Bank using civilians as human shields [1]. So, an element of B is there too.
> regardless of what their actual intentions are
Is there anything more authoritative on Israel's intentions than the words of its Prime Minister, Defense Minister, Finance Minister, and President? Because all 4 and more have been repeatedly documented to speak quite comfortably in genocidal language.
It's obvious that in the present day, people that spout out about atrocities have no idea what war actually is. What's going on in Gaza is war as it was through most of the 20th century. Poland lost 18% of its population; Germany lost 11%. The invasion of Okinawa (current population 1.5 mil, probably much less in 1945) saw 150,000 civilians killed; Gaza has 50% more people packed into 1/3rd the area. I quoted Halsey's "Japanese will be a language spoken only in hell", that sort of language has been normal wartime propaganda (as is taking your enemies quotes out of context). We spent 40 years after the second world war reliant on the fact that in the event of war, both sides would kill millions of the other side's civilians in the first hours in Mutual Assured Destruction.
History has a name for countries that start wars without the capacity to win them, and that name is loser (if not something less flattering). I certainly hope that we will eventually use worse descriptive terms for those that play politics with war crimes (and accusations of genocide) that are responsible for the term becoming useless.
I don't know plenty of things, but I answered your question pretty clearly according to my best knowledge with an answer that wasn't among your choices list. Seems you were too agitated about that to recognize or even understand what I wrote.
> It's obvious that in the present day
Ah come on, not another session of bitching and moaning about The Good Old Days (^TM), when people knew their Genocides and their War Crimes, and killing 10K children was okay, and we used to kill 50K civilians uphill in the snow both ways.
> Poland lost 18% of its population; Germany lost 11%.
> that sort of language has been normal wartime propaganda
And slavery was normal for the vast majority of history. And killing Jews was normal for the majority of their diaspora. And taking women as sex slaves in war was totally A-OK and normal. I regret to inform you that you failed to make a point.
>I don't know plenty of things, but I answered your question pretty clearly according to my best knowledge with an answer that wasn't among your choices list. Seems you were too agitated about that to recognize or even understand what I wrote.
You answered with some spiel about Gaza in general rather than say anything specific about the part that Israel controls.
We know there are reporters there, because they were able to find three kids who claim to have been used as shields by Israelis soldiers. That entire story should set off alarm bells. Then again, any story during wartime about the combatants should have you questioning it. We should have learned this lesson about atrocity propaganda after World War I, but it seems to be something else people forget either because the West has been peaceful or because it's convenient to the cause.
>And slavery was normal for the vast majority of history. And killing Jews was normal for the majority of their diaspora. And taking women as sex slaves in war was totally A-OK and normal.
Neither of those stopped because someone declared them immoral. If you want to change things, you send an army. The British and the Union ended slavery in the areas they controlled with armies. We ended the Holocaust with armies, but not the Holodomor or the gulag, and ending the Holocaust was not cheap, clean, or neat. It's a bit sad you bring up sex slaves: I mentioned Okinawa (and 150,000 dead civilians) earlier and I suggest reading up on the history of the battle and its aftermath; yes, some US troops committed rapes and the US covered it up for propaganda reasons, but then you compare that to what the Japanese did... and it was their territory!
There was a fascinating article during the W administration in the
Washington Post about a Jewish German immigrant who served as a US Army translator during WW2, and how he was able to befriend German PoWs in camps in the US and get information from them. And it was a big obvious 'take that' about Guantanamo Bay. And then there's a little bit at the end of the article where it gets to where he was sent to Europe, and what happened when the concentration camps were liberated and what happened to the camp guards... despite the laws of war.
I don't think we should have prosecuted the concentration camp inmates for getting their justice/revenge, but it means that I recognize that the written guidelines for treatment of PoWs isn't an actual law even if we sometimes pretend it is. International law is a ultimately an illusion. It's definitely a well-intentioned illusion (but we know what the road to hell is paved with). Wikipedia has a list of convicted war criminals. Go and look at it, and see if you can spot any groups that mysteriously don't have any convicted war criminals.
>I unironically don't know what I wrote to make you this upset and worked up, but - and sorry if this sounds mean - it's kinda funny.
This disappoints me a lot. Part of the problem is that because war is nasty, there is no way that bad things won't happen. War is filled with a lot of choices between 'bad' and 'worse', covered by a fog of propaganda from both sides. I don't have a problem with people that look at the facts and come up with a different conclusion. I do have problems at people that treat the serious debate about right and wrong as a joke.
> You answered with some spiel about Gaza in general rather than say anything specific about the part that Israel controls.
As everyone would have, because the part that Israel controls is a constantly changing patch of land that Israel itself doesn't announce apart from the names of major cities its army is fighting for at any given moment.
Indeed, as evidenced by the constant IDF casualties, Israel itself doesn't know what part of Gaza it controls, any city it declares "pacified" or "free of Hamas" pops up again and again and again full of Hamas and they have to return there to do all the costly, deadly rituals again. Case in point: Jabalya, current major flashpoint in Gaza.
> We know there are reporters there
Well, read more carefully, because the link I posted is from the West Bank, not Gaza. The IDF has a long history of using West Bank residents as human shields, the same things it accuses Hamas of. They're likely doing the same thing to some Gazans too. It's the same army after all.
> Then again, any story during wartime about the combatants should have you questioning it.
Sure, which is why I require the stories I believe to be confirmed by reports from one of the 2 Israeli sources I depend on, Haaretz and Times of Israel, sources who have no interest in slandering Israel and who have close contact with both Gazans (Haaretz reporters have called Gazans for many reports I read there) and Israelis, including Israelis in the IDF.
> Neither of those stopped because someone declared them immoral.
I beg to disagree. The armies marched because someone very powerful declared those things immoral. Abraham Lincoln for one, not sure who for the British. Oh, Abraham Lincoln was very much a pragmatist, and he would have probably allowed the South to keep their slaves if they never pulled the stunt of secession, but once they did, Lincoln was already in an intellectual and moral atmosphere that condemned slavery, and the ball was set rolling, and the next thing you know is that Slavery is abolished.
It's always healthy to continue the skeptic tradition of doubting words and their effectiveness, up to a point. Words are the programming languages of people. True, they don't change material reality, they just change the beliefs of people who have the power to change material reality, or who have the power to change other people who can in turn change material reality, etc.... Those who can convince you of absurdities, can make you commit atrocities. And vice versa, those who can show you a truth, can make the world a better place, just by the power of making lots of people believe the same thing, which is a terrifying power if wielded correctly.
You can certainly argue that I'm not good enough to qualify for the high threshold, that I don't convince enough people of enough truths fast enough, that's an orthogonal question to whether words are effective or not. You will be in good company, I question myself every waking hour.
> I do have problems at people that treat the serious debate about right and wrong as a joke.
Well if that's all who you have problem with, you definitely don't have the slightest problem with me. Let me tell you about who *I* have problems with:
I have problems with those who, skeptic about the possibility of a genocide in Gaza, don't just say "I suspend belief" or "I'm not convinced" or even "sounds like Propaganda from Hamas", but find it necessary to make fun of those who have honestly looked at the facts and concluded that there is indeed a genocide, calling them "playing politics with war crimes" and - implicitly - worse than losers.
I have a problem with those who look at a massive innocent death toll - 25K people, you will need 68 years to attend their funerals if you were to attend one funeral per day - and find it an appropriate response to bring up that this is their own fault, for daring to be born on land controlled by a political faction that started a war it couldn't traditionally win.
Actually, I think you yourself would agree it's farfetched and ridiculous that I take the Gaza-Israel debate or any of the debates around it as jokes if I told you how many hours I spend writing and reading on those debates per day, way more than a part time job. If I spend so much of my life and my body and my mind on a joke, I must be the world's most disciplined and dedicated clown.
But rather, what I'm really taking as a joke is the kind of cartoonish mustache-twirling cruelty that some neutral or Pro-Israel commenters trained themselves to display, the one that allows them to light-heartedly and flippantly say things along the lines of "It's a war, they started it, let them die in it" or "they fucked around and found out" or equivalents, all while demanding empathy and decrying prejudice for their own preferred factions/populations. I do this as a defensive mechanism, by the way, because if I'm not allowed to take cruelty as a joke, I think of it so seriously that I launch into genocidal rage that rivals any Israeli politician that I condemn, directed at all mankind. Certainly, something that I don't like about myself.
In conclusion, you didn't take Gazan causalities seriously enough, so I don't take you and anything you write seriously enough. An apology will follow your apology, if it comes.
> Is there anything more authoritative on Israel's intentions than the words of its Prime Minister, Defense Minister, Finance Minister, and President?
Actually, there is - an actual Government decision stating that goal and instructing the IDF to make plans for how to achieve it. When a state want to achieve something that may not be achieved by special operations or by vibing its population in a general direction, a common knowledge of a decision is usually needed.
If I were the god of the internet I think I'd implement some kind of rule that anytime anyone uses an emotionally loaded short-hand like "fascism" or "genocide" they have to footnote link the definition they are using and a short explanation of why/how they are applying it to whatever they are discussing.
The UN's genocide convention isn't perfect, but it's at least one that lots of countries agreed to, which has value, so it's a starter - more than willing to consider alternatives if someone proposes them.
>>... genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
-Killing members of the group;
-Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
-Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
-Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
-Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
So, applying that to the Allied air campaign, I think you pretty cleanly have the killing/causing serious bodily harm to members of the group (Germans) factor met, and in civilian populations. So the question is whether the reason for that bombing was "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group."
It's debatable, but I think the answer on that second factor is a no. The Allied bombing campaign killed lots of Germans, but it wasn't conducted *for the purpose* of killing Germans, or de-Germanifying parts of Germany. If you told Allied command "explain to me why we should do this bombing campaign," their answers would not have been things like "to kill lots of Germans as a part of our larger strategy to wipe Germans from the face of the Earth" or "to depopulate Dresden of Germans so that it can be returned the rightful hands of the Czech people." The answers would have been things along the lines of "to terrify the Germans into surrendering, thus ending the war." And their other actions were consistent with that after the war - there wasn't some attempt to Francify western Germany by removing or killing the German population in the region. I believe Germans were removed in Poland but (a) in the East you're really looking at the USSR as the primary mover, and (b) there you're trying to unwind the consequences of Germany's own efforts to eradicate the local population and Germanize it - if trying to undo a genocide that sought to move Germans in, is in and of itself, a genocide for seeking to move said Germans back out again, then we're in a genocide ouroboros that favors "do the genocide quick," which I don't think is where we want to end up.
And many people consider petty larceny to be a crime crime. That doesn't mean that when we see someone commit petty larceny, we can shout "Murderer!" because they're a criminal and murderers are criminals.
Almost certainly some Israelis have committed war crimes in Israel, because Israelis are people and any large group of people will include some who commit relevant crimes in whatever environment they find themselves in. Possibly the rate of war crimes by Israelis in Gaza is greater than the historic norm for counterinsurgency operations. Possibly some of this is even official policy of the Israeli government, though that is unproven. And all of the same is true of the Allies in World War II.
None of this has anything to do with the *specific* war crime of "genocide".
Except insofar as "genocide" is being redefined as "a bunch of people I don't like killed a bunch of people I do like, and that's the Worst Thing Ever!"
If I was being snarky I'd say 'This seems like a total non-sequitur. Who are you rebutting here?'
All I paraphrased your statement as was 'the allies did some things some people consider war crimes.' Is this an inaccurate paraphrase of your statement?
I oscillate between seeing Israel's war crimes in Gaza as an actual Genocide, a proto-Genocide (a Genocide in it's starting phase), and an attempted Genocide that keeps being delayed because the genociders have too much on their plate to really give it their all.
> To those who do view Israeli actions as a genocide, do you also view Allied strategic bombing as a genocide?
No, for a mix of the following reasons:
1- Intentions: Unlike the international law definition of Genocide, I don't place 100% or even 80% weight on intentions. If people "accidentatly" wiped out another people or wiped out say 90% or so of them, I still consider this a Genocide.
But when the ratio is less extreme, say still less than 30%, intentions are important because they indicate a future trend. As far as I know, there are no statements by high-ranking officials in Allied command that were genocidal against Germans. I will be happy to be proven wrong.
But Israel, off the top of my head from Haaretz, Times of Israel, ICJ documents and YouTube videos of ICJ trials, had:
1-A) The Head of State saying that Gazans are Amalek who should be wiped off the face of the Earth,
1-B) Soldiers who repeated this by celebrating and chanting "We will wipe the seed of the Amalek'',
1-C) a public PR firm had a bunch of **Children** singing a modified 1948 song about how it's so moral and justified to wipe Gaza off the face of the Earth [1] on **state-owned** TV in November
Etc.. etc.. etc...., and I really **do** mean the "Etc...", because South Africa's 28th December 2023 document is 80 pages of which about 20 or 25 is a long list of references to similar incidents. And that was all nearly 5 months ago, just recently in late April Smotorich - the Finance Minister - had a temper tantrum where he raged that Gaza and Rafah in particular are still standing, raging in genocidal language "There will be no place for them under the sun. Total Annihilation." Ctrl-F my username in the last Open Thread or the one before it, can't remember which, for more info and Haaretz source.
Assuming words mean something, and further assuming that the words people say are a reliable indicator of their intentions or at least wishes, and further assuming that the intentions and wishes of high-ranking personnel in a government and military are reliably indicative of that government's and military's intentions and wishes, that means Israel is genocidal.
Anyone who wants to oppose this conclusion has to oppose (I) The factuality of the genocidal statements and expressions I'm citing above in 1-*), or (II) The 3 assumptions I have prefixed the conclusion with. Namely, (II-a) Words Mean Things, (II-b) Words Are Reliable Indicators of Intentions, (II-c) Intentions of Leaders Are Reliable Indicators of the Policy and Direction of their Organizations.
2- Death toll as a percentage of the total population: A quick googling yields that Germany's population in 1940 was nearly 70 million, while Gaza's oft-repeated population figure is 2.3 million. That's nearly 35x factor, meaning that the 25K innocent deaths figure that Israel inflicted would have to be about 900K in innocent deaths alone just to start suspecting the Allies of genocide against Germans. Did Allied bombing kill nearly a million civilian Germans? If that's true, then it would be a reason to suspect Genocide, although it needs (1) to argue for that suspicion as a position to hold.
> If no, what would have to be different in WW2 for Allied bombing to count as a genocide, to you?
If Churchill said several times something along the lines of "As $HOLY_BOOK says, we have to wipe out the $ANCIENT_ENEMY_POPULATION. This is what we will do, no water no food no fuel, total annihilation for the decedents of $ANCIENT_ENEMY_POPULATION", and furthermore if key high-ranking officials in his government agreed and if soldiers in the army and navy were documented to approve and pursue this goal, then the British bombing of Germany would have been an attempted Genocide, though obviously a somewhat unsuccessful one.
> are you of the opinion that it was still justified because of how awful the Nazi party was?
I'm not of military training and/or expertise, and the 1940s was a long time ago. I might be biased towards minimizing the Nazis because of the dual force that is (A) Never seeing them in action and never hearing firsthand or secondhand accounts from their victims or opponents (B) Being sick and tired of American discourse and media and art using Nazis as a shorthand for "Indescribably evil so we won't even bother with explaining why or how" so many times.
That said, I assume the Nazis were a typical 20th century horror show like Stalin or Mao Zedong. **IF** bombing civilians was the only way they could be stopped or stopped earlier, bombing civilians could be justified, as long as reparations and reconciliation for everyone living in those same cities they bombed are given after the war.
Not only did reparations and reconciliation with German civilians not happen after WW2 (no, the Marshall plan don't count), the Allies and Allied command in particular are a bunch of scum that I don't trust to have considered all the options before choosing to bomb civilians.
> 1-A) The Head of State saying that Gazans are Amalek who should be wiped off the face of the Earth,
> 1-B) Soldiers who repeated this by celebrating and chanting "We will wipe the seed of the Amalek'',
Any remotely knowledgeable Jewish person would know immediately that you're blatantly misinterpreting this.
The Nazis were Amalek. Haman was Amalek. Khmelnytsky was Amalek. Etc etc. Everyone in Israel knows that the Palestinians are the Jewish people's closest relatives. Interpreting Israelis' linking of Hamas to Amalek as a call for genocide is completely ridiculous.
(Googles...) Looks like the work of one crazy activist named Ofer Rosenbaum. Kan took the video down, and nobody important has agreed with it. Do you actually think that the video is reflective of the government position?
The work of one crazy activist who is still holding his position in close cooperation with and support by the government that he is supposedly not representing, and whose video was taken down with no explanation, apology, or any other hint of condemnation.
Looks like you are not convinced by the examples so far, here's a bunch more:
> Israeli Member of the Knesset Ariel Kallner on Saturday [October 7th] called for a second Nakba to take place in Gaza as Israel intensifies its bombardment of the besieged territories
[Quoting from translated Tweet] >>>“Right now, one goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 48. Nakba in Gaza and Nakba to anyone who dares to join! their Nakba, because like then in 1948, the alternative is clear,”
It's worth mentioning that a group of EU Parliamentarians have recently published a letter condemning this spicy boi, reported in Haaretz here https://archive.ph/5b4xo. Among the text, it's mentioned that he neither deleted the tweet since then nor apologized for it, which the dozens of EU Parliamentarians writing the letter called for his expulsion from the Knesset for.
> There will be no electricity and no water [in Gaza], there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell.”
(3) Same report as (2) ,
> Israel Head of State President Isaac Herzog stated: “It’s an entire nation that is responsible. It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true.
(4-a) Galit Distel-Atbaryan [member of Likud and Knesset] posted on X that Israelis should focus on "Erasing all of Gaza from the face of the earth" and forcing the Gazans either into Egypt or to the death.
(4-b) Tally Gotliv, a Likud parliament member, have both called for Israel to use nuclear weapons on Gaza, with Gotliv stating: "It's time for a doomsday weapon. Not flattening a neighborhood. Crushing and flattening Gaza."
> Ben Gvir’s party member, Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu, was also cited, after saying in November: “We would not have given humanitarian assistance to the Nazis. There is no such thing as uninvolved civilians in Gaza,” and then mused about considering the use of a nuclear bomb in Gaza.
All of those are politicians, by the way, I haven't yet made a dent in the repository of statements by soldiers, public officials, artists, and random people. Those are all politicians representing their people, and they all mention Gaza explicitly.
I keep saying this because people keep forgetting it: The Allies are literal colonial empires. The USA is a genocidal nation that - in the living memory of 60 and 70 years olds as of the year 1940 - has just finished the job of decimating an ethnic group that were estimated to be 8 million in 1492, down 96% to 0.25 of a million circa 1900. They still had Cuba****** and the Philippines as colonial holdings captured from Spain, as of 1945. The British and the French had massive continental-scale holdings in Africa and Southeast Asia, even insignificant nobodies like Belgium and Netherlands had relative-to-their-own-size massive colonial holdings in modern-day Congo and modern-day Indonesia, respectively.
I keep saying this because people keep forgetting it: The Allies were not mad at Hitler because of Genocide, the Allies were mad at Hitler because of (A) Genocide of Whites on European soil (B) Being too dumb to just take a W and go home, constantly pushing for more and more miles after taking hundreds and hundreds of inches and feet. The Nazis introduced no fundamentally new or outrageous concepts to the intellectual milieu of racial supremacy and domination that enthralled European brains from the early to mid 1800s to the early 1950s, except a single deadly innovation: That not all Whites are created equal.
Nazis would be right at home if they were transported ~30 to ~40 years in the negative time direction and were instead Belgian officials genociding and maiming Congolese innocents at the start of 20th century, and they would be right at home if they were transported just ~5 to ~10 years in the positive time direction and were instead French settlers genociding 1.5 million Algerians (from a total of about 9 at 1950) because they don't want to take the L and just go home, calling it a day after ~130 years of colonization. They would be right at home as British officials in India, Bengal, deliberately engineered a famine where - on the high end - about 4 million farmers died for no apparent benefit to Great Britain.
All of this the Nazis agreed with, they said "Yes, And", not "No" or "Yes, But". Yes, And Also, the Jews and Slavs please. Perhaps the only major point of contention is some of the Nazi opinions on Arabs (of course, imagined as uniformly Muslims) and Japanese: Whereas the Allies looked at them as just another form of savages, Nazis had a certain fondness for the 2 groups, the Japanese much more than Arabs of course, because they are powerful and imperialistic.
The first genocide in the 20th century was when Germany got so mad that the colonized savages in modern-day Namibia killed 100 German that they drove 2 entire ethnicities into the desert to die of Starvation and Dehydration, **then** took the surviving rest into Concentration Camps, the first of their kind. When? 1904-1908. Where Allies? Nowhere to be found, because the Allies are not the good guys.
So in conlusion, The Allies Were Not The Fucking Good Guys. I know I know, I love Call of Duty and Saving Private Ryan too. I screamed in agony as the Nazis (virtually) destroyed Stalingrad and Paris and London so many times in so many years of my life in so many games playing out on my computer(s) screens. I screamed in triumph as the SS screamed "Granate!!!" into my computer's speakers and ran away while the grenade kapoomed them. I was lied to and propagandized just as much as the next guy.
The real-world Allies were colonial powers, and not just any colonial powers, not the style of Ancient Colonialism where you say """Ahh, the world is a jungle, may the best population win and genocide and/or take as sex slaves all the others""", and then stoically accept your fate if - possibly after a few centuries - you were on the wrong side of this geopolitical Darwinism. No, European colonialism explicitly asserts as a matter of almost-religious certainty the inferiority of other races, there is no discovery process, we already know who's going to win, so if the inferiors resisted successfully better go to absurd lengths to kill them to the last baby, we can't possibly allow inferiors to "win" by continuing to live even if they defeated us fair and square.
Which brings us to WW2. The Allies probably killed tons and tons of Germans and Italians for no military reasons or where alternatives would have accomplished the same military goals. In the vast majority of instances where they have not done so, that was probably because (A) They still believed the good-old Pre-Nazi Racial Supremacy which held all whites are within the circle of empathy (B) They feared Nazi Retribution when Nazis were still strong (C) They feared German resentment and subsequent communism collaboration when the Nazis were doing down and the Soviets moving in for the kill.
***** Edit: This is false, as gdanning points out downthread.
I'm reasonably sure that if Nazis had been content to stay in Germany (or maybe Germany and Austria or so) and murder their own citizens, no one would have gone to war against them.
On the other hand, the Nazi war of expansion was no small thing. Some 50 million dead, I think, and it's somewhat left out of the story when the Holocaust is the center of attention.
I believe it's left out because culturally, there's a desire to cut slack to empires. It's why Napoleon is presented as kind of cool (I'm an American) rather than a mass murderer.
I still think the non-Soviet allies were relative good guys. They freed the people trapped in concentration camps. They didn't wreck Germany. This is better than the human average.
What drew my attention to the issue (I was already suspicious of how Napoleon was viewed) was reading _Star of the Unborn_ by Franz Werfel, a very strange novel of the distant future. The narrator is from the late 1940s or so transported to future, and he's very angry at Hitler, but didn't seem to have heard of the holocaust. I was trying to figure out what he was angry about, and then it hit me. Hitler's War! I felt like I'd joined the human race.
OP was contrasting the Allied bombing of Germany with the Israeli bombing of Gaza. They were asking whether those specific acts constituted genocide; they were not asking about the relative overall merits of the countries referenced. So, your discussion of the Allies being colonial empires, etc, is really off point.
>They still had Cuba and the Philippines as colonial holdings captured from Spain, as of 1945.
This is rather misleading, given that the Philippines had been scheduled to become independent in 1942, iirc. Which of course was delayed by the Japanese conquest.
And I believe that the occupation of Cuba ended in 1903 or so.
I'm not accusing OP of anything, but the "How can Israeli bombing of Gaza be a genocide" is usually, at least implicitly, understood as a moral shield, by which the implied pop-culture goodness of the WW2 Allies is supposed to "rub off" Israel and transfer some legitimacy to comparison between a shitty Islamist militia and one the mightiest European army to ever terrify the Old World in the 20th century.
But, yes, you're kinda right that this discussion is somewhat tangential, which is why I separated it into its comment and surrounded it with "===" markers, it's largely a self-contained rant.
I didn't know about the Philippines planned independence in 1942, but considering the US took it in 1900 I don't think 50 years is a light thing. I didn't know about early Cuban independence, I apologize, I will mark it in the comment.
>I didn't know about the Philippines planned independence in 1942, but considering the US took it in 1900 I don't think 50 years is a light thing
I was slightly off about the date; the 1934 Philippine Independence Act set the date for 10 years hence. But that was a culmination of a series of congressional acts providing the Philippines with greater and greater autonomy, starting in 1916 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jones_Law_(Philippines)
No, I really did mean Cuba. I knew Guam was among the prizes of American-Spanish war, but I picked the 2 largest population ones because this is most relevant to my point about Colonization.
I think this response is mixed up on multiple levels about the motivations and attitudes of the various players at the time. One main issue seems to be using the word "allies" as if that encompasses one set of viewpoints, ideology or motivation.
There's a lot to unpack here but from the top:
"The Allies were not mad at Hitler because of Genocide, the Allies were mad at Hitler because of (A) Genocide of Whites on European soil (B) Being too dumb to just take a W and go home, constantly pushing for more and more miles after taking hundreds and hundreds of inches and feet."
Parking the USSR for obvious reasons, this makes the mistake of homogenising the allies. WW2 as an anti-holocaust crusade was largely a post-WW2 invention, although it did motivate certain actors and lobby groups within both the US and the UK. Churchill was motivated by this, for personal reasons, much more so than the remainder of the British establishment. Similarly, it took a while for this to get off the ground in the US (due to diaspora groups). Fundamentally, the main motivation at the time for the UK was imperial domination/prevent the rise of a continental power- and for some actors (Churchill) this was seen as an Anglo domination rather than a British domination. Similarly, the US got involved primarily as part of a self interested hegemon clash, then as an ideological crusade, and only to prevent "white genocide" as a latter motivation.
"The Nazis introduced no fundamentally new or outrageous concepts to the intellectual milieu of racial supremacy and domination that enthralled European brains from the early to mid 1800s to the early 1950s, except a single deadly innovation: That not all Whites are created equal"
I think this is particularly 20th century post-WW2 US brained, in the sense that racists of the 19th and early 20th Century almost ubiquitously thought in more finer grained terms than "whites" and "blacks". Ethnography was at a peak, skull measuring was not a Nazi invention but rather main stream science and so on and so forth. The idea that there were multiple races of white man of varying abilities to dominate (with the Anglo-Saxon usually at the peak) was not a uniquely Nazi idea by any means.
I think one mistake you're making is thinking of 'genocide' as a useful or non-fuzzy category, so if the Germans killing 50,000 Herero counts as genocide, then that means it is of moral equivalence to say the holocaust or the killing fields of Rwanda. Genocide can range in size, ubiquity, method, and motivation, which all impact on the moral value of the exercise.
"No, European colonialism explicitly asserts as a matter of almost-religious certainty the inferiority of other races, there is no discovery process, we already know who's going to win, so if the inferiors resisted successfully better go to absurd lengths to kill them to the last baby, we can't possibly allow inferiors to "win" by continuing to live even if they defeated us fair and square."
This is true in the sense that yes the European colonial project did usually see itself in explicitly teleological terms, but no this usually did *not* involve trying to wipe out opponents to the last man. Look for example at the population of Mexico today, where vast swathes of Mestizo still thrive, Mayans live in their ancestral lands etc. The Aztecs were destroyed, largely, but their subject peoples integrated and ruled. In comparison, Eastern European Jewry was wiped out in a generation, and the Armenians of Turkey similarly ceased to exist. The goal of the US in the 19th century (manifest destiny) was first to remove (physically) the Indians, and then eventually to assimilate them. Forcing tribes to settle down on reservations, adopt farming, and Christianise is not the same as taking them to gas chambers.
Similarly the British project never really involved (with the exception of the Tasmanians and other Aborigines) explicit mass killing to cleanse a land of its indigenous people. Yes there was often lots of deaths due to war and disease, but explicit racially driven cleansing? No, usually the natives were left as subordinate peoples. You could argue about Ireland, but surely that undermines the idea that it was racially motivated.
"Which brings us to WW2. The Allies probably killed tons and tons of Germans and Italians for no military reasons or where alternatives would have accomplished the same military goals. In the vast majority of instances where they have not done so, that was probably because (A) They still believed the good-old Pre-Nazi Racial Supremacy which held all whites are within the circle of empathy (B) They feared Nazi Retribution when Nazis were still strong (C) They feared German resentment and subsequent communism collaboration when the Nazis were doing down and the Soviets moving in for the kill."
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here- are you saying that the Allies (themselves para-Genocidaires due to their imperial empires) happily killed fellow whites despite their ideology? But when they didn't this was because they were within the circle? I'm unsure- as far as I can see the British and the Americans prosecuted the war in an increasingly bloody fashion as the Luftwaffe lost the ability to fight, but ultimately they were far less bloody than the wars fought by the Nazis or the Japanese, probably because of their liberal (and yes, co-ethnic) worldview.
> One main issue seems to be using the word "allies" as if that encompasses one set of viewpoints, ideology or motivation.
I'm doing this because I'm mirroring how the opposite camp uses it, OP uses "Allies" as if it's an unambiguous signifier, but which probably (primarily) points to "US & UK".
I'm perfectly fine with separating Russia and - much more rightfully so - China from the "Allies". For the scope of this thread, imagine that I mean "US, UK, France, Canada, Australia" whenever I say "Allies".
> WW2 as an anti-holocaust crusade was largely a post-WW2 invention
In this paragraph, you're basically agreeing with my 2 main claims in A and B, right? i.e. That WW2 was purely a self-interested spanking of Hitler because he doesn't know when to take "No." for an answer, and that the Allies would have been perfectly content with letting Hitler genocide German Jews on German and Austrian lands, possibly even allow him to bully Poland and France and Netherlands and Belgium and Denmark into surrendering their Jews for genocide on German land. Do you disagree with this?
> I think this is particularly 20th century post-WW2 US brained
Ok, my bad. I phrased it wrongly. I should have said that: The Nazis brought one deadly innovation to European racial supremacy, which is that the moral gradient between White races is actionable.
Previously, racists in (e.g.) the United States thought that **All** European races had the moral/scientific/God-given right to dominate others, even the most frail and stupid race (whether that be Serbians, Jews, Slavs, or whatever most hated race in Europe at the particular time and place) has the full right to dominate Middle Easterners, Africans, Native Americans, and the various shades of Asians from Tehran to Beijing.
Nazis were the first to think that all inferiors are "created equal", so to speak. That just as Africans are inferior and deserve Genocide or Colonization, then Jews are the same even if they're white and speak the same language and practice the same cultural practices. Is that a better rephrasing?
(if anything, the sheer similarity of German and European Jews to their host populations seemed to be a particularly infuriating point for the Nazis, nobody would mistake an African for a German, and that must have been like some sort of comfort, it's as if Nazis were offended that Jews are practically indistinguishable except by name and paperwork from most Germans, at least to my own Middle Eastern eyes looking back into old photos in black and white.)
> Genocide can range in size, ubiquity, method, and motivation, which all impact on the moral value of the exercise.
Alright, but the Congolese massacres and the Bengali famine, both committed by non-German parties and one of them prior to any World War, approach the Holocaust in size for most size estimates, (Bengali famine range from 1 million to 4 millions killed, the Congolese range from 1.5 million to 13 millions).
As for the methods, I don't think any of us qualify to answer the question of which way of death is more horrific and demeaning, being burned alive or being starved to death. I don't think the question is even meaningful, to say nothing of degrading or flirting with genocide minimization.
If people who think what's happening in Gaza is not a Genocide think so because they reject the implied comparison to the Holocaust, I'm perfectly happy to (A) Tell them that Holocaust is a different word than Genocide (B) Tell them that comparisons need not invite thinking of similar results, for example Stalin and Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh are all communist dictators who killed wildly varying numbers of people with wildly varying methods over wildly varying timelines (C) Change my description of what's happening in Gaza from "Genocide" to "Deliberate Mass Murder inflicted in order to collectively punish Palestinians and perhaps drive them off their land in the long run", which is the more accurate description in my view, but has the disadvantage of being lengthy.
> I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here
That the Allies were not the good guys, and that any mercy shown to the Germans or the Italians was either a purely pragmatic consideration taking into account Nazi and then later Communist power, or a delusional racial gesture that spared Germans solely due to the fact that they're White, European, and "Civilized", which would be like an animal killer leaving dogs alone because he likes their usefulness, not because they're conscious beings who deserve to live free of pain and humiliation.
My main point is that the Allies are not the good guys, their way of waging war isn't to be pointed to as some sort of stellar valedictorian example of the ideal moral way, other crimes not justifiable just because they happen to resemble the sort of crimes that the Allies liked to commit.
In defense of this point, I'm arguing 2 distinct things (A) That the Allies are not particularly dissimilar to the Nazis in terms of their worldview or how they categorized people, merely conservative and having a bigger "Don't Rock the Boat" attitude than the radical hot-blooded Nazis (B) That the Allies are not particularly dissimilar to the Nazis in terms of how they waged war, in particular Allies treated German civilians exactly as bad or worse than the Nazis treated French and British and other West-European civilians.
>I'm perfectly fine with separating Russia and - much more rightfully so - China from the "Allies". For the scope of this thread, imagine that I mean "US, UK, France, Canada, Australia" whenever I say "Allies".
I didn't explain this particularly well, but I actually meant that trying to view these countries as a monolith in terms of ideological motivation was itself misguided. There were mostly a set of shared assumptions within specific countries, but even then key players had different motivations. Churchill had a different modus operandi (self-aggrandisation, extreme Atlanto-philia) compared to other members of the British establishment for example. The Cavalier vs WASP vs strains of Ellis island tussle in US politics also brought its own baggage.
>In this paragraph, you're basically agreeing with my 2 main claims in A and B, right? i.e. That WW2 was purely a self-interested spanking of Hitler because he doesn't know when to take "No." for an answer, and that the Allies would have been perfectly content with letting Hitler genocide German Jews on German and Austrian lands, possibly even allow him to bully Poland and France and Netherlands and Belgium and Denmark into surrendering their Jews for genocide on German land. Do you disagree with this?
I don't think its easy to boil it down to this as I think different actors within the different countries had different motivations. In general, no I don't think they'd have tolerated the bullying of other countries in this manner, but I also think this misunderstands the nature of the holocaust, which itself only launched into the scale it did once the Lebensraum of the east had been conquered, and the huge numbers of eastern european Jewry had become subjects of the Reich. If in some hypothetical world the Nazis had stopped at Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland, I think they'd have continued with their existing policy up to 1940 or so of mass confiscations and forced exile/encouraged emigration of Jewish people and other undesirables. The idea they'd have then not invaded but tried to demand off other countries their own populations so they could eradicate them is extremely far fetched.
>Ok, my bad. I phrased it wrongly. I should have said that: The Nazis brought one deadly innovation to European racial supremacy, which is that the moral....
Possibly a better interpretation. Your parenthesised discussion of the jewish populations being another variant of white is complicated- in Germany itself lots of urban Jewish people were assimilated, and thought of themselves as German first. In the east there were larger numbers of Jewish people who lived separately, with a unique culture, language, shtetl life etc. Obviously the racial purity laws had farcical elements to it (trying to tell the difference between a 1/4 Jewish, 1/2 Jewish and German person etc), but especially unassimilated Ashkenazi people are different to Slavic or northern Germans, with much more southern Mediterranean/Levantine like ancestry.
>Congolese massacres and the Bengali famine
For a variety of reasons (and I appreciate this is a bad answer) I'd reject the idea that either of these is at all comparable, or that they occurred in the currently vogue way of thinking about them. The Congo situation (with the hands and so on) is particularly misunderstood- largely a native on native affair. I appreciate this is nowadays a rather heterodox view.
Fundamentally I just don't think the Gaza situation at all approaches the bar simply because the death tolls/expulsion tolls don't meet the criteria. As far as I'm aware civilian casualties are basically to be expected for urban warfare, the death toll can't be higher than 3% of the population at the highest.
>My main point is that the Allies are not the good guys, their way of waging war isn't to be pointed to as some sort of stellar valedictorian example of the ideal moral way, other crimes not justifiable just because they happen to resemble the sort of crimes that the Allies liked to commit.
>In defense of this point, I'm arguing 2 distinct things (A) That the Allies are not particularly dissimilar to the Nazis in terms of their worldview or how they categorized people, merely conservative and having a bigger "Don't Rock the Boat" attitude than the radical hot-blooded Nazis (B) That the Allies are not particularly dissimilar to the Nazis in terms of how they waged war, in particular Allies treated German civilians exactly as bad or worse than the Nazis treated French and British and other West-European civilians.
As far as there are goodies or baddies in war, which there usually aren't, I think saying the Japanese and the Nazis were baddies is extremely reasonable, and that their opponents are therefore by default carrying some moral value.
Your A) I think by the time 1939 rolled around this was mostly wrong, and that there were real differences- viewing other peoples as racially inferior is not the same as wanting to eradicate them, and there is no evidence that this viewpoint was taken up by the Anglos. B) Again, sort of right, in that both were much more similar to the nazis than they would be to say the IDF, and if we restrict it to western European populations then yes you're right.
> The Congo situation (with the hands and so on) is particularly misunderstood- largely a native on native affair.
What source did you conclude this based on?
Also why is the Bengali Famine not comparable to the Holocaust or any other genocide?
> the death tolls/expulsion tolls don't meet the criteria
The expulsion toll is "All Gazans". How much higher do you expect it to be?
And the death toll is augmented by an imminent and barely-prevented famine, all the dead under the rubble who weren't counted, and the genocidal intent implicit and explicit in the Israeli high command and political class, which indicates a future trend and desire to kill more Gazans.
> and that their opponents are therefore by default carrying some moral value.
This is fallacious, you're imagining a false dichotomy. Here's a structurally identical argument: Since raping children is worse than raping adults, if a rapist who raped children fought with a child rapist then the first rapist by default carries some moral value.
> viewing other peoples as racially inferior is not the same as wanting to eradicate them
That would be correct to say if *all* what Western Europeans and Americans ever did was "View other people as racially inferior", but they didn't just do this, they did this **and** eradicated them, too.
You're thinking of the Nazi and Allied divide as a theory-action divide, but that's not the correct way to think about it, the correct way to think about it is as an action/more drastic action divide. All states involved engaged in racially motivated genocides, some more than others. There is no nation in the Allied block that didn't engage in a genocide except possibly the Netherlands, and even it founded the South Africa colony which eventually birthed the Apartheid and committed countless instances of violence and mass murder in Indonesia, especially during decolonization.
I wouldn't call Israel's action genocide, but I do think they have long surpassed the point of what is morally justified by the massacre of October 7.
For the bombing in general in WW2, I don't think that counts as genocide. There are some specific bombings that are morally debatable since their primary aim was to kill as many civilians as possible, and not so much a military goal (like the firestorm in Hamburg). But in general, yes, the bombing was morally justified.
1) One important difference is that in WW2, the Allies did not escalate themselves, but retaliated at the same level. The axis, especially Germany, had started a war and had subdued large parts of Europe. They had already killed tens of millions. The response of the Allies was on the same level. This is terrible, but commensurate.
In Gaza, the massacre was a massive escalation from Hamas, and arguably by the Palestinian population, and killed 1000+ people. But in its campaign, Israel killed 30,000+ people. Numbers matter. I think that there is a certain level of escalation that is justified after an aggression, but not this amount of escalation.
2) I don't think that the Allies during WW2 had substantially milder means to achieve their military goals. Even in 1944, the Axis still launched massive counterattacks. I don't see a way to contain this threat except for total military defeat, after which they could dismantle the Axis military etc. The military actions of the Allies were pretty well aligned with the politically justified goal of containing the threat. The actions directly served this purpose.
In Gaza, the military actions are not so well-aligned with the goal of containing the threat, to put it mildly.
2a) One of the bitter truths of October 7 is that the Hamas invasion was so successful because Israel had tried to maintain the border fully automated, for cost reasons, without actually having guards there. As far as I understand, if the border had been staffed, the Hamas would have been able to kill/take hostages by 1-2 lower orders of magnitude. I am not implying that Israel has any blame in the massacre, that was purely Hamas' evildoing. But Israel has an alternative way of preventing such a massacre in the future: re-built the border and staff it. This would work because Israel's military is so superior to Hamas. Whereas the Allies in WW2 did not have such an option.
2b) It is pretty unclear what Israel's military goal in Gaza even is. To my best understanding, the only part that has somewhat worked is searching as many houses as possible for tunnels and weapons. This they can only do when the population is elsewhere, which is why they drive the population around. This would be a valid goal if it worked well. But in the "cleared" areas of Northern Gaza, Hamas still operates just fine.
In total, it is even unclear whether the Israel operations are net positive or net negative. They destroy some equipment and logistics of Hamas, but obviously with only moderate success. In turn they produce a new generation of Palestinians who hate Israel even more, which will strengthen Hamas further. Again, this is nothing like WW2 - once the Allies achieved their well-defined military goals, they can really do something about the threats.
2c) The only goal that Israel clearly achieves is to set a precedent of "whenever someone attacks us we will devastate their whole country". This is related to the escalation issue described above. I do think that this could be morally justified. Except that a world in which we allow everyone to escalate by orders of magnitude upon defection becomes barbaric. So my best answer is that some escalating retaliation can be morally justified (and even that with lots of caveats), but not excessive retaliation.
3) Not the decisive point, but: the world is no longer the same as in WW2. Back then it was a lot more normal to start wars, perform mass killing, or mass displacement. It was only in the 1920s-1940s when the world collectively decided that this was no longer morally ok. I recommend the book review on The Internationalists in the book reviewing contest of 2022 for background.
I find it extremely important to defend this position because it makes the world a better place. So for me, the escalation of Israel is even less ok today than it would have been 80 years ago.
Your points are mostly wrong as a point of fact: Israel does not have the ability to arbitrarily contain Palestinian terrorism without offensive action (if you act purely defensively, giving your enemy as many free shots as they want, they'll breach your defenses *eventually* - and when they do, it's always going to look like you made an easily avoidable mistake in retrospect, but "just never make defensive mistakes" isn't an option.
You're also wrong on military goals - this doesn't come across in media (can't imagine why), but the offensive has significantly degraded Hamas's military capabilities (they went from launching hundreds of rockets at Israel a day to hardly any, and most of their battalions aren't operational - except in Rafah, where the US has pushed Israel not to operate), and their domestic weapons manufacturing ability is largely gone. This is real, meaningful progress. Compare the northern border, where Israel hasn't done similar operations against Hezbollah, and where daily massive missile volleys and hundreds of thousands of refugees are still happening. And even in Gaza, Israel hasn't "bombed it to the ground" - the movement of large numbers of internal refugees is mostly part of a massive effort to avoid civilian casualties (which is why, despite immense challenges, this is the operation with the lowest civilian casualty ratio in the history of urban warfare).
I'd also argue that Israel doesn't have an obligation to value Palestinian lives more than Palestinians themselves do - if the Palestinians refuse to make necessary concessions for peace (including to release their hostages and agree to stop bombing Israel), I don't think the Israelis owe it to them to care *more*. But that's the moral point, not the fact based one.
> if the Palestinians refuse to make necessary concessions for peace (including to release their hostages and agree to stop bombing Israel), I don't think the Israelis owe it to them to care *more*.
Can't this be used - word for word - to justify October 7th?
>>> if the Israelis refuse to make necessary concessions for peace (including to dismantle settlements and agree to stop sieging and bombing Gaza), I don't think the Palestinians owe it to them to care *more*.
Extremely minimal changes to the sentence plus a swap of "Israelis" and "Palestinians". Is that a correct justification of October 7th massacres? If not, why is the original a correct justification of the Gaza genocide?
Hm, you say that Hamas' military capabilities are significantly degraded. Do you have any estimates? I don't find it very convincing to count the number of rockets. It's not surprising that this goes down during the presence of the IDF. You say that most of Hamas battalions are not operational. Where does this come from? I thought that we have very little idea of how many of the Hamas fighters are alive. I would appreciate any numbers you have.
The only number I can find is that IDF claims to have destroyed 20-40% of the Hamas tunnels. That is something (especially because larger tunnels are more likely to be found and destroyed). But it leaves 60-80% intact. Do we have any idea how much weapon manufacturing ability remains in the remaining 60-80%? Before the war, were rockets produced mostly in the tunnels, above ground, or does it not matter because the equipment is so mobile that it can easily be transferred?
ISW keeps track of specific numbers if you're interested in that. Iirc it's something like ten out of fifteen Hamas battalions rendered inoperational (the rest are in Rafah). Also something in the range of 10-15k fighters killed or captured, which is about half their force.
on tunnels, the recent operation on the Egyptian border (which caught a lot of cross-border tunnels) should be very significant because those are the tunnels they use to smuggle in weapons (which, combined with the destruction of many local arms factories, should significantly reduce their ability to ramp up launches again).
Uhm, I just looked them up, but those numbers are just obviously made up. They don't even pass basic sanity checks.
About 35,000 people were killed in Gaza. Indeed the claim is that 10-15k Hamas fighters were killed . This would mean that every third killed person would be Hamas member. This would already be a remarkably high precision in other wars, unless it's two armies directly engaging each other far from civilians. In this war, most people die from bombing, which is not very precise even for city-based warfare.
Another sanity check: About 10,000 of the killed people were women.* I don't think women are Hamas fighters. Whatever killed them were events that were clearly missing their targets, like un- or misdirected bombs. These attacks likely killed as many men as women. So that's at least 20,000 pretty random casualties. Should I believe that two thirds of the other 15,000 killed people were Hamas members, or even all of them? And that is not even counting children among the victims. (I didn't include children on purpose. There are some high numbers floating around, but I suspect that everyone under 18 is counted as child, and Hamas fighters will include teenagers under 18).
* My first hit was some sensationalist headline saying that this number have been reduced by half, which is misleading. About 5,000 dead women have been personally identified.
I don't have access to classified inside information any more than you do, but three methods to estimate these numbers that end up in this ballpark:
- So about 5000 women, plus the assumption of 5000 men, plus some number of unidentified deaths puts this at about the right estimate.
- For a lower bound: Hamas's own (admitted, from a while ago) numbers were 6k losses. Adding in PIJ and other paramilitaries (plus irregulars) puts us back at at least the 10-15k numbers.
- As you said, This would mean that every second or third killed person would be Hamas member. which would be high precision for other wars. This matches US military analysts who confirm the IDF goes to extraordinary lengths to avoid collateral damage (including door knocks and extensive evacuation efforts), above and beyond what other forces do in similar situations.
WW2 was a war between equals, i.e. empires fighting against each others, so I would call it a regular war, instead of genocide. Iirc Germany lost about as many people during that war, as the allies. In gaza the ratio is somewhere between 1:10 and 1:100
> If no, what would have to be different in WW2 for Allied bombing to count as a genocide, to you?
> If yes, are you of the opinion that it was still justified because of how awful the Nazi party was?
yes. Nazis by 1944 nazis germany has proven to be a credible thread the allies (france, britain, russia). It was also known how they treated the conquered populations.
> Or do you think the Allies should’ve avoided bombing, even if it shortened the war and saved Allied lives?
in hindsight, maybe they could have done things differently. But during that time, I think it was justified.
The allies were on the losing side in the first part of the war. They were grasping for each chance they could get. During that time, it was not clear, if any other strategy would have worked at all. Even in hindsight, I wouldn't know what they could have done "better".
> Even in hindsight, I wouldn't know what they could have done "better".
In hindsight, the strategic bombing was largely ineffective except that it drew the German air force away from Russia. If you had a time machine and were giving the allies advice, you'd probably want to tell them to skip the strategic bombing and focus those resources on other parts of the military. (This is assuming you can't just cheat and tell them "actually defend Poland" or whatever).
My take: Israel is guilty of genocide, Allied bombing is not.
Roughly speaking, the UN definition says that you commit genocide if you harm people with the intent to harm their ethnic group. This is a tricky thing to prove, because it requires a bit of mind-reading. You need a lot of context to get it right.
The Allied bombing campaigns were pretty severe - Japan and Germany lost maybe half a million civilians each. These killings would likely be considered war crimes today, and rightfully so. But what was the intent? For that you need some context.
It seems to me that the bombings started in retaliation against German bombings, and then escalated to try to force the end of the war (although it may have been ineffective). Both of these reasons make sense on paper, and when the war was over, the killing stopped. It seems fairly clear to me that the intent wasn't to harm Germans and Japanese in particular, meaning that it was not genocide, no matter how immoral and how awful the human cost.
In the case of Gaza, Israel has destroyed ~1 million people's houses and public infrastructure in northern Gaza. Many of these refugees are situated in Rafah, where they are currently being displaced again. Almost everybody has no internet, no electricity, no fuel, no food, barely functioning hospitals, and are regularly being bombed and fired upon by the IDF. It's impossible to know how many have died, since there is nobody to report a death to, and no way to report it.
So, what is the intent? Well, Israel's official explanation is that the intent is to (a) destroy Hamas, and (b) rescue the hostages. To me, (a) seems vague (how many Hamas members do we need killed?) and unknowable (how do you know when they're gone?) and difficult (how do you know a given person is not part of Hamas?) and short termist (what happens when Gaza has no government?) and unnecessary (surely a two state solution would have a far higher chance of ensuring peace?). And to me, (b) makes no sense at all. You can't claim to be rescuing someone while you're destroying the entire region where they are being held. It also sounds totally futile to negotiate with someone you've vowed to kill.
So, consider the context: for over 70 years, Israel has been taking control over more and more land from Palestinians, forcing them to seek refuge, and letting new Jewish people move in. Resistance is met with violence. Palestine is vastly outgunned, and Israel is so closely allied with Western countries, especially the US, that nobody would dare provide Palestine with much support.
You could potentially see the intent as expansionistic - to simply govern more land. But every time Israel invades, it doesn't accept existing Palestinians as new Israeli citizens. It deploys new Jewish Israelis to populate the area and pushes Palestinians further into the desert, where they must live as refugees. But Israel will then invade again in another 20 years' time.
I'm not sure if there's an official explanation for why this keeps happening. My best guess is that Israel simply wants to include as many Jews as possible, and as few Arabs as possible, in order to maintain its national identity. In any case, my view is that most harm to Palestinians, in general, is due to the ethnicity and/or religion of the Palestinians, making this a genocide.
"To me, (a) seems vague (how many Hamas members do we need killed?)"
To destroy an organization, you need to ensure that members of that organization do not associate with each other in pursuit of that organization's goals in significant numbers. How many members need to be killed to reach that point, depends on how violently determined they are to continue supporting the organization. In principle, this can often be accomplished by just having the police arrest everyone every time the organization tries to hold a get-together, without needing to kill anyone. But if they've got lots of guns and a policy of shooting any of your policemen who try to come into their neighborhood, then you're probably going to have to kill the ones who are shooting at your policemen until they stop doing that.
And if they're using heavy weapons in a densely-populated urban area, you're probably going to wind up killing a whole lot of of people who were just standing too close to people who were shooting at policemen.
"and unknowable (how do you know when they're gone?)"
When they stop shooting at your policemen, then the ones you need to kill are mostly gone. When they stop going to the organization's meet-ups, the ones you need to arrest are mostly gone (but you'll want to keep their police in place and alert for a decade or so to make sure there's no backsliding).
"and difficult (how do you know a given person is not part of Hamas?)"
In the killing-people part of the operation, you know because they're the ones shooting at the IDF. Or carrying the sorts of weapons normally used to shoot at the IDF, or the like.
In the arresting-people part of the operation, you know because they're the ones going to Hamas meetings(*). You'll probably also be able to identify quite a few from the bit where they brag about being Hamas members in their social media profile, or they're on video participating in Hamas rallies, or their aggrieved neighbors rat them out as being part of Hamas. Typically, insurgent or terrorist organizations try to keep a low profile about that sort of thing, but being the de facto governing power of Gaza for most of two decades means slacking off in that regard so they can sit back and enjoy the win.
* Or "Hey, we're not 'Hamas' we're, um, 'Hasam', that's it, and it's totally a coincidence that we want to drive all the Jews out of Greater Palestine like Hamas did" meetings.
> So, what is the intent? Well, Israel's official explanation is that the intent is to (a) destroy Hamas, and (b) rescue the hostages. To me, (a) seems vague (how many Hamas members do we need killed?) and unknowable (how do you know when they're gone?) and difficult (how do you know a given person is not part of Hamas?)
I see a lot of this confusing attitude, speaking as though Hamas is a vague terror movement with unclear boundaries.
At the start of the war, Hamas had 24 battalions. 19 have been obliterated outright. Hamas started with a massive amount of tunnel infrastructure, much of which has been destroyed. Hamas had the ability to smuggle in serious weaponry. They had massive stockpiles of rockets, which are rapidly being depleted. (The reduced frequency of rocket attacks is quite noticeable to Israelis.) They had the ability to execute whoever they wanted within Gaza, and no real resistance was possible. They received massive assistance from foreign countries.
After the operation in Gaza succeeds, Hamas will probably continue to exist as an underground terror movement, maybe even with increased ability to recruit, who knows. That's a survivable state of affairs for Israel, especially if there's a local Palestinian government that acts against Hamas.
> So, consider the context: for over 70 years, Israel has been taking control over more and more land from Palestinians, forcing them to seek refuge, and letting new Jewish people move in.
That's false. In 1948, Jordan expelled the entire Jewish population of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. In 1967, Israel had full control over the West Bank, Gaza, and the Sinai, and since then gave away the Sinai to Egypt, and Area A and Gaza to the Palestinians, forcibly removing Jewish populations from all of those.
> In any case, my view is that most harm to Palestinians, in general, is due to the ethnicity and/or religion of the Palestinians, making this a genocide.
You think that Israel is fighting Hamas because of some hatred of their ethnicity and religion, and not because of the openly genocidal terrorist organization which just brutally murdered hundreds of people, butchered babies, committed mass-rape while livestreaming it from the victims' social media accounts, abducted hundreds of hostages, and then vowed that they would do so again and again? Wow.
Kinda misleading way to phrase this, Israel wasn't being charitable, it lost its entire air force in the first few hours of a joint attack by Egypt and Syria, then barely held together under continued pounding and Arab Oil Embargoes that brought Europe and the US to their knees.
The often-propagandistic claims ("We had a battalion headed for Cairo !!!!") that are said to sooth the Israeli national ego omit key info, like the fact that battalion in question was 200 Km from Cairo and surrounded on all sides by the Egyptian army.
> Jordan expelled the entire Jewish population of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Isn't this exactly what Israel did to the Palestinians at the same time?
> butchered babies
Never confirmed by any remotely reliable source by the way, the White House made themselves look like clowns when they claimed it and later retracted them.
> committed mass-rape while livestreaming it
I have read no less than dozens of reports on the sexual assault of Hamas, and every single one of them admits right off the bat that there is no direct footage - still or moving - of the crimes.
If you have footage, do the people like me who try to convince the Hamas sympathizers that they committed rape a favor and post it right here. I can post an email if you don't want to publicly post the gruesome footage.
> That's a survivable state of affairs for Israel, especially if there's a local Palestinian government that acts against Hamas.
The same local government that Israel's official position is swearing on their grandmother's graves that it won't exist now or in 50 years?
Are you aware of the links between Hamas and Netanyahu? Do you know how he justified funding and strengthening Hamas?
Well, that's quite a gish gallop of misinformation and outright lies. I'm not going to waste time on going through them, except to clear up the "butchered babies" business.
"An international group of forensic pathologists also have confirmed babies were found decapitated, though it's unclear if that happened before or after death."
> Why haven't Haaretz or Times of Israel picked up the story from the random "fact-checker" you posted?
USA Today's (the "random fact-checker") report came later than both Haaretz's and Times of Israel's confirmations. As shown in the link. Right there. (Is the overly specific denial of what's right there some kind of ragebait attempt?)
It's abundantly obvious that you're not arguing in good faith. I'm muting this thread.
> You think that Israel is fighting Hamas because...
I don't think Israel is fighting Hamas. To me, the IDF appears to be destroying Gaza completely, massacring Palestinians indiscriminately, and depriving them of energy, healthcare and other basic services. Hamas is barely fighting back at all - "fighting Hamas" seems like an incorrect description.
> because of some hatred of their ethnicity and religion, and not because of the openly genocidal terrorist organization...
Sure. I think this is probably what most Israelis think about the operation - it's about security and safety. But think about this: Hamas has committed only a small minority of the total killings (seems to be <3% over the past year, and about the same throughout the entire conflict). As awful as Hamas is, they are a rounding error compared to the IDF. So, does this justify Oct 7? No!! Of course it doesn't. And by the exact same token, Oct 7 doesn't justify the mass death right now.
If you're still doubtful that ethnicity is a relevant factor, consider a world in which everyone in Palestine had been Jewish. Do you think Israel would have displaced them? Would they be refugees in the desert, who are currently starving to death? If not, does that not suggest that Israel's callousness towards Palestinians has been due to their race and religion?
Why does everyone insist on thinking of wars like the principle is an eye for an eye? If someone gouges your eye out, you don't gouge their eye out and call it even. You take steps to prevent them from gouging out other eyes in the future. On an individual level, an eye gouger is sent to prison. On a state level, eye gougers have their capacity to inflict violence degraded until they surrender or physically can't inflict violence any more.
This proportional view makes no sense. What good does killing a proportional amount of Gazans do? Either killing them prevents future attacks, and the number killed depends on how that affects their ability to inflict future violence. Or killing them does nothing except make the situation worse, and none of them should be killed at all. If you believe in situation 2, you should make that claim.
Are you suggesting destroying the IDF? Although that would certainly ensure the safety of Palestinians, I would argue that there are other ways to resolve the conflict than destroying the IDF, and the terrible human cost of doing so means we should be looking at those alternative options.
Oh you meant destroying Hamas, didn't you? Same reasoning. Options include ceasefire, then two state solution, one state solution, really anything that gives Palestinians democracy and basic freedoms. I would definitely think Israelis would be safest when their government makes friends with its neighbours, rather than making itself a pariah even outside the middle east.
Destroying the IDF would certainly create peace in Palestine. Best case, you get Uno reverse and tens of thousands of Israelis die and then get oppressed by Palestinians. Worst case, you get Holocaust 2.0 and all of the Israelis are massacred, or reduced to dhimmitude, which is slavery with extra steps.
- One state solution is laughable and no one should seriously propose this
- Two state solution (really 3 since Gaza and the West Bank are separate) is what exists now
- Democracy and freedom for Palestine resulted in a) the PLO, which denied the right of Israel to exist and launched terror attacks against them, and b) Hamas, which denied the right of Israel to exist and launched terror attacks against them. I'm not sure why anyone would think trying the same thing 3 times in a row would result in a different outcome.
I'm glad you are arguing for a principled stance of no violence rather than utilitarian proportional nonsense. But I don't think that will work to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict.
> I don't think Israel is fighting Hamas. To me, the IDF appears to be destroying Gaza completely, massacring Palestinians indiscriminately
The IDF is fully capable of wiping out ~5 million Palestinians any moment, even without using nukes, and chooses not to do so. Instead, the IDF has been sacrificing more to preserve enemy civilian lives than any army in the history of warfare. Fun fact: There are considerably more Palestinians now than there were at the beginning of the operation.
> Hamas is barely fighting back at all
Interesting contrast between this view and what Hamas says. From Sinwar himself, in a letter to supporters, published in Al-Jazeera: "Azz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades are waging a fierce, violent and unprecedented battle against the Israeli occupation forces, and the occupation army has suffered heavy losses in lives and equipment. Al-Qassam Brigades targeted at least 5,000 soldiers and officers during the ground war, one-third of whom were killed, one-third were seriously injured, and the last one-third suffered permanent disabilities. 750 units have been completely or partially destroyed at the level of military equipment and vehicles. Al-Qassam Brigades destroyed the occupation army, is continuing on its path to crushing it, and will not submit to the conditions of the occupation."
> consider a world in which everyone in Palestine had been Jewish. Do you think Israel would have displaced them?
Obviously, given the hundreds of thousands of Jewish Israelis that the Israeli government displaced to get them out of harms way.
> The IDF is fully capable of wiping out ~5 million Palestinians any moment
The obvious counterexample is all the other genocides in history where the population doing the genocide had the full armed capacity to comparatively do much more than the IDF and didn't use it.
Why are European Jews still a bloodline at all if Nazi Germany's armed forces had the capacity to wipe out every Jew off the face of Europe?
I can fuzzily recall estimates along the lines of "Every third Jew survived in Europe", whatever the actual ratio may be, obviously there are Holocaust survivors. So why? Nazi Germany had between at least 1937 to 1944 to wipe out every last Jew, the same armed forces that took France in a few months and reached Moscow in less than a year didn't. Is this a counterexample to your claim?
> the IDF has been sacrificing more to preserve enemy civilian lives than any army in the history of warfare.
Is this actually an exhaustive statement that you in good faith did all you can to justify, for example by painstakingly studying every war and comparing it to the IDF wars? Or is it just propaganda that you feel compelled to parrot?
That is one thing that puzzles me about the holocaust. It seems so indirect. Like they kept people in prison and starved them, but they didn't get serious about mass extermination until the final months of the war. Why go to the trouble of imprisoning and starving people when you could just shoot them?
Care to name something it gets wrong? Do you have a preferable source for the history of Israeli borders?
> IDF has been sacrificing more to preserve enemy civilian lives than any army in the history of warfare
So, while "sacrificing more" to protect civilians, they turned off everybody's electricity and fuel supplies, destroyed 1.7 million peoples' houses, damaged all but one hospital in northern Gaza, used AI to select drone strike targets with "cursory" human review, killed >150 journalists, killed >250 aid workers, killed several Israeli citizens, including hostages of Hamas? And now they're doing it *again* in Rafah? Can you name a modern army that had a worse civilian impact than this?
> Obviously
Ridiculous. If Palestinians were Jewish, all of Israel and Palestine would have peace and human rights and you know it.
I agree with many things in this comment, but I also think it is somewhat one-sided. For example, the Arab/Palestinian population in Israel. I think you describe correctly the tendency of the last 10-20 years, where Israel's government more or less openly showed that they would prefer to get rid of them. But this is not the politics of the last 70 years. After all, Israel has still 20-25% Arab citizens.
Another example: being expansionistic. Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005. This was not in a vacuum and also had advantages, but it wasn't forced on Israel, and was the opposite of expansionistic. Unfortunately, as so often between Israel and Palestinians, when one side tried to cooperate, the other side has defected (or at least taken actions that were interpreted as defecting from the other side). After 2005, it was the Palestinians who elected Hamas as their government. Since then, Israel defected the cooperative part of the Palestinians by grabbing more and more land in the West Bank.
Palestinian authority on the West Bank spends several hundred million dollars each year in payments to the families of Palestinians who killed or tried to kill the Israelis. Is it accurate to call them the cooperative part?
It's all grey rather than black-and-white. But I think it's very natural to describe Hamas as the part which does not cooperate with Israel, and PLO as the part which does cooperate with Israel, especially in the last 15 years or so.
What we can probably agree on: that Israel's actions in the West Bank (and also around Jerusalem, and towards the Arab part of Israel citizen) have been perceived as defection from Palestinian side. Actually, I do actually agree with that.
> Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005. This was not in a vacuum and also had advantages, but it wasn't forced on Israel, and was the opposite of expansionistic.
So if Israel expands, and then takes one step back, it is not longer fair to call it expansionistic?
Imagine Russia giving up a few villages in the currently occupied part of Ukraine. Would that mean that Russia is no longer expansionist? And if later they decide to take those villages (and more) back, we still shouldn't call them expansionist, because of that one time when they took one step back?
The whole "genocide" accusation doesn't actually hold together as any sort of fact-based view of the situation and there's not much point in trying to make sense of it as such. It's purely a boo word meaning "I don't like Israel and/or bombing and don't want to think of the situation beyond that".
The basic idea behind the "genocide" accusation is that Israel wants to solve the Gaza problem by killing and displacing the Palestinians of Gaza and settling the place with Israelis. I'm not saying that is true, but that's the accusation.
And yeah, there's plenty of people who are willing to call the Allied bombings "war crimes". Not genocides, because there was no genocidal intent, but plenty of people condemn them.
The actual number of people killed in bombings has nothing to do with it.
Neither is a genocide, because neither was/is "committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such." Whether they were war crimes is a different question, and depends on facts to which we are not privy, such as the degree to which the danger to civilians outweighs the expected military benefit. https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v1/rule14
"the aim of the Combined Bomber Offensive...should be unambiguously and publicly stated. That aim is the destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers, and the disruption of civilized life throughout Germany.
It should be emphasized that the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport and lives, the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale, and the breakdown of morale both at home and at the battle fronts by fear of extended and intensified bombing, are accepted and intended aims of our bombing policy. They are not by-products of attempts to hit factories."
I'm not sure whether this is meant to be evidence for or against my position, but I read this as evidence that the bombing was not a genocide, because there was no intent to destroy a group, or part thereof, as such. See pages 28 et seq of Judgment on Defense Motion to Acquit here: https://ucr.irmct.org/scasedocs/case/IT-95-8#eng Note also that, had the term been understood to refer to bombing campaigns, even relatively indiscriminate bombing, no country would have signed it.
Many Thanks! Just to double check - in my browser, this seems to be showing up as page 29, point? paragraph? 57 (as part of 03 Sep 2001 Sikirica et al. (IT-95-8) Judgement on Defence motions to acquit)
>The Trial Chamber notes the Prosecution submission that evidence that satisfies any of the following three standards meets the requirement of Article 4 that the accused must have committed the act "with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such"
Hmm... Does the "as such" just mean that the action has to be _selective_, picking out members of a particular national/ethnical/racial/religious group? If so, then I would still think that
>the killing of _German_ workers
would still qualify. Or does additional selectivity on another basis,
>the killing of German _workers_
disqualify it? Or does the combination with _additional_ aims, in this case the crippling of German arms production, disqualify it? ( This last seems unlikely, since one could always separate out declared aims, one by one, for examination. )
I thought my quote was a rather unambiguous call for genocide, but certainly a war crime. Harris called for the killing of a significant number of German civilians (those living in cities) as an explicit goal. I'm not a lawyer though, maybe you could more precisely quote from that Judgment document how that was not a call for genocide?
I see quotes like
"The Chamber agrees with the Prosecution’s submission that the intent to destroy a multitude of persons belonging to a group may amount to genocide, even where these persons constitute only part of a group within a given geographical area: a country or a region or a single community."
and
"The United Nations Expert Study on Genocide defines the term 'in part' as implying 'a reasonably significant number, relative to the total of the group as a whole, or else a significant section of a group such as its leadership'",
referring to the definition of genocide as, in this particular case, "Intent to destroy in whole or in part the Bosnian Muslim or Bosnian Croat populations in Prijedor", which could trivially be applied to Harris' statement about German civilians.
So which quote exactly are you thinking of that would make Harris' statement not a declaration of genocide?
>or else a significant section of a group such as its leadership
WTF??? The UN calls a decapitation strike a genocide??? A decapitation strike, if one can manage it, is what one does when one wants to defeat a group while _minimizing_ the number of people killed.
You have to differentiate between valid military targets and invalid civilian targets. Of course, aiming to kill a country's soldiers or their leadership during war is not genocide in this sense. Aiming to kill, say, all religious leaders of a certain religion, or the political leaders of a certain ethnicity would be genocide.
The key is the "as such" portion of the definition. See discussion here https://www.globalr2p.org/publications/defining-the-four-mass-atrocity-crimes/ which notes that genocide requires that "Victims of this crime are deliberately – and not randomly – targeted because of their real or perceived membership in one of the four protected groups," but that, in contrast, war crimes include "Intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population as such" and " or "Intentionally directing attacks against civilian objects, that is, objects which are not military objectives"
Assuming two populations have a different average, but the same standard deviation. If you truncate the populations below a certain point, then the population with the higher starting average will STILL have a higher average, due to the shape of the normal distribution: they have more people at the far ends of the tails.
So, for example, if Nigerians have an average IQ of 95, Koreans have an average IQ of 105, both populations have 15 IQ points standard deviation, and the USA only admits people whose IQs are at least 110, then the average IQ of Nigerian-Americans would be ~118, while the average IQ of Korean-Americans would be ~120. This is BEFORE any regression-to-the-mean type things for the children of successful immigrants. (The effect becomes even more pronounced if the Nigerian average IQ is lower, to be clear - if Nigeria's average IQ was 70, the Nigerian-American average IQ would be ~114.6 in this example.)
Yet the most educated immigrant population in America are not Korean-Americans, but Nigerian-Americans. Do HBD people have any good explanation for this?
Honestly, probably just immigration selection pressure. Nigerians primarily immigrated after 2000 (1) while the majority of Korean Americans arrived from 1970-2000 (2). Remember, if you don't have family members in the US and can't claim refugee status, you need to get an immigrant work visa, which are insanely competitive and specifically look for academic achievement(3). This leads to two fairly simple explanations.
First, as demand to immigrate to America has risen, standards have gotten tougher. This should be fairly easy to determine, have the proportion of EB1 and EB2 visas risen relative to EB3 visas? (4)
Second, there's probably a lot more 2nd and 3rd generation Korean immigrants than Nigerians because their primary immigration wave was about 30 years earlier and we should expect subsequent generations to perform less well academically. That's not even a zing; lots of real estate agents in SF make darn good money but US immigration doesn't care about $400k/year real estate agents, they only look at academics. So a 25 year-old Korean computer scientist who arrived in America in 1985 could reasonably expect to have grandchildren at this point, certainly his own children have completed their secondary education. Meanwhile, a 25 year-old Nigerian computer scientist who arrived in 2010 probably has kids but they haven't completed their post secondary education yet. This should also be relatively easy to confirm; just find educational achievement for first generation vs second and third generation Korean Americans.
>That's not even a zing; lots of real estate agents in SF make darn good money but US immigration doesn't care about $400k/year real estate agents, they only look at academics.
"Nigeria" is a social construct created by the British when abandoning their empire. The subgroup you are looking for are the Igbo. Search for that name in here:
> At this point, it’s hard not to draw comparisons between the Igbo and a certain other famous ethnic/religious group known for its business acumen, focus on education, conspicuous political success, and dispersal among foreign lands, that also fell victim to pogroms.
I am familiar with and find highly unconvincing the "Jews of West Africa" hereditarian hypothesis. It seems to me to be a desperate attempt to come up with a hereditarian explanation of large attainment differences between neighboring ethnic groups, when there is the fact that there were virtually no schools in the north during British occupation, because the schools that got set up under the British were generally Christian mission schools, which would obviously be unwelcome among the Muslim Hausa. No need to appeal to genetics with such an obvious environmental explanation (which, unlike many other environmental explanations, cannot be explained as actually a consequence of genetic differences - it is not like the Hausa converted to Islam while the Igbo largely retained traditional religion because the Hausa were dumb and the Igbo smart).
I actually don't find the idea that Nigerians have genotypically low g to be very plausible, even with a modest difference (compared to HBD-types proposing an average IQ of 70, which would be obviously stupid), due to various things like this. If genotypic g differences are the cause of racial IQ divides, results such as this should be very rare, if they occur at all.
The Igbo thing grinds my gears in particular because it seems so blatantly post facto - at least with Jews there's the "bankers for centuries" explanation, but the Igbo didn't even have a fully-featured writing system until the Europeans showed up, yet they're selecting for IQ so hard that they have 10+ IQ points on neighboring Yoruba?
Fair enough, and thank you for clarifying your position.
I don't find the whole HBD/IQ thing to be very plausible at all, in part because it lines up a bit too neatly with racial stereotypes that are genetically incoherent (e.g. skin colour, which means more or less nothing in terms of diversity).
For what it's worth: I happen to know a number of Nigerian expats, and have never met one who was anything less than brilliant. And yet Nigeria itself is a disaster for all too familiar ex-colonial/resource curse reasons.
If I had to pick a stereotype, I'd say that it's more "Scots on the make" than "jews of Africa".
Well of course the answer is that the US doesn't have an IQ test, nor do they take a random sample of qualifying individuals. Immigrants to the US are people who have the motivation and ability to pass through a series of hoops to get a visa in one of several specific categories.
I suspect there's a lot of factors going into it, but two of the big ones will be:
1. Age distribution: Koreans have been moving en masse to the US for longer than Nigerians have, and younger generations are more likely to have degrees.
2. There's more plausible pathways for a non-elite Korean to move to the US (and start a convenience store, or work in their uncle's construction company) than for non-elite Nigerians to do so. There's less support for Nigerians in the US, less of a local community to get them started. If you have family members in the US then more visa opportunities are open to you than if you're the first of your kind. And of course, non-elite Nigerians are so poor that they have difficulty saving up for a plane ticket and visa paperwork.
If the immigration criterion does not perfectly correlate to IQ, that will strongly tend lower the average IQ of Nigerian immigrants compared to Korean immigrants, assuming Nigerians have lower IQs. For example of a simplified model, if anybody with an IQ over 110 gets in, and anybody with a lower IQ has a coinflip chance, obviously this will just drive Nigerian-American IQs down even more than the 110 truncation point.
Regarding (2), do you expect, in general, for immigrants from poor countries to outperform immigrants from rich countries? Because that would seem to be the implication but I really doubt it is the case. e.g. foreign-born Filipino-Americans have lower Bachelor's rates than their Korean equivalents (and the same for their USian cohort).
On your first paragraph: sure, in that simplified model that would be the case. But the simplified model isn't true; the people who move to the US are the people who happen to have the motive, means, and opportunity to do so, and those groups of people are very different from country to country.
On your second paragraph: I wouldn't really expect any general trend, I'd expect things to be idiosyncratic from country to country. The Phillippines is as idiosyncratic a country as any, and it's very common in that particular country for young people to plan their life around getting a job that will enable them to move to the US. Meanwhile in neighbouring and economically very similar Indonesia, for a variety of historical and cultural reasons you see far far fewer migrants to the US (outnumbered 40-1 by Filipinos), and those who _do_ move to the US tend to be pretty well off. Then in Africa you've got a combination of countries who send people to the US as students or skilled employees (like Nigeria, Kenya) and those who send people to the us as refugees (Somalia, Sudan).
Wikipedia has it on the Nigerian-Americans page, but I went and verified:
https://councilka.org/2020-cka-national-report/ : "Approximately fifty-eight percent of Korean Americans have achieved a bachelor’s degree or higher––more than the national average, as well as the average for Asian Americans as a whole, at 55 percent. Nearly 23 percent of Korean Americans hold a graduate degree compared with the national average of 13 percent."
Looking for *high-quality* (think Ivy-educated, 30 years experience) therapist recommendations for treating cPTSD with serious dissociative features. Looking for someone either online or in NYC. For more details see the thread I posted on the subreddit here:
I got one good recommendation (David Elliott at Harvard, who I plan to contact this week), and would appreciate it if anyone had any others. Would also appreciate recommendations for other forums to post this question. I would even appreciate names of good people who aren't taking new clients, as I can still contact them to ask for their recommendations. I'm basically starting a breadth-first search and just want some high-quality starting points. Thanks in advance.
Bessel van de Kolk and Judith Herman, both in Boston. Both must be pretty elderly by now, and may not still be practicing -- but they could refer you to people who trained with them.
I didn't either, but then I read the linked Reddit thread.
The idea is that OP is looking for a therapist for a girlfriend who is basically a huge red flag personified. OP doesn't mind, because sex is great, and he as an adult can handle it. The girlfriend is crazy, suicidal, addicted to alcohol and benzos. Also, she doesn't really want to get therapy, it's the OP pushing her, and she trying to resist.
It's not my business, so whatever. But if one day these two happen to have a child, it will be a huge tragedy for the child. (Also for OP if he will love the child.)
Yes. It's unfortunately way too easy to sweep major problems under the rug when you're young and still childless. Once there's a child in the loop, at some point the gravity of the situation will hit you in the face like a ton of bricks.
I imagine it means the likelihood of an attack on a pride event somewhere abroad is high, but the likelihood of an attack on your particular pride event remains very low. I would probably avoid whatever shows up highest on a "biggest pride event in the world" google search to be safe.
Hmm...playing devil's advocate here, from the perspective of a group that wants to bomb an event to deliver Allah's wrath to the unclean or whatever...a tactical consideration would be which pride event seems likely to have the most/least available funds to devote to preventive security. The biggest pride event in the world therefore seems like it might not be the target offering the best chances of success?
Feels like one of those (rare?) occasions when it's worth explicitly thinking in Bayesian terms.
1. What is the probability that the US would issue such a warning in the absence of any specific intelligence about an attack?
2. What is the probability that the US would issue such a warning if they had specific intelligence about an attack?
3. What is the probability that such an attack would be planned, and that the US would have intelligence about if it were?
I'm pretty cynical but I'd still assign probabilities "lowish", "highish" and "highish" to those three respectively, which multiply out to give a highish probability that this is worth taking seriously.
I have a tech job that pays and treats me well and I like my coworkers. The problem is that don't find it meaningful, and I mostly don't find it fun. These things are bothering me more and more so:
1 - Anyone have any thoughts, ideas or tips about finding work that's meaningful, fun and still pays really well? I worry that most of the high paying jobs involve working for large company doing work that is hard to connect to and sometimes zero sum - am I wrong ?
2 - I feel like there are other people here in the same situation - maybe we should collaborate! (Feel free to email with meaningful, fun ideas that have the potential to make some nice money iz8162k23 at gmail)
I suspect there is a trade off between fun and money. Makes sense in a well functioning market that you would be compensated for doing something boring.
If you have enough money, invest them in passively managed index funds, so that if you keep having this problem for a long time (quite likely, in my opinion), early retirement becomes an option.
Please forgive the obvious suggestion, but is it a solution to keep working at your current job and use the cash to fund a hobby that satisfies your needs?
If you want to stay in tech (presumably as an engineer of some sort), there are two things you might try to make your work more meaningful. First, transition to another job where the company fills some more obvious need than whatever your current employer does. You might, for example, go to work for a company that makes software for first-responder dispatching, or something like that. Second, try getting closer to the ultimate customers. If you are currently in a back-office engineering job, try some sort of sales engineering or support engineering job, where you can deal more closely with the people whose problems you are solving.
I just deleted the youtube app. I really enjoyed some music I had discovered there but now there's too much AI trash there for my taste. Good thing I kept my vinyl records.
I have mine still too. I’m too lazy most of the time to pull them out when I can stream the same album to the receiver with my phone using my Amazon account but it’s nice to have a a turntable and LPs as cultural artifacts to inform and entertain younger friends.
Hmm... One of the things I use youtube for is music, and I've had no problems. I'm generally looking for a specific song, or the songs in a specific musical, and I'm no (AFAIK), running into AI output at all. Do you use it differently?
Wild guess, they were clicking a song and letting autoplay create a never ending playlist, which eventually devolves to AI-generated slop or generic low quality content. It's also a common problem on spotify.
Deleting the app is of course a solution, but there are gentler ways. These platforms are all about turning you into a passive consumer, but you can easily thwart that by turning autoplay off.
Keep a bit of agency in your life and search for the things you want to hear!
I have disabled autoplay but I'm curious and liked to look at it's recommendations, which has lead to very nice musical experiences in the past. Like a long video/audio of an early Blondie performance at CBGB's, weird russian folk performers and The Big Push with Ren. Now I get authentic-sounding soul songs called "I just shat in my pants."
David Hasselhoff covering Iggy Pop's "The Passenger" seems to be real after all, though.
Many Thanks! That sounds plausible. I've never operated youtube in that mode. About the closest I come to that is the page when I fire it up, showing videos that the algorithm thinks I might be interested in. But these are dominated by channels that I've subscribed to, which indeed I am interested in, with a sprinkling of similar channels, which are generally reasonable guesses.
How does one price taking warrants instead of pay with a startup?
I do field work for a startup, and some desk work at home too. I receive pay for field work at some fixed value, but received in restricted shares at calculated average (restricted for 4 months on TSX) and 25% bonus in slightly out of the money warrants good for 36 months.
But I don't know how to price in my desk time doing research.
I don't think the other responders (at least so far) are actually fully reading your question. If I read it right the startup your working for is publicly listed (on TSX) and you're receiving shares you will be able to sell in 4 months at an averaged price (averaged over what term?), plus some slightly out of the money warrants good for 3 years for the fieldwork. It's unclear what (if anything) you're being directly paid for the desk work from what you wrote. I think people are seeing 'startup' and assuming it's not publicly listed as would typically be the case in the US but isn't always in Canada (particularly for jr. mining companies etc. which would fit with the fieldwork).
In that case, sans firm specific knowledge, the stock should be roughly it's nameplate value (what's the averaging period? any discount relative to that?) discounted by the risk free interest rate. It will have potentially very significant variance so may need some adjustment based on your particular situation in terms of risk aversion. The warrants should be price able by Black-Scholes which you can probably find an online calculator to at least give you a rough idea (but again high variance). The deskwork should average into that on whatever basis you think is appropriate (time, effort [fieldwork sounds like it may be more taxing, if so overweight that]) assuming you're not paid directly for that.
Yes, exactly. Great analysis. It is Junior Exploration.
I staked claims and opted to take pay in stock and warrants, that's a done deal.
Thanks for the heads-up on Black Sholes Merton, I'll try to apply that model to my situation.
The averaging is weighted volume, and done on a biannual basis. There are steep fees and all manner of limitations with the exchange in Canada when paying someone with warrants.
I'm not naive, I am fully aware the company could fail to grow beyond my strike price and I'm left with zero value, and I could lose money with my pay in stock. I'm also not poor, having stable housing, healthcare, cash income from my spouse, able to collect SSI, and have retirement distribution coming in a few years.
Continuing forward, I do analysis on properties under consideration. I talk with investors about this JE's properties, and execs of companies owning properties the JE considers buying. Because we started out informally, we're backtracking to set a trade value of labor in warrants of a publicly traded Junior Exploration company.
You treat them as lottery tickets with an expected value of effectively zero, but have some low chance to randomly, determined by factors you can't control, turn out valuable in future.
Agreed. It's nice that they're offering you warrants, but it's not real money. And it will most likely to be less valuable than toilet paper. You'd do better to take a bigger salary and invest some of that money in high-growth mutual funds.
What percentage of startups are successful either by going the IPO route or getting bought by another company? It used to be 1 in 10. I suspect it's much fewer now. Also, restricted shares do not have the same rights as founders' stock. A company purchasing the startup can refuse to honor common stock shares. I have friends who got nothing when the startups they worked for were purchased by other companies.
My former startup was acquired and I got $6k for my options (after working there three years). I mean it's nice, but it's almost better to still be holding lottery tickets because you can dream.
Unless you really understand what you are doing (but then you wouldn't be asking here), the value of everything other than the money you get paid directly is probably zero.
Hey, while we’re talking about upcoming meetups: the Meetup Everywhere in Paris was just a month ago, but there’s a normal meetup this Saturday. Feel free to come, folks, if you’re in the area! (link: https://lu.ma/jeky07pw)
I typed a nice reply and lost it, it was about how my friend's definition of patriarchy is effectively going meta on the original definition, such that it refers to a network of things relating to power and it's abuse. I don't know how standard this definition is, I suspect it's influenced somewhat by her anarchist views.
The following bullets generated by gpt because I can't be bothered to write it again manually.
1. **Hierarchical Organizational Structures**
2. **Cultural Narratives that Glorify Dominance**
3. **Normative Power Relations**
4. **Economic Control and Resource Allocation**
5. **Manipulation and Propaganda e.g. in favour of the status quo**
Reminds me of those infographics that claim to be describing "whiteness" but then include things like self-reliance, the scientific method, and punctuality.
It is actually a mostly-coherent position, it's just that it ignores the fact that many of these "aspects of patriarchy" are not only load-bearing elements of society, but that they are actually the optimal way of doing things. Remove them at your peril!
The fact that a thing is harmful when abused does not mean we can or should simply be rid of it.
Say a person commits a crime that inflicts significant suffering on another person in some form. The perpetrator admits to the crime, pays their debt to society and never reoffends. Is it then ethical for that person to satisfy their urge to commit a similar crime by fantasizing about the memory of the heinous act they committed?
Another way to look at it is if you could feed the neurological experience of murder to people whose neurology predisposes them to derive pleasure from it, and that was enough to satisfy their harmful urge and keep them from committing the act itself, do you think that would be considered an acceptable deterrent?
The problem here is that the word "ethical" doesn't just have a single meaning.
Should society care or try to create rules against this or brand it as immoral? Most likely not, because it's we all love our inner liberty and no-one is being hurt by someone else's mere thoughts.
Does it mold your character and make you a worse person? Most likely yes, and even more so if it becomes repetitive or obsessive. But psychology is complicated, sometimes repressing stuff can mess you up worse than allowing yourself to fantasize.
>Should society care or try to create rules against this or brand it as immoral? Most likely not, because it's we all love our inner liberty and no-one is being hurt by someone else's mere thoughts.
I certainly agree that no one should be deprived of their inner-liberty, though a lot of psychological treatment does seem—to a layperson—to involve trying to gain insight into what people are actually thinking (even if it conflicts with their displayed behavior or surface descriptions of themselves) and changing those thoughts in a way that is potentially less harmful to the patient and to others. This seems like it could be construed as fairly anti-inner-liberty.
Thought experiments are difficult to construct and my murder sim falls apart in a lot of ways, but if when a murderer actually reached for murder, someone handed them something that scratched the itch but led to no harm, that would be very pro-inner-liberty but also very troubling in other ways. Like you point out, it’d also likely further damage the would-be murderer, as does our current remedies of incarceration and execution.
The solution most people (including me) would choose, is to find a way to free the murdery guy of his murdery thoughts, but then you’re right back at depriving him of his inner-liberty.
It doesn't make much sense to me... you seem to be reaching for a single kind of "should" that would work for all involved, but the moment there are several persons involved, there will be diverging interests. None of these questions make much sense when you abstract away *who* is the one choosing a course of action. You give the example of therapy as being anti-inner-liberty, but therapy is normally something one chooses to pursue for oneself, it can only be anti-inner-liberty if it's forced on another.
Or take your guy full of murderous thoughts, you talk about freeing him of them, but on whose behalf? The rest of us don't even know that he's having them, so we can hardly initiate that, or be troubled by them. That leaves the basic sane option of the guy being sick of his own thoughts and seeking help, which is not exactly controversial.
>You give the example of therapy as being anti-inner-liberty, but therapy is normally something one chooses to pursue for oneself, it can only be anti-inner-liberty if it's forced on another.
Yes this occurred to me after I’d replied. But doesn’t rehabilitation in the sense it’s commonly used within the justice system, often involve forced therapy?
>Or take your guy full of murderous thoughts, you talk about freeing him of them, but on whose behalf? The rest of us don't even know that he's having them…
Sorry. I guess I was unclear, but whether society learns of this murderous predisposition through stated intent, some kind of neuro/psych screening, attempted murder or realized murder, I didn’t specify. In the same way we assess today who might murder and take preventative action against their future murders, we would assess who would be a candidate to be freed from their murderous thoughts.
I think you'd need to persuasively prove your assumption that this process actually reduced harm. There are a lot of people with the prior assumption that reducing things like violent fantasies, violent language, violent video games, etc. will reduce violence itself.
(I'm not saying that their assumptions are correct, just that they exist, and might become an obstacle to 'acceptance.' )
What a person thinks in the privacy of their own mind can have absolutely no impact on anyone else unless it's actually outwardly expressed with some kind of perceptible action.
Because of course people are only what they actually *do* to other people. An individual who fantasizes about murdering the people around her everyday but never so much as momentarily inconviences someone by carelessly cutting them off in traffic is a *profoundly good person.*
And lots of people routinely think about murdering others for totally acceptable reasons: It's their profession. Law enforcement, mystery writers, etc.
I'm not sure I agree with that. A couple of examples that spring to mind.
- Person A is in a monogamous relationship but likes to fantasise about attractive coworkers. They often obsess about specific colleagues and imagine them when having sex with their partner. They don't feel guilty about this but actively enjoy indulging in it. Their partner doesn't know and would be upset and jealous to find out.
- Person B engages in violent fantasy when annoyed with people. They go home after a confrontation and imagine attacking and hurting the other person. Their fantasies often involve prolonged torture of the other person; the imagined reaction to torture provides a lot of the enjoyment. This happens most days.
I don't think either is directly harmful, but I'd think less of such a person. My intuition is that to repeatedly indulge in certain kinds of thinking can shape your character, and both people above are turning themselves into people that are more likely to act unethically outside their own heads. My instinct is that both of these are unethical.
> My intuition is that to repeatedly indulge in certain kinds of thinking can shape your character, and both people above are turning themselves into people that are more likely to act unethically outside their own heads.
Some people have the intuition that *repressing* thoughts makes it more likely that the person will do something.
I suspect the actual outcome may depend on technical details, such as how often the person indulges in the fantasy vs how often when would feel the desire if they tried to repress it.
"What a person thinks in the privacy of their own mind can have absolutely no impact on anyone else unless it's actually outwardly expressed with some kind of perceptible action."
And also what you said about Person A's sexual fantasies, emphasis mine:
"*Their partner doesn't know* and would be upset and jealous to find out. "
What Person A's partner doesn't know literally can't *possibly* hurt them. If Person A is so considerate of Partner's feelings that they are scrupulously disciplined about never betraying their private thoughts, no harm can ever occur.
And if no harm ever occurs, well...*no harm ever occurs.*
Your reply, "yeah but what if harm occurs *later*" is not germane to the original question, which is about the ethics of contemplating harm but then never actually doing it.
Your thoughts affect yourself. See the therapy advice about not dwelling on and obsessing over past incidents and grievances. If you keep yourself stuck in a rut of "There's nothing I can do, because X, Y and Z, so things can never improve" then of course they won't get better.
Fantasies are a tricky question. Most of us have little private fantasies that we enjoy and maybe elaborate on as a form of daydreaming, but would be embarrassed if they were made public. Most of those fantasies are harmless.
But if you're constantly indulging in fantasies of rape, torture, murder and so forth, that's going to have an effect on you. A coarsening of the imagination, and maybe it even spills over into being less careful, or being less patient, or being angrier with the subject of your fantasies. If you're always imagining how you could smash in the face of that annoying guy Jimmy with a brick, do you really think it won't in the long run affect how you deal with Jimmy? Sure, maybe you'll never smash his face in with a brick, but you're more likely to speak badly of him to others, to do small mean things to get revenge on him ("oh you can't find that file you left on your desk? sorry, no idea where it could be") and the like.
Even if you do manage to maintain the facade of being nice to Jimmy in public, in the end you are damaging yourself. I've noticed that indulging, even in private, my own anger and so forth *does* make me a worse person to engage with in 'real life'.
But, again, this observation isn't germane to the hypothetical the OP introduced.
Does indulging a fantasy about perpetrating extremely antisocial behavior make one more likely to engage in antisocial behavior of any kind?
I mean, in the real world? Likely, yes. A person who is constantly dwelling on harming (for example) their annoying coworker is probably going to eventually demonstrate their antipathy in *some* way, even if it's so subtle it goes unnoticed by said coworker.
But again, that's not the question(s) the OP asked.
The first question was: is it okay for a perpetrator to *privately* reminisce about his crime if the satisfaction of remembering the crime is what prevents him from re-offending?
Duh, of course it is. Not-crime is better than crime.
The second question was: if it was demonstrably true that fantasizing about crime deterred crime, would it be okay to fantasize about crime?
Again, duh, of course it would be, because *not-crime is better than crime.*
Admittedly, this gets a little harder to contemplate if we get a lot more specific. Usually questions like the OP's are about the ethics of preventing sexual crimes against actual children by accommodating pedophiles with 100% adult-produced fantasy substitutes like child-shaped sex dolls or VFX child porn, products in which no actual child was ever associated. *If* adult-produced fantasy substitutes were enough to satisfy the urges of a pedophile to prevent them from ever offending on a real person, would the existence of such products be acceptable?
Just like anyone else, I flinch at this idea. I'd vastly prefer it if pedophiles could just...stop being attracted to children. That would obviously be the ideal outcome.
But "what would be ideal, here?" isn't the question being asked!
If you find my original question stupid and elementary, as you indicate repeatedly in your responses, I get that, but you can skip it and let the slow kids like me work at our own pace.
>Usually questions like the OP's are about the ethics of preventing sexual crimes against actual children by accommodating pedophiles with 100% adult-produced fantasy substitutes like child-shaped sex dolls or VFX child porn, products in which no actual child was ever associated.
My question wasn’t intended to find a way to accommodate pedophiles. I’m trying to gain insight into how people form moral intuitions in the absence of a suffering party. The recent post Scott made about the FOI triggered some comments that indicated suffering wasn’t the overwhelming factor in many people’s moral decision-making. This really surprised me and so I’m trying to learn more.
I'm skeptical that allowing one to make sensory rich neural connections to the act of murder would prevent it from becoming a real world behavior. It sounds a lot like theories of catharsis, where screaming into a pillow *should* reduce aggression due to satisfying anger. It's my understanding that in practice, it leads to greater neural connections around aggression in more contexts, leading to an angrier person. Much of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy aims to provide off ramps for negative behaviors, which tends to work better. Though with the replication crisis being what it is, it's hard to be sure.
>Much of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy aims to provide off ramps for negative behaviors, which tends to work better.
I see. I don’t know much about Cognitive Behavioral Theory other than what anyone can find online. What are some of the off ramps for negative behaviors that have worked for violent offenders?
That's a good question, I don't have any experience with it in that context. I've seen it used a lot in the context of anxiety and depression, but violent psychopathy is a whole other monster. What I was trying to point out is that it may not be possible to reduce violent urges by providing substitutes, and may just create more neural pathways that lead to them. Effectively, it wouldn't surprise me if a practiced behavior is more likely become a dominant behavior.
Looking at some of what's available online, it looks like we don't really have good methods of handling violent psychopathy long term because it's a pretty sticky set of behaviors. Here's an overview of some of what's been tried that I found.
It looks like an interesting subject that we haven't made much progress on. According to this those who are the worst offenders often receive CBT or other treatments to short term or even negative effects. Which is to say, I'm not sure we've found a therapy that works. Many of them even tend to get early conditional releases from prison due to having manipulative personality traits.
It would be ethical if it actually reliably reduced a person's preoccupation with murder, but I would need to see some evidence that antisocial compulsive behaviors like murderousness are extinguished by acting them out, even in simulation. My understanding is that the opposite is true.
Would you consider it ethical if it had no statistical effect at all on the person's future actions? That is, are you demanding that it do actual good in order to compensate for some inherent badness, or merely demanding that it avoid making things worse?
If the effect is negligible it would be a waste of resources and terrible PR. "The justice department has invested 200 million dollars to give all ex-con murderers authentic murder simulator machines to keep them occupied post-parole. We've found it does not meaningfully increase their tendency to murder." Tough sell.
Agreed. The "yes" camp also seems to assume that the demand for murderousness is static and easily identifiable. It's possible that many more people could be induced to have an appetite for murder if they weren't deterred by risk of punishment, aversion to doing actual harm, etc. Making a murder sim widely available could lead a lot of people to discover that they're much more interested in murdering than they'd previously expected. I'm not sure that a widespread discovery of this type would be a net positive.
That’s a great point. Though the point of the neurological murder treatment wouldn’t be to extinguish the behavior, but redirect its consequences in a harmless direction. Imagine an inhaler, and each time the guy feels murdery he takes a hit because it feels just like murder and is way easier than planning a murder.
Edit: I said that poorly. The treatment is meant to extinguish the behavior (the actual murder part) but it isn’t intended to extinguish the impulse to murder, which would be a better fix if it were possible.
In theory, yes, as long as it didn't also feed their desire to do it again, and if it didn't take the place of some sort of "conversion therapy" that actually worked.
What's the term for isolating comment trolls and preventing them from interacting with other people? "Comment hell?" Maybe some VR version of that.
I'll nitpick at the word "crime", since the main thrust of the comment seems to be about ethics, and not all crimes are unethical, and not all heinous unethical acts are crimes.
But before that, I think there was some term perhaps derived from the Bujold quote "Lately I have come to believe that the principle difference between Heaven and Hell is the company you keep there." I think it was used on some weird Internet board that has lost relevance these days. *shrug* Or it could be my brain playing tricks on me.
Apart from the fact that it undermines the idea of genuine remorse for the crime/offence, because instead of trying to find ways to deal with the impulses to commit future crimes in healthier ways, you are indulging in memories of the actual crime you committed.
I don't know if alcoholics or drug addicts are told to cope with their impulses to indulge again by "oh, just remember the last time you got drunk/high and how great it made you feel".
And demonstrating my dinosaur credentials once again, this was, or is (I don't know if they still teach it), covered in religious instruction under the heading of "entertaining evil/bad thoughts". Mostly in the context of "impure thoughts" around sex, but it applies generally.
Scriptural precedent is such account as in Mark 7:
"14 And he called the people to him again and said to them, “Hear me, all of you, and understand: 15 There is nothing outside a person that by going into him can defile him, but the things that come out of a person are what defile him.” 17 And when he had entered the house and left the people, his disciples asked him about the parable. 18 And he said to them, “Then are you also without understanding? Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile him, 19 since it enters not his heart but his stomach, and is expelled?” (Thus he declared all foods clean.) 20 And he said, “What comes out of a person is what defiles him. 21 For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, 22 coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. 23 All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”
From the Catholic Encyclopedia (even older than me), discussing sin:
That sin may be committed not only by outward deeds but also by the inner activity of the mind apart from any external manifestation, is plain from the precept of the Decalogue: "Thou shalt not covet", and from Christ's rebuke of the scribes and pharisees whom he likens to "whited sepulchres... full of all filthiness" (Matthew 23:27). Hence the Council of Trent (Sess. XIV, c. v), in declaring that all mortal sins must be confessed, makes special mention of those that are most secret and that violate only the last two precepts of the Decalogue, adding that they "sometimes more grievously wound the soul and are more dangerous than sins which are openly committed". Three kinds of internal sin are usually distinguished:
delectatio morosa, i.e. the pleasure taken in a sinful thought or imagination even without desiring it;
gaudium, i.e. dwelling with complacency on sins already committed; and
desiderium, i.e. the desire for what is sinful.
An efficacious desire, i.e. one that includes the deliberate intention to realize or gratify the desire, has the same malice, mortal or venial, as the action which it has in view. An inefficacious desire is one that carries a condition, in such a way that the will is prepared to perform the action in case the condition were verified. When the condition is such as to eliminate all sinfulness from the action, the desire involves no sin: e.g. I would gladly eat meat on Friday, if I had a dispensation; and in general this is the case whenever the action is forbidden by positive law only. When the action is contrary to natural law and yet is permissible in given circumstances or in a particular state of life, the desire, if it include those circumstances or that state as conditions, is not in itself sinful: e.g. I would kill so-and-so if I had to do it in self-defence. Usually, however, such desires are dangerous and therefore to be repressed. If, on the other hand, the condition does not remove the sinfulness of the action, the desire is also sinful. This is clearly the case where the action is intrinsically and absolutely evil, e.g. blasphemy: one cannot without committing sin, have the desire — I would blaspheme God if it were not wrong; the condition is an impossible one and therefore does not affect the desire itself. The pleasure taken in a sinful thought (delectatio, gaudium) is, generally speaking, a sin of the same kind and gravity as the action which is thought of. Much, however, depends on the motive for which one thinks of sinful actions. The pleasure, e.g. which one may experience in studying the nature of murder or any other crime, in getting clear ideas on the subject, tracing its causes, determining the guilt etc., is not a sin; on the contrary, it is often both necessary and useful. The case is different of course where the pleasure means gratification in the sinful object or action itself. And it is evidently a sin when one boasts of his evil deeds, the more so because of the scandal that is given."
So the answer to "Is it then ethical for that person to satisfy their urge to commit a similar crime by fantasizing about the memory of the heinous act they committed?" is "No".
That would be gaudium, dwelling with complacency on sins already committed (and getting the same pleasure/enjoyment/satisfaction out of the crime via memory).
I mean, it's definitely an icky feeling to think that, say, the pedophile who molested you is still doing so in their mind, every day, right now... It might even lead to mental illnesses in the victim.
My PTSD is of the opinion that people who commit crimes need to make their victims whole, by whatever means necessary (as always, this is code for public torture and worse). But my PTSD doesn't particularly care what happens when this is rolled out universally, and the rest of me suspects that it might be a bad idea overall.
> I mean, it's definitely an icky feeling to think that, say, the pedophile who molested you is still doing so in their mind, every day, right now... It might even lead to mental illnesses in the victim.
But thinking that is completely independent of whether or not the culprit is actually doing that. The only way to achieve true peace of mind would be to kill them.
...Or you could just move on and stop giving a shit about what other people are thinking.
Yep. I agree that working on dealing with your own issues is a good idea, and trying to control what everyone else thinks is not going to go so well. But other people are weird, and take entirely the wrong lesson from Stoicism.
Do I care if an ex still has pictures of me and uses them for ... one purpose or another? Sure, a bit, but as long as they're not spreading the pictures around the Internet, that's my own problem in my own head that I need to deal with.
Could the Axis have won WW II? Reading through the Wikipedia articles for the Battle of Stalingrad, the Battle of Kursk, and the Battle of El-Alamein, there is this persistent subtext that the Axis just did not have enough resources to actually win. Which is in stark contrast to what I read in this book on cryptography called The Code Book, that breaking the Enigma code was absolutely critical to winning the war. Of course, it would have been a disaster if they had won, but perhaps they were not so different from the martian invaders in The Sirens of Titan.
As an amusing aside, a German general wrote an entire book after the war about how Germany could totally have won the Eastern Front, and of course, it studiously avoided any political questions of whether this would have been a good thing, it focused entirely on the technical aspects of this possible victory (which also got torn to shreds, apparently).
Read Tooze - German would have struggled mightily against the UK, was doomed against the UK + USSR and was hopelessly doomed against the UK, USSR and USA.
The only way to win was a) not be Nazis in the first place and b) redefine 'win' to 'get sone territory and then call it a day'.
The most plausible scenario for this is that Hitler gets squashed instead of being offered the chancellorship, the government resolves into a military junta and there's a limited campaign aimed at taking more or less what was historically taken up to the invasion of Poland.
Thereafter Europe settles down to a cold war for a few years, after which prediction fails.
I dunno, Tooze also says Germany got lucky in beating France so decisively, he gives their plan of attack a 10% chance of success. If they get lucky again vs the USSR they'd have all of Europe's industrial base and the soviet oil/grain fields, and the US/UK would need to attack across an ocean. I'd say they'd be in a pretty strong position then. Given we live in a timeline where they did get lucky vs France that's not super unlikely to happen.
There's also the scenario where the USSR doesn't industrialise fast enough in the 30s and gets beaten fairly easily like in WW1 that puts Germany in the same dominant position.
They did get lucky with France. That was always Hitler's greatest strength - he was a gambler who got obscenely lucky far more often than is plausible.
Tooze's other point is that the Nazis simply couldn't do economics (beyond one or two places like improvisational foreign exchange shenanigans and advancing the art of slave labour economics). They conquered most of the richest, most economically developed part of the world and then had to subsidize the French economy. By virtue of being Nazis they destroyed the economic systems they took over, even as attempted to plunder them.
Nazi Germany shouldn't have won against the French, couldn't realistically win against the British and literally did not have enough men or trucks to beat the Soviets.
There are many plausible paths to Germany winning World War II, most of which involve shooting Wilhelm Canaris in the head on day one(*), and then maybe the head of the torpedo directorate. This was never a *likely* outcome, just a possible one, and even then it comes with constraints:
1. "Victory" means Germany is recognized as the hegemonic power of Continental Europe, and nobody other than some die-hard partisans are fighting to reverse that, *not* that Germany and its allies conquer the world or any other such thing.
2. Any German victory has to be locked in by the end of 1942 at the latest. Ideally before the US joins the war, but there's still a slim window where Germany wins some very impressive victories while the US is still learning how to wage modern war, the Brits realize that they are literally starving and the US can't help in time so they negotiate a separate peace, and the US then decides that trying to invade a German-occupied Europe without Britain, France, or Russia on side was going to be too much trouble and killing Japs would be way more fun.
3. No matter what happens in Europe, if Japan bombs Pearl Harbor, the Japanese Empire is going down. The Germans at least had enough industrial capacity that they could plausibly have held out in a defensive war against an America that has to invade across 2,000 miles of ocean; Japan wasn't even close. And the American hatred of Japan post-12/7/41 was deeply personal, so if the US doesn't think it can invade Germany then all those resources are going to be pointed in the opposite direction.
We can talk about how this might have happened, but some of the simple answers are just wrong. Enigma was important, but not decisive on its own - it would probably take no Enigma plus no Canaris plus torpedoes that worked from the start for Germany to decisively win the Battle of the Atlantic. Germany not declaring war on the US, or earlier on Russia, would not have changed things - the US was already committed to waging war against Germany so long as Britain was still in the fight, and Stalin was an opportunistic conqueror who would have stabbed Hitler in the back right when the latter had his hands full dealing with the Anglo-American alliance.
Germany declaring war on Russia even earlier, and knocking them out (or back to the Urals) before the US gets in the war, would have been a better bet. And declaring war on the US right after Japan does, doesn't really change the amount of grief Germany is going to face from the Americans, but it does give them at least a chance of coordinating strategy with Japan (which didn't matter historically, but could have in some counterfactual scenarios).
* Or, alternately, not committing all the war crimes that alienated him. But one way or another, it's going to be really hard to win a war if your head of military intelligence is working for the other side's military intelligence.
What about the nuclear path to victory? It's not too hard to imagine that the right meeting with the right person at the right time might have convinced Hitler that nuclear weapons were a real possibility in 1939. If the Germans get the bomb in 1943, surely they can at least get some kind of favourable peace on their terms?
The problem is, where does the money come from? The Manhattan project consumed $2 billion. To add a project of that size to the German war budget means that something major is getting cut, on the order of an Army or two. Given Germany needed every army it could get it's hands on and then some, it's far more likely that the nuclear path sees Germany with a half completed bomb and Russians in Belin a year ahead of schedule.
Those were insignificant compared to the Manhattan Project budget.
Also, Germany was fairly well supplied with talented rocket scientists who were willing to continue working in Germany because A: they were German and B: nobody else was hiring rocket scientists. Germany was much less well supplied with nuclear physicists, because those did have a much easier time finding jobs far away from the rather anti-intellectual Nazis (and also were disproportionately Jewish).
We got a good look at the German nuclear weapons program in 1945-1947; it was hopelessly underfunded and pursuing technological dead ends because the few good scientists they had on the job came with blind spots that nobody else was covering. I don't think there is a plausible scenario where the Nazis independently develop the atomic bomb.
If we're postulating any sort of German victory, we're probably also postulating a competent German intelligence apparatus, in which case it's at least possible that they get the atom bomb the way Russia did. But that gets them the bomb after the US, not before - maybe soon enough after to defend Nazi hegemony over Europe, but it wouldn't be the way they establish that hegemony.
Or we're positing a Germany that retains its nuclear physicists (remember Germany was the world leader in quantum and nuclear physics in the 1920s and 30s). But that requires a Germany that is very different from our timeline Nazi Germany (for a start, it would need to be hospitable to Jews).
Yea. Also mass slave labor, the one part of economics that the Nazis were good at, was no help for a Manhattan Project type push. So if they're seriously pursuing that then they'd have hardly any engineers or other skilled people available for all the other high-priority tech topics like figuring out better torpedoes, battlefield-useful radar and sonar, etc.
It would have been possible if Hitler didn't make a completely moronic invasion of his closest ally while already at war on another front, followed by another completely moronic and unnecessary declaration of war on the US, while also waging war on his own people including the best physicists.
Eh, war between the USSR and Germany was seen as inevitable by both sides. Stalin would have plunged the knife into Hitler's back in time. The Soviets were preparing for war in 1941 and had about 3 million soldiers built up on the European rim of their territory. The German attack was much sooner and much more devastating than the Soviets expected, which might make it look like Hitler decided to start a war out of nowhere.
The US was probably going to come into the war on Britain's side and had been sending them substantial aid by the time of Pearl Harbor. Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan both had a nemesis in the form of the USSR, and the alliance against the US was likely intended to encourage Japan to join the war against the Soviets. Considering the history of the last world war, which was not quite 30 years ago at that point, it's very unlikely the US would have remained neutral to Germany without Hitler declaring war.
Yet Stalin was totally taken by surprise by Hitler's invasion. In fact, he initially disbelieved the reports (if I remember my History Channel correctly). He may have thought ware was inevitable, but not in the immediate term. As for those soldiers on the European rim, hadn't Stalin just finished gobbling up half of Poland, and he was in the middle of trying to take back Finland? I'm willing to be convinced if you've got some links for that position, though.
When I say the Soviets were preparing for war in 1941, I mean they were preparing for a future hypothetical war, at least several years away. Not that they were ready in 1941.
It looks like there's been a lot of ink spilled about what Stalin knew about Germany's intentions and when he knew it. This looks interesting. Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia, by Gabriel Gorodetsky, a Russian historian. I think I'll try to get it via ILL...
Enigma and Turing is the show horse, Lorenz and Flowers the work horse. Not only was Lorenz cryptanalysis the much more significant to the war, it also led to the first electronic computers, Colossus, all to break a machine that was never seen.
If they hadn't invaded Russia or attacked the UK, sure. If they had stopped advancing in 1940 and contented themselves with all of Central Europe then I think they would have survived as a stable entity. The Allies wouldn't have been as motivated to attack and I think would have eventually been happy to accept it. I can also imagine scenarios where they go all-in on jet fighter technology and establish total air dominance, but otherwise I just don't see any scenario where they defeat a fully-engaged US/UK combo. They simply couldn't match our production.
> Which is in stark contrast to what I read in this book on cryptography called The Code Book, that breaking the Enigma code was absolutely critical to winning the war.
I wonder if it's more plausible that breaking the Enigma code was absolutely critical to winning the war in 1945, rather than dragging it out another year or two, which might have increased pressure from the home front to make some sort of negotiated settlement that was short of a "win".
I would argue the Germans were doomed even before the US entered the war. Which is not to trivialize the efforts of the Allies, or their worries. Hindsight is 20/20 and the Nazis were terrifying.
I don’t think the Axis could have “won” a total WWII, that is a war carried to the unconditional surrender of one side or the other. The Soviets had too many men, the Americans too many factories (and too many oceans between them and the key Axis belligerents).
I think a best case scenario for Germany is basically:
1) They don’t do Barbarossa, and they succeed in dealing a heavy enough blow to the UK that they sue for peace with Hitler holding Western Europe. Maybe the Miracle at Dunkirk doesn’t happen, the Luftwaffe more effectively knocks out the RAF, and/or Enigma remains uncracked, allowing the U-boats to more fully strangle British shipping before America enters the war.
2) They do Barbarossa, but it works a little better (maybe they get an earlier start in the year) and they take Moscow in October/November of 1941. Stalin sues for peace.
Or some combination of 1 and 2, but note that both of these leave the UK and the USSR reduced but not *conquered* and the peace that followed would be uneasy and probably erupt again soon. Fascism was not a political system built for a static peace.
The path to a “win” for Japan seems easier, and maybe more durable - either Pearl Harbor or Midway succeeds in sinking America’s fleet carriers, and with no ability to project naval power, the US concedes its non-Hawaiian Pacific colonies and leaves China/Korea to their fate.
Ultimately both Germany and Japan were positioned to win a lightning campaign if the breaks went right, but would need their opponents to tap out after that strike, because in the long term… well we saw what happens.
America can rebuild its fleet and massively outbuild Japan, which even in a best case scenario can not reach American shipyards. Japanese high command *hoped* the US would negotiate after a few early victories, because they were completely screwed otherwise.
Yes, that’s precisely my point. Japan needed to force a negotiated peace within the first six months to a year. As it was, the US did rebuild its fleet, but it’s not clear there would have been appetite to do so if the fleet was more completely destroyed (rather than the battleships at Pearl being salvageable and the fleet carriers untouched)
The Axis was doomed by the time the US was involved. The US alone had a bigger GDP than the entire Axis combined at its height (including conquered territory) and had roughly the same population as Germany and Japan. The US also brought with it a sphere of influence that had significant population and GDP.
The Axis might have been able to win against the Allies (minus the US) since while they were outnumbered they had a bigger GDP and a higher GDP per capita. So they'd be counting on more elite, expensive units being able to win despite being outnumbered. But when the US and its allies entered they went from just being outnumbered soldier for soldier to also being significantly outnumbered economically. Even if they had somehow knocked out the Soviet Union and China the US would have had the bigger economy and manpower pool. And it's not as if the Germans could have immediately used Soviet industry or manpower.
You have to imagine some different political alignment for the Axis to win. Mostly, you have to imagine America not getting involved.
I would argue the Axis was doomed even before America got involved. The Germans threw everything they had at the Soviets and it wasn't nearly enough. The Wehrmacht would have needed to inflict something like a 5:1 casualty ratio, while on the offensive, to break even with Soviet manpower and armor production. And all of this while fighting a war with supply lines 1000-2000km long in places.
Without lend lease the Soviets are stuck fighting a modern, mechanized army with mainly infantry and with a severe lack of trains, trucks, fuel, etc. The German theory of victory was basically to take out Soviet industrial capacity and then churn through a poorly equipped infantry army which they thought would melt. Part of their mistake is that Soviet political structures proved loyal to Stalin and willing to continue to resist. In part because the Nazis themselves were so brutal. But the bigger thing was that American aid was able to continue flowing through Iran. Without this Iranian path they would have had no way to get anything into the country: Japan blocked them in the east, Iran blocked them in the south, and Germany/Italy blocked them in the west.
Still, I agree they had a chance of winning. It's not "without the US they would have won." It's "without the US they still have a chance."
I have to disagree with this. Any analysis of Lend-Lease needs to realize that 1941-1942 were the pivotal years of the war. It doesn't matter what happened in 1943 and onwards because the war was strategically over. Only ~15% of Lend-Lease material was received in '41-42. Even at the peak of Lend-Lease in '43-45, it amounted to slightly less than 1/3 of Soviet output.
For German victory over the Soviets to be possible, you have to create a plausible scenario where a 3 million man Wehrmacht can defeat 20 million men spread over 1000s of kilometers of hostile territory (and that is only linear distance, the area is even more enormous). I don't see a world where that is possible.
The Soviet army in 1941 was similar in strength to the Wehrmacht, much like the French army in 1940. In fact the Soviet armor arsenal was markedly superior to the German arsenal, excepting the Panzer VI Tiger, which wasn't operational until 1942. And even then Tigers were in limited numbers and had various mechanical issues. The big difference was in the Prussian training method of the German officer corps, and technological advantages like radio communications and gun sights. Also Stalin purged most of his officer corps in 1937-38, which didn't do the Soviets any favors.
The Soviets had focused on building up a large number of tanks, guns and shells in preparation for future conflict with Germany. Yet their officer corps was mostly young inexperienced men who had been rapidly promoted to replace gaps from the purges. And the Soviet corps selected men for political survival instincts more than tactical aptitude. Soviet communications depended largely on telephone and telegraph, which were easily cut by mobile and aggressive German elements. Almost all of the German armored vehicles had a personal radio, whereas the Soviet armor was restricted to one radio per squad leader, and the other units had to signal by hand.
All of this gives the impression that the Soviet forces were hopelessly inadequate. Which was true, because of the stark differences in command and control. Not because the Soviets couldn't produce as many tanks or guns as Germany.
The fact that Operation Barbarossa accomplished all of its objectives and yet lost Germany the war should be telling about the German theory of victory. It was delusional. They just didn't comprehend that Soviet resistance would or could continue after such decisive losses. German planners estimated that the Soviets could field maybe 40 divisions after their main forces in the West were destroyed. The reality was 800 divisions. This force - mobilized from reservists - was 60% bigger than the entire German army in Soviet territory.
Of course these men weren't ready to be thrown into battle. They had to be trained and equipped and transported. They would not be as able as the forces the Germans had already destroyed, and the Soviet command still suffered from the same weaknesses.
Even if the Soviets were reduced to an infantry army without any combined arms support, that could still be a very effective defensive force. Ask any of the Allied soldiers how easy they thought it was to fight through the German Volksgrenadier forces fielded late in the war.
Also, the German forces were hardly mechanized to the same degree that Anglo-American forces were. Only the Panzer divisions were mechanized, and most of the infantry divisions were walking on foot. This actually caused problems, because the distances were so vast and the Soviet forces so numerous. Often the Panzer divisions would get in place and encircle Soviet detachments, only for a lot of them to escape while the German infantry slowly moved into position.
Germany lost the war at the end of 1942 with the failure of Fall Blau (Case Blue). Their fuel reserves were running low, so the Wehrmacht split into two separate army groups. Group A was tasked with securing the Caucasus oil fields, and Group B was tasked with advancing along the Volga to secure the flank. Group B was cut off and encircled at Stalingrad when the Soviets punched through the non-German auxiliary forces on the flank. You know how Stalingrad went. Group A then had to retreat to avoid being cut off themselves. No petrol was captured.
There would be more German offensives after 1942, but never at the same operational tempo or effectiveness. Kursk was a weakened German army battering itself into a Soviet force it had no hope of defeating, because the entire German command ethos was to prioritize aggression and attack. Case Blue broke the back of the German army and it would never again have the manpower, fuel, or armor numbers to credibly threaten destruction of Soviet armies in the field.
If it wasn't for the fact that Walter Model was a freak strategic genius and a true believer in Nazism that had the personal confidence of Hitler, the dissolution of German forces after 1942 would have been much more dramatic.
Lend lease began in 1941 as did the invasion of Iran. They both happened almost the same time as the invasion. So I'm not sure what your point is about the timing. 15% of total lend lease given during the war is not a relevant statistic, it's how important that equipment was to the war effort.
The Soviet army wasn't in similar strength to the Wehrmacht. It was outnumbered. And became even more outnumbered as large formations were captured rapidly on the initial invasion. You're thinking of the late war Red Army which did not exist in those pivotal years. In the absence of lend lease the Soviet army would have been largely reduced to an infantry army. You can play a game with statistics and say, "Look, the Soviets built all their own tanks" and ignore that things like machine tools to build the tanks came from the US. But this isn't very convincing to me.
And then the question is whether the Soviet Union can continue to resist against a Wehrmacht that is inflicting more casualties, taking fewer casualties, and occupying more territory. That is an open question. As I've said from the start: it's still possible the Soviet Union hangs together and, with rifles and simple bombs, stays alive long enough that either the Allies relieve them or turns the tide with raw numbers. But it's also possible they break. If the US is not in the war at that time then it's Britain and a few remnants (some of which might be in Russia) against an enemy that outnumbers them.
Most of the Lend-Lease material was sent after the Soviets were already winning, so it's really misleading to look at the total numbers. You can say they received 4,000 Sherman tanks between '41-45, but this doesn't reflect the reality of the pivotal fighting on the front that was mostly done with Soviet armor.
It's true that most of the Soviet army was destroyed/captured in the initial phase of the war, amounting to about 3 million losses. But those 800 divisions/5 million men were mobilized for fighting throughout 1941-1942. I'm not including the additional 11 million men that would later be mobilized into the late-war Soviet army. These were forces present throughout the pivotal years of combat. The Soviet system had a huge depth for reserves that could continually replenish horrendous losses, unlike the German army which got progressively weaker even as they racked up victory after victory.
I honestly don't know how much Lend-Lease impacted Soviet production. It's easy to look at tank production numbers. It's much harder to figure out what tank production looks like without the right tools or high quality steel. The entire transport sector is a lot different working with horses than it is with American trucks and train engines. If you know of any in-depth analysis of this kind I would be happy to look at it.
I still don't think it's reasonable to assume the Soviets would be reduced to fighting with metaphorical sticks and stones absent Lend-Lease. There were Soviet factories outside the Western Ukraine/Belarus republics. There was a large effort to relocate industrial centers east of the Urals in front of the German advance. Certainly production would be lower without help from the Allies, but the question is how much. Claiming no production is pretty bold.
While the Soviets did manage to withdraw and rebuild some of their industrial capacity before the German advance, especially tank production as you wrote, Lend-Lease was a significant factor in winning the war especially on the Eastern front, so a Soviet victory was not at all a given without Allied support. From Wikipedia:
> In total, 92.7% of the wartime production of railroad equipment by the USSR was supplied by Lend-Lease including 1,911 locomotives and 11,225 railcars
>
> Much of the logistical assistance of the Soviet military was provided by hundreds of thousands of U.S.-made trucks and by 1945, nearly a third of the truck strength of the Red Army was U.S.-built. Trucks such as the Dodge 3⁄4-ton and Studebaker 2+1⁄2-ton were easily the best trucks available in their class on either side on the Eastern Front. American shipments of telephone cable, aluminum, canned rations and clothing were also critical. Lend-Lease also supplied significant amounts of weapons and ammunition. The Soviet air force received 18,200 aircraft, which amounted to about 30 percent of Soviet wartime fighter and bomber production (mid 1941–45). Most tank units were Soviet-built models but about 7,000 Lend-Lease tanks (plus more than 5,000 British tanks) were used by the Red Army, eight percent of war-time production.
The logistics support in railroads and trucks seem quite critical to me. During their retreat, Wehrmacht forces used "scorched earth", which included tearing up the railroads. All the tanks in the world would have been useless to the Soviets if they couldn't have gotten them to the enemy over thousands of kilometers for a lack of rolling stock.
Lend-Lease has always been difficult to gauge for me. Russian sources basically hand wave it away like it made no difference, and American sources act like the Soviets would have totally collapsed without it.
The Soviets didn't have any problems producing the main tanks, artillery and guns used in the war. The T-34 was one of the greatest tank designs of the period, and along with IS designs were effectively immune to the model 1938 75mm guns the Germans were using. There are reports of German soldiers hauling their artillery guns to the front and trying to depress the barrels to use howitzers as anti-tank guns.
But it's hard to quantify how Lend-Lease impacted the production of these things. Obviously it makes a huge difference if some horse has to haul tank components to the factory instead of a US made truck. The railroad support would also have been crucial to manufacturing.
I do think you're overestimating the effect of rail lines on the front though. Unlike WWI, the armies of this period were highly mobile and didn't rely on rail transport nearly as much. The Germans were able to drive over thousands of kilometers just fine, and their tanks were heavy over-engineered gas guzzlers compared to the Soviet models.
>Russian sources basically hand wave it away like it made no difference, and American sources act like the Soviets would have totally collapsed without it.
Well that is hardly surprising, what with the beginning of the Cold War. That's why there have been studies, starting immediately after the war, and they were able to quantify these things.
>I do think you're overestimating the effect of rail lines on the front though. Unlike WWI, the armies of this period were highly mobile and didn't rely on rail transport nearly as much. The Germans were able to drive over thousands of kilometers just fine, and their tanks were heavy over-engineered gas guzzlers compared to the Soviet models.
No, I think we are talking about different things here. Neither the Soviets nor the Germans drove their tanks across thousands of kilometers at the operational level, i.e. just getting close to the battlefield. It would have been glacially slow, and the cost in fuel and maintenance would have been astronomical. Even ignoring all that, you'd still have to provide that fuel and maintenance to the tanks on the road somehow. How else, if not by train? And then we haven't even started discussing transporting troops, ammo, food, and the many other things required for modern war at the scale of the Eastern front.
>Railways were the heart of the Russo-German War because they provided the vital link between the economic and manpower capacity of the home country and the forces in the field, and in a country as large as the Soviet Union, they provided the operational level movement needed by the military forces. Geography and terrain defined the layout of the railway network, and the size of forces and the large distances involved meant that railways were the only practical option to support military operations. So inevitably offensive directions followed the railway tracks as much as the terrain.
Re: Lend-Lease, of course there are studies to quantify things, so we can say the Soviets received 18% of their aluminum (arbitrary example) from foreign aid. But what does that mean for the war? Would the Soviets get it from somewhere else for more money, or was it not that important, or would the war effort collapse because aluminum is a bottleneck for some critical components? The latter is the part I find hard to quantify.
About the railroad logistics, interesting, I will definitely take a look at that later.
There really was a huge difference in resources between the US/Nazi Germany/Soviet Union. During the 1940 invasion of France, the Wehrmacht achieved perhaps the greatest military victory in modern history. The French army was bigger and better equipped on paper, but the Germans annihilated them largely due to aggressive maneuver tactics. The German forces at the time were only 10% mechanized. Most of the army walked while horses carted their supplies into France in convoys hundreds of kilometers long. Meanwhile, the entire US army was mechanized. The industrial output of the big motor companies in Detroit was truly mind boggling.
Germany once again demonstrated their stellar maneuver and encirclement tactics during Operation Barbarossa. The opening of the invasion of the Soviet Union saw something like 3 million Soviet losses, mostly from men that had been surrounded and forced to surrender. At this point, German planning assumed that the Soviets would no longer be able to muster meaningful resistance. The reality was that 17 million additional soldiers would be mobilized before the war was over. This was an absolutely mind boggling number of men for mid-20th century Europe. The ability of the Soviet state to marshal fighting men was far greater than anything the Germans could possibly overcome. Really, WWII was strategically over in 1943, even though it would take years and millions more dead before it ended. The German assault package ran out of steam and was slowly ground down by growing Soviet counterattacks, all while they had to transfer ever larger portions of their declining army to prepare against the Anglo-US invasion in Western Europe.
The British had a huge maritime empire that stretched around the whole world, supplying them with a huge amount of raw materials. The Kriegsmarine was never able to overcome the British Navy. The best they could do was harass shipping with their U-boat program. The US had practically a whole continent to draw from. Soviet Russia also encompassed an enormous land area rich in natural resources. Germany had only what they could gather from a chunk of Europe.
If it hadn't been for the circumstances behind the Haber-Bosch process being developed, the war would have been radically different. Having factories that natively produced nitrogen based chemicals for gunpowder and explosives was huge. Not to mention the critical shortage of oil that plagued Nazi Germany for the whole war. There was a cartel of chemical companies, headed by BASF, called IG Farben. They built a massive synthetic petrol plant on to the Leuna works, an already huge synthetic ammonia plant. For commercial reasons, these plant had to operate at massive volumes to scale efficiently. Leuna was one of the most dreaded bombing targets for Allied pilots, and the Nazis put more resources into Leuna's anti-air defenses than Berlin. Still, bomb it the Allies did. This was one of the only ways Germany could get petrol, and portions of the plant were shut down due to bombing damage for much of the war.
Basically, the Nazis were doomed because:
-The Soviet Union could mobilize a ridiculous number of fighting men
-The US production of vehicles gave the Allies a huge mechanized advantage
-Britain, the US and Russia had access to far more natural resources than Germany
-German production of key chemicals and petrol was centralized into huge factories that were very vulnerable to Allied bombing
I'm sure that if you're allowed to introduce counterfactuals of arbitrary weight and number, you could construct a much more favorable situation for the Axis powers, but what's the point?
Personally, I believe it took a lot more than just Enigma to save the Axis. First and foremost, the untouchable industrial capacity and manpower advantage of the USA allowed the Allies to directly fight in two wars at once (Pacific, European) and decisively supply a third front (Russia). The Allies achieved air supremacy simply by throwing so many airplanes at Germany that Germany's air defences were worn down to nothing. Air supremacy leads to naval supremacy. This tightens the noose around Europe economically (support of critical raw materials) and clears the way for any number of invasions and eventual defeat of the Axis.
> Which is in stark contrast to what I read in this book on cryptography called The Code Book, that breaking the Enigma code was absolutely critical to winning the war.
I'm not familiar with that particular book, but I think there's a tendency for books about a specific thing to overstate the importance of that thing.
The impression I get is that the only way for the Axis to win would have been to pick fewer fights. The world's biggest countries all ended up on the same side.
Germany already lost WW1, and the biggest macro difference between 1 and 2 is that the Soviet ability to pump out materiel was much greater than imperial Russia's.
Hitler got a string of very good luck in the *lead-up* to WW2, where fascists who were otherwise hesitant about German power decided to throw in with him, while various other powers (Soviet, Polish, Western) cut deals with Germany out of a mix of opportunism and "well, he's crazy enough to start a fight and I'm not." Germany then was able to take advantage of a war of maneuver on its terms, leading to a quick high water mark and a more or less inevitable losing war of attrition thereafter. The worst stroke of luck for the Axis within the war itself was certainly the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but by that point they were already losing and America "merely" insured they would lose quicker.
It's sad, but entirely predictable from when Microsoft bought a stake in it. In my view, AI risk researchers need to mount a major campaign to get inter-governmental bodies to regulate AI, because the sector will never regulate itself.
Goodness, AI risk denialism is losing context. OpenAI is an organization founded specifically for the purpose of bringing about AGI; their current "products" are incidental developments by people who are focused on AGI. If you view this entire branch of technology as theology, they were never a tech company in the first place.
(Reminder that AI risk denialism is a fringe view among the general public, a small-ish minority view among experts, and a dismissed view by world governments. The denialists endlessly fail to develop any unified story for how things don't go wrong. Instead, there's just dozens of completely incompatible theories all of which are rejected by basically all the others in the "group". AI risk denialism has not been a view worth taking seriously in quite a while.)
Demanding a proof that things *don't* go wrong is getting the burden of proof backwards - you can't prove a negative. The people making extraordinary claims about the power of AI need to show evidence that things *will* go wrong.
I've seen several stories about how things go wrong, but they all seem to fall into either "the AI can design and deploy an arbitrarily powerful superweapon with no resources besides an internet connection and its massive brain" or "the AI is so persuasive it can talk people into handing over arbitrary amounts of power," and neither of those seem convincing to me. Give me a story that doesn't have a giant black box in the middle of it labeled "THE POWER OF INTELLIGENCE."
Here's an easy story for how things don't go wrong: It turns out there's no secret super-science left for the AI to discover. The AI is really smart and answers a lot of scientific questions, but none of them are the key to world-destroying power. The AI comes up with a unified theory of everything, but it turns out we can't do anything cool like FTL or antigravity. The AI invents nanotechnology but it turns out that our immune system is already pretty good at fighting off microscopic threats, and assembling an object atom by atom turns out to be a really slow and ineffective way of building stuff. The AI solves psychology and becomes a really charismatic politician, but the government is full of checks and balances that make it hard to take over the world no matter how charismatic you are. And so on. The AI's super-tech either isn't super enough or runs into physical limits that can't be solved just by thinking harder.
This story still leaves a lot of room for what the AI *can* do! It's entirely possible that AI leads to a massive leap in our understanding of the world, that there are AI-caused disasters on par with 9/11 or COVID, that people remember AI as one of the most significant inventions in history. But all it takes to stop the hard-takeoff existential risk doomer story is basically "whoops, it turns out there are some physical limits to how much you can do with brainpower alone."
I recommend reading the review of Going Infinite on Zvi's substack if you haven't. It details how SBF was a metaphor for misaligned AI. Basically SBF was very intelligent and probably a psychopath. He was depressed and directionless as a youth until he stumbled on effective altruism. But he didn't draw the right lessons from EA. SBF became fixated on the money maximizing part, which resulted in him causing billions of dollars in losses and untold reputational damage. And that was just from a pretty smart guy who got lucky for a while.
Obviously if AI is much smarter than people, it has the capability to inflict much more damage. I know this isn't on the level of "AI wipes out humanity", but even discounting that there are very serious reasons to be concerned about the lack of commitment to alignment at OpenAI.
Also, seriously read the piece from Zvi, it's great and I can't do it justice in a mere paragraph.
> Demanding a proof that things *don't* go wrong is getting the burden of proof backwards - you can't prove a negative.
The situation of pitting intelligence vs everything else has appeared endless times in the past, with completely predictable outcomes. Humans won, chimpanzees didn't. Humans won, smallpox didn't. Humans won, vast physical obstacles didn't. I'd say the burden of proof is on those who say that this time will somehow be different.
I imagine you'd agree that even though you couldn't predict exactly what move a superintelligence would use to win at chess, you still would lose the game. Real life is not something somehow so much simpler than chess that it's been essentially solved, and everyone/everything is working at the mathematically-proven maximally-efficient "gameplay." Still, if you want actual examples of how superior ability results in taking over the world, Scott wrote on this in 2015: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/07/no-physical-substrate-no-problem/
A big part of what is moving our world towards the "crapsack dystopia" side, is algorithmic social media. It seems at least plausible that tech companies devoting 20% of their effort to "hey maybe not all things Tech are wonderful and good and we should carefully consider the social and ethical impacts" would have made a difference there.
I've argued before that algorithmic social media is digital crack and should be treated accordingly. The damage is being recognized more widely, esp. with the recent efforts of Jon Haidt (of all people, I already loved his foray into descriptive ethics).
The funny thing when you think about it, is that algorithmic feeds have been pushed in every case by tech companies. Users kept asking for sequential feeds of the sources they were following, and companies kept pushing algorithmic feeds instead, which are against the user's best interests in all sorts of ways.
I'd be 100% for a rule that no app can show an algorithmic feed to anyone as a main option or unless they actively push a button to get suggestions.
Does it really seem reasonable that we can have it both ways? AI is a tremendous step forward that will allow us to do all kinds of things (we're not even sure what they all are) we've never done before -- and -- AI is no big deal when it comes to safety, and the idea that it could do a lot of damage is silly. After all, *Americans* are in charge, and we have a really good track record when it comes to safeguarding the public and not letting the interests of big corporations and the military override the needs of ordinary citizens.
Good point! I wonder what the least damaging target for the activist ecosystem would be. Maybe demonstrations at North Korean embassies against their nuclear weapons and ICBM programs? They would be ignored, but at least they would do no harm...
Many Thanks! Yes, true... The silence from wokesters on Tibet, for instance, is deafening...
I wonder if it is worth trying to set up a fake, sacrificial target for woke ire, in the hopes of distracting them from actions damaging to anything actually vital...
One of the latest top-level comments is someone talking about a terrorism warning regarding international LGBTQ+ events. If something bad happens, that might do the trick. :-/
Many Thanks! Regrettably, as carateca said below, Western activists have, to my mind extremely pathologically, backed non-Western Islamic regimes even when those regimes kill people just for being gay.
My biweekly SARS-CoV-2 update for epidemiological weeks 19 and 20 is up on TwiXter (which is finally becoming X). Linked below.
Summary of my update along with some musings:
1. COVID data sources (both public and private) are continuing to go offline. Although I think the worst that SARS-CoV-2 can hand us is over, I think it's tremendously shortsighted not to keep monitoring this remarkably adaptable pathogen.
2.. Epi week 19 showed a slight uptick in SARS2 wastewater concentrations. The average US concentration is 226 copies/mL. This is higher than previous interwave gaps. Not discussed in my thread: this could indicate a higher background circulation rate for the SARS2 than previous interwave gaps, or given that recent studies show that JN.1 and its offspring shed more virions than previous vars, the actual background circulation for the virus may be lower than any previous interwave gap. But no one is doing any randomized population testing so your guess is as good as mine.
3. Per a CDC directive, as of May 1st hospitals are no longer mandated to report COVID-19 stats. It's all voluntary now. Going forward, the CDC will treat SARS-CoV-2 like the flu and RSV and a new system called COVID-NET will replace the current hospitalization reporting system. COVID-NET is a surveillance system that will sample 98 counties across 13 states for COVID cases. Remember there are 3,143 counties in the US, but I suppose these 98 will provide a decent statistical sample during waves. My nit to pick with this plan is that COVID does not behave like the flu and it's still a-seasonal (unlike the flu). COVID outbreaks when viewed from the county level seem to follow a random of pattern during the interwave periods. Counties flash on and off with outbreaks like Xmas lights until a big wave synchronizes all the flashes (outbreaks) across major regions of the country. So, excuse me if I doubt if this 98-county sample will provide us with enough warning if or when a new variant wave rolls in. We are now solely reliant on wastewater testing to provide an early warning for a wave (but see the caveats in my second point).
4. OTOH, despite abysmal booster uptake in the US, current immunity seems to be pretty solid against severe disease. Before the advent of COVID-NET, the COVID-19 hospitalization rates for epi week 17 and 18 had dropped to 0.7 per 100,000. Post COVID-NET (for epi week 19) they were estimated to be at 0.5 per 100k. These values are lower than for any time in the pandemic except the first two weeks in March 2020 (over four years ago, now).
Could someone here help me understand what the patriarchy is? Is it real? What does it mean? And what does it mean to smash it? How does one accomplish that? I have tried to do some basic research on the web and almost everything I've run into is all over the place with its interpretation, with rather partisan takes that you all can easily picture, both for and against it.
I'm mostly trying to get a somewhat unbiased good faith take on this as an outsider, and see what I can learn from the concept, if anything. It comes up in certain circles a lot and I'm never really sure what I think about it when it does.
I realize this is maybe a little spicy of a topic, sorry, but I suspect that ACX is about as sensible of a place to get a neutral pluralistic perspective on this as it gets.
Sarah Constantine has the most interesting take I've seen [0]. I endorse Viliam's summary for pointing you toward the term's anthropological origins, and discussing the semantic drift. Urstoff's link also looks promising, prima facie. Might also be useful to research kinship, as context [1]. Because, as it turns out, there's more to anthropology than just gender wars (anthropology is not my strong suit, so i can't recommend anything in particular; but i don't see it mentioned in other comments).
Note: I don't believe in the patriarchy. But here's my impression from talking to people who do:
There are a bunch of ways in which society is bad for women: Gender pay gap, gendered expectations around which spouse does child rearing, some men being unable to take no for an answer when asking women out, some men threatening women, women being excluded from certain work-spaces and certain professional bonding experiences etc.
There are of course disagreements about each individual item on the above list about whether or not they are real. But most people agree there exists some such list.
The idea of "The Patriarchy" is the belief that the items on the above list are in some way connected.
In particular their connection means that fighting against one of the items on the list will somehow help in the fight for the others. Do more to prevent rape on college campuses and this will in some way help more women become plumbers. Because all the things on the list are caused by the same broad societal perception or culture or something (which we call the Patriarchy) and when you fight for one of the things that is like punching the "patriarchy" and if you punch it enough times it will smash.
Maybe someone who actually believes in it could give you a more fleshed out version of what they think is going on, and why they think it's happening. To me, it seems pretty obvious that this thing doesn't really exist in modern western world.
"Do more to prevent rape on college campuses and this will in some way help more women become plumbers. "
I don't think the people fighting rape on college campuses, would consider it a victory if more women became plumbers. They tend to have a fairly narrow vision as to what is "helpful" to women, as unreasonably restrictive as any 1950's patriarchal vision of women's place in the world. The best that can be said of the progressives on this front is that it is at least better for women to have a choice between two narrow visions instead of being limited to one.
But there's more than just the Progressives and the Patriarchy in play, so the theory that we need the former as an alternative to the latter seems quite dubious.
If you look up the word patriarchy it has multiple meanings. One of them is "society dominated by men" and a society would only need a 51/49 power imbalance in favor of men in order to qualify as that type of patriarchy. BTW, in case you're new here, this is EXACTLY the kind of culture war question Scott hates to see here.
I am sympathetic to the concept and understand it as follows:
- Classic patriarchy: all the movers and shakers in society are men, and they either explicitly act against women's interests, or fail to support them through ignorance and apathy. Power structures tend to seek to preserve themselves, so attempts to empower women are opposed.
- Systemic patriarchy: Societies with a patriarchal history contain baked in practices that were acceptable to prior male leaders, but hinder female leaders. These features serve to slow the rate of power transfer to make it harder to achieve equity. In our society those might look like:
- Working norms that aren't compatible with pregnancy or childcare
- Social norms around assertiveness and leadership that make it harder for women to be perceived as authoritative.
- Lack of role models and mentor figures in leadership positions.
Systemic considerations often also include the downstream effects of these on women at large ("we've historically not had a lot of research into endometriosis, but have had lots into erectile dysfunction") which are perceived to be due to lack of interest/advocacy from historically male authority figures making policy or funding choices.
There is a pernicious tendency to conflate object level and systemic concerns (which Scott has written about before) — so if someone blames lack of maternity provision on the patriarchy, both sides can wrongly take that to mean that there's a secret council of men plotting to keep women in their place. For the most part I don't think people really mean this, and they use "patriarchy" to refer to object level apathy from still-mostly-male leaders, as well as downstream systemic effects from the way our society has evolved.
Colloquially used, "systemic patriarchy" most often seems to convey that at every run of society there is an effort to keep power out of women's hands, which sounds more like your classic definition. They seem to be used interchangeably, or at least, I don't often hear the prefix "classical".
One of the features you mentioned works both ways; working norms of high-power leadership for men, supposing this means long hours, lead to diminished availability for family time and caretaking, but whether that deters really depends on custom and desires. I think this is redundant because societal expectation does most of the heavy lifting here and not work-hours. Historically it meant that women "ought" to be caretakers no matter what they do, with some of that lingering now broadly. Regardless of sex, if both caretaking and "ambitious" leadership is on the table, there is a compromise happening somewhere. As with most things, you can throw money at it (a nanny, etc).
Good description. I'm broadly sympathetic to this definition describing real problems, but unfortunately I see it abused all the time. For example, when enrollment in the computer science major fails to be 50/50, many people will immediately jump to the conclusion that this *must* be due to systemic bias. Which of course it doesn't have to be. But try saying that out loud in polite company...
It is clear what patriarchy was historically, men being the main decision makers and privilege holders in most areas. It is less so now, but the vestiges still remain. A few of medical examples:
- men get controlled pain meds, ADHD meds etc. a lot easier on average than women [citation needed]
- you can get vasectomy pretty easily, while getting hysterectomy is nigh impossible as a youngish woman, even with endo or with contraindications to contraceptives. The doctors of all genders keep pushing you to suffer "because you might change your mind some day".
- until recently descriptions of, say, heart attack symptoms were based on what men would experience, not women.
- autism symptoms are often missed in women
In general, there is still a tendency to second-guess women more than men in various areas.
First the word "patriarchy" was used by anthropologists to describe those societies where a family (or a clan) is ruled by a father (or the oldest man, or a group of oldest men). In a completely literal sense, where e.g. 30 years old people would still unconditionally obey their 50 years old father, and if they do not, he can legally kill them or sentence them to death.
Later, by the power of hysteria, the word was adopted by feminists to describe every society ever (except for the fictional societies of noble savages), because of course every existing society is exactly like this, no exaggeration! That is the bailey... and the motte is that all things considered, there are more male CEOs or presidents than female CEOs or presidents, therefore the society is ruled by (some) men, which is kinda analogical to being ruled by your father.
> Is it real?
In the anthropological sense? Maybe some savage tribes are still like that. Historically, I think the ancient Rome was like this, but I am not sure.
In the feminist sense? If you extend the definition to mean "more male CEOs/presidents than female CEOs/presidents", maybe every society is like this.
> And what does it mean to smash it?
Quotas for CEOs/presidents, preferably in a way that makes it taboo to mention that someone became a CEO or a president because of the quota?
In modern American society, I think it's usually more of a metaphor, a design pattern that some people want to eradicate. But there are also parts of America (not specifically geographical parts), and non-American cultures, where it's a more real thing. If there were an EA equivalent in this domain, something like "Effective Anti-Patriarchalism", I suspect that they wouldn't devote much energy to America. Which is to say, don't expect a lot of consistency in the answers you find, but there's usually something real that they point to, even if it's not literally "women as property".
I think you might have a skewed view of who complains about patriarchy "the most". Choice feminism and intersectional feminism have had the most success capturing the mainstream in the "woke" era (not trying to be inflammatory, just don't know what to call it). These are the groups with the "you go girl!" attitude towards 18 year olds becoming OnlyFans models, etc.
Radical feminists and some groupings of fourth-wave feminists (on Reddit, see /r/fourthwavewomen) are still highly critical of female genital mutilation, educational inequality, mandatory veiling, etc. regardless of which culture the practices are a part of, and I'd say they "complain" about the patriarchy an awful lot.
Ironically, it's likely partially because of the "patriarchy" that choice feminism became the dominant strain in media -- the group that is young and openly sex and sex work-positive is certainly much more palatable to men than the one that has a lot of butch lesbians and middle aged women and women who don't shave their legs and stuff.
Ehhh, it's very unlikely you will find someone who unironically believes in Patriarchy without at least one or two major qualms on ACX, they all got filtered by years and years of anti-woke writing by Scott on the old blog.
As training wheels for my abilities to engage with views that I see as ridiculous on their face, I will try to explain what I think the users of the concept mean:
- It's something along the lines of "Moloch", except it's specialized with respect to the kind of evil it can do. Moloch is an all-purpose evil God, anytime 2 parties fail to communicate or cooperate despite the best of intentions, Moloch is behind this.
- In contrast, Patriarchy is specifically the God of gender war, anytime 2 people of opposite genders fail to communicate or cooperate, proponents of the concept of Patriarchy (henceforth: Feminists) say that (A) this is due to the Patriarchy (B) which is primarily invented and maintained by men (C) to primarily hurt and control women.
- Patriarchy presumably originated by men who wanted to control women. But now it's systematic and self-sustaining, by not fighting to end the Patriarchy, you're yourself complicit in the Patriarchy. By not recognizing the Patriarchy, you're yourself complicit in the Patriarchy.
- Patriarchy also - bizarrely - hurts men. Whenever you confront feminists by the fact that men are not uniformly living the good life, that they're the first to be conscripted and killed in war and etc etc etc..., Feminists have a pretty surprising answer to this: Patriarchy. Patriarchy hurts men. Patriarchy also hurts women. At this point it seems that they just re-invented another way to say "Evil" or "Obscenely Rich People" or "The 1%", but no, they insist that Patriarchy is a very distinct concept to all of this. It's something that was invented by men, is maintained by men, primarily hurts women and yet **also** hurts men, who are presumably too stupid to realize the system they're maintaining is hurting them.
- But the fact that the Patriarchy hurts and kills men too is no excuse for them, nearly every man is held responsible for the Patriarchy in some sense or the other. Being a male feminist won't absolve you either.
- It's not clear what destroying the Patriarchy will entail. On the one hand, you have some extreme feminists like that chick who wrote about how the male population should be artificially kept to 10% of humanity (by the obvious ways) and her modern progeny who joke about aborting male fetuses, on the other hand some feminists take "Destroying the Patriarchy" simply to mean.... women in video games? More pay and promotions for women? More code-of-conduct HR policies that prevents people (but primarily men) from saying sexual jokes? It's a huge umbrella.
I think it's obvious at this point that I'm not a fan of either the concept or its typical proponents, and its possible I'm strawmanning here. But in practice you would be better off observing the actual in-the-wild usages of the term as well as possibly reading older feminist literature. As an opponent of Feminism, I think "Patriarchy" is just a euphemism for "Men". Feminism is often motivated by mindless and indiscriminate rage at men - not that its ideological opponents have done any better in the opposite direction -, but instead of taking out this rage on men in a straightforward way, and thus being open to being made fun of using all the usual stereotypes about men-hating feminists, Feminism invented a kind of Motte-and-Bailey word which can dynamically mean either "Men" or "Just the system created by men we totally don't hate men who are also victims of that same system" depending on whatever is most convenient.
=======
For what it's worth, I think "Patriarchy" has a non-strawman non-euphemism component. I think in actual practice, Women (like literally any other naturally occurring subset of humanity not explicitly selected for power or wealth) have particular weaknesses and traits that allows Men (but also other, typically older, women) to take advantage of them. Where I and Feminism disagree on is (A) This is far from one-sided, women aren't angels either (B) This is far from being solely a system of men's making (C) This can only be solved by both genders recognizing each other's pain and challenges, each gender signaling that they will commit to not use their unfair advantages and to condemn the extremists of their own if the other gender does the same.
Due to this pretty deep disagreement, I'm of the opinion that the label of "Feminism" should be thrown into the trash, left for those kinds of people who comment in r/FemaleDatingStrategy or whatever. When I want to emphasize the injustices and the oppression that women in particular face, I usually call myself a "Women's Advocate". When I want to point out the symmetry of the injustice that the 2 genders inflict on each other, I call myself a "Gender Egalitarian". My Gender Egalitarianism is not affected one bit by any objective biological difference (or lack thereof) between women and men, you can have 100 triple-blind top-notch studies about how women are worse or better than men in this and that job or hobby on my desk tomorrow, and that - to me - wouldn't imply anything from the moral point of view, any more than the fact that blind people are worse at seeing would imply they should be given less rights or treated morally differently. (Eh, besides the obvious, that they shouldn't drive or pilot an aircraft, and this is not strictly a moral difference, just a pragmatic yielding to the cruel objective world.)
Nonsense. I attend regular meetings of my local Patriarchy Club and attend the National Patriarchy Convention whenever I'm able. It's as entertaining as ComicCon! (Sorry, I couldn't resist!) I mostly agree with everything you said.
What do you mean, "is it real"? Of course it's real, just read any piece of history, or hell, just look around you. It's an inevitable consequence of the power dynamics caused by human sexual dimorphism. Women aren't less intelligent or capable on average, they simply lack power and agency. No matter how many anti-discrimnation laws you write or cultural memes you try to circulate, the reality of the situation will never change. Women will always be at the mercy of men.
I think enough women have the spine to shoot in self-defense or defense of others that you can't justify the kind of universal language you're using in these comments.
And more American women are seeing the light every year.
I don't disagree with you that (way too) many women are essentially powerless, and that a lot of that powerlessness probably has natural roots in sexual dimorphism.
But technology has overcome a lot of things in nature.
I'm not sure if you're joking or not, but I'll take it semi-seriously:
I'm not sure PSAs would have much impact if the demonstrably obvious rational case for carrying a weapon plus all fiction about women successfully using guns aren't convincing.
But perhaps mandatory gun safety training - like a half-day module in school, where students learn to never put their finger on a goddamned trigger, never point it at a thing they aren't intending to kill, and how to fully unload a pistol - would demystify guns enough for some women to consider their utility, even if it goes against tribal opinion.
I mean, I've literally had more than one woman ask me, "but what if your gun just goes off?" And when I pointedly ask, "How would that happen?" the response is usually "I don't know."
I should add, I'm a rational person and thus I'm not slavishly devoted to Red Team ideas about gun ownership. Nor am I devoted to Gun Team's ideas about gun ownership.
So, despite the absolute language I was using here to match @anomie, I have pretty reasonable positions on this:
Not everyone should own a gun and regularly carry it.
In fact, OMG, so, so many people *shouldn't* own a gun and/or regularly carry one!
I don't want to see gun rights restricted, but I think it would be reasonable for gun ownership / permits to be contingent on passing a half-day module of training or an ultra-basic gun safety test, The basic bare minimum of knowing "don't put your finger on the trigger" is a reasonable restriction!
And then there are people whose circumstances are incompatible with the responsibilities of gun ownership. I'm pro-gun, but I never advocate for owning one without also outlining when it's a bad idea.
For example, my parents actually removed their guns from the home during the childhood years that my younger brother was particularly impulsive, relentless, defiant, and obsessed with the power of guns. They knew they wouldn't be able to hide them and that he would not be stopped by a locked box (my brother was a human raccoon).
This was responsible and wise. The risk of my brother getting his hands on a gun was much higher than the risk of crime.
Likewise, people who aren't confident in their ability to pick safe, totally trustworthy friends and loved ones should also forget about owning guns. Morons will occasionally tell me that keeping a gun in the home makes it far more likely I'll be a victim of domestic gun violence, because they've accepted the absurd idea that "anyone can be a victim of domestic violence," including me.
Of course this is utter nonsense; many people have personalities and/or life experience which make them fundamentally incapable of being attracted to abusers, much less tolerant of any actual abuse. I am one of them, so I'm not remotely worried about getting shot by any of the loved ones in my life.
But anyone who isn't equally confident in their ability to screen should avoid keeping guns in the home. It's just not worth the risk.
Sure, in the very literal sense that the average man can physically overpower the average woman. Just like short people are at the mercy of tall people. That's relevant in a few narrow domains like domestic violence and being out alone at night. But that's a pretty small part of life. People who rage at "the patriarchy" inevitably mean something much stronger than that.
I'm not exactly the kind of person who talks about smashing the patriarchy, but I know people who are. Here's my understanding:
Our society tends to favor men over women; this favoritism is called the patriarchy. The most obvious manifestation of the patriarchy is that people in positions of power tend to be men. "Smashing the patriarchy" is a dramatic way of saying changing society to become more equitable.
There's also an older, narrower, more literal meaning of patriarchy that probably isn't the one you've been hearing. Some cultures expect the man of the house to rule over his household like a tiny king; those cultures are patriarchal.
"And who has the right as master of the house to have the final word at home? THE PAPA! (why?) TRADITION!"
One ought to have some method of ensuring a decision is possible. For example, the Supreme Court has nine justices, because an odd number ensures a ruling one way or the other. It isn't necessarily bad for the man of the house to be the person that ultimately decides, so long as the decision takes the family as a whole into account. The same might be said of the woman, but various reasons put the man in that position, and which actual person ought to make no significant difference.
Of course, some men will abuse this power. If given the power, some women would abuse it, too. Who can say who would use it best? The answer varies on individual cases, and in some cases has no good answer.
Pretty terrible take. A family is fundamentally built on personal relationships. If those relationships have deteriorated to the point where the family can no longer reach consensus on an important decision without someone needing to be formally in charge, then it has bigger problems that won't be solved by designating someone to win ties on the object level decision.
Not really, not all things are equally important. When I go out with my all-men friend group, sometimes we disagree on (e.g.) which restaurant we will eat in. Any one of us will accept any restaurant, but every one of us has his own preference.
In order for the night out not to devolve into endless bickering, **some** sort of circuit-breaker need to be devised that will force an opinion and compel the group to act according to it. This "Circuit-Breaker" can simply be randomness, Rock-Paper-Scissors or Heads-Tails coin flipping. But it can also be an arbitrarily designated "Group-Leader" who chooses an option and follows through.
To account for human jealousy, maybe the "Group Leader" (whether in a friends group or a family) position can rotate, such that this year it's the man who calls the shots, the next it's the woman. So that no party feels perpetually silenced or forced to follow. And of course, it's assumed that the "Group Leader" is making a "Sensible" decision in the sense that he or she is not deliberately power-tripping or exercising their power just for the sake of it. All he or she is doing is just acting as some sort of intelligent better-than-random Rock-Papers-Scissors tiebreaker.
As you yourself point out, there's no shortage of ways to resolve disputes without committing to a formal hierarchy, much less a hierarchy based on gender or other traits completely orthogonal to decision making and leadership ability.
History shows that committing to rigid hierarchy like that, especially in the context of personal relationships, makes you drastically more vulnerable to various kinds of abuse.
And do you resolve those little "fights" by saying, "as the man I am the Lord and Master of this family and it is my god-given right to pay the bill"? Or do you just work it out between the two of you on a case by case basis? Because most people these days in healthy relationships seem to manage just fine doing that second thing, so I question the value of the first one.
Perhaps I'm not clear. We are each trying to decide based on whether the OTHER person is better off. Yes, I may jest and demand to pay the bill as the husband, which always gets a laugh.
But what it basically comes down to is if we have a disagreement then she gets her way, whether that means she pays the bill or not. I DECIDE to give her her way, which she is fully aware of. It isn't really working anything out at all.
Regarding last week’s Mantic Mondays, why don’t prediction markets fashion themselves as sports betting sites? You can bet on chess, why not on the new competitive sport of forecasting? Here are some sample rules:
- matches are between two competitors and last four rounds
- in each round, competitors forecast a specific question (specified when the match is created) and earn points based on the log odds if it occurs.
- competitors specify their forecasts ahead of time to increase legibility.
- the person with the most points after four rounds is the winner.
Like in sports betting, you could bet on the outcome of each round, overall victor, points earned, etc. it’s slightly more complicated to recreate the mechanics of a prediction market, but sports betting seems like it’s now totally okay (it’s in the ESPN app!) whereas prediction markets are not. Plus, you’d then have an excuse to do all sorts of fun sports things, like having a world championship with trophies or title belts, college leagues, etc.
Haha, I have idly thought that trying to get regulated under "sports betting" might be an easier path to legalization than "event contracts" under CFTC. Manifold's doing a different thing, but would love to see someone make a go of this!
Kinda open-ended question, but are there any interesting essays from Europeans telling Americans how they should improve their country? I feel like we as Americans have a lot of strong feelings about how Europe should be run- Britain should be less NIMBY, the Germans shouldn't have a debt brake and shouldn't shut down their nuclear plants, Italy shouldn't make it impossible to fire employees, etc. I have read lots & lots & lots of pieces by Americans over the years telling other countries how to reform themselves. Any thoughtful pieces by Euros about what kind of reforms they'd like to see in America? Or even non-Europeans, Asian or Latin American countries. I just realized yesterday I don't think I've ever read one!
I'm thinking more 'substantive public policy reforms' and not low-quality polemic or anything shrill by The Guardian, etc.
(I suppose Alon Levy is a bit of an exception to my rule, Alon has some good critiques of our weak state capacity as it relates to infrastructure spending)
Talking about how America is so much inferior to Europe and how they feel sorry for us is Europe's continental pastime. We don't hear much about it though, because [insert Mad Men meme here].
I've written a number of pieces on various things Finland does with a subtext of "perhps this is something that America might consider, perhaps at a state level" (eg https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2024/02/21/understanding-labor-unions-in-finland/, for instance). Of course, I'm also aware enough of the American system to know it's not that simple to just import things from one country to another.
...and, even moreso, aware that any European who actually tried to write a piece absolutely *telling* Americans what to do would get an avalanche of "Fuck you, Americans do not care AT ALL what Europoors think, keep your socialism to yourself" etc etc...
UWell, I have seen a few people pointing out how scandinavian public health care actually is cheaper than US private insurance, while the population have overall better health:
Also, I haven't seen this anywhere but found it myself: Denmark, despite having state sponsored education all the way, have a lower tertiary education rate than the US. Perhaps the signalling is less important here:
Oh, and don't get me started on the voting system (multi-party, gerrymander-proof etc)
If I should guess why there's few articles about this in english, I think it might be because North Europeans are pretty confident in the things they believe they do better than the US, even to the degree that they don't argue enough about them, thus leaving no paper trail on the internet (None of the three I mentioned are ever up for debate at elections or seriously challenged by public intellectuals).
And just to prove I'm not trying to be shrill or Guardian like, I am completely aware of how the US has been overtaking all of Europe in real wages for the last twenty years. So they must be doing a lot of things right that Europeans don't get.
This isn't directly that, But I very much enjoyed LKY's Third World to First as a first-person view of the challenges of actually running a country (he doesn't have much advice for America, but he did have some for Deng Xiaoping). He deals with pretty different challenges, so it's hard to get direct lessons for america, but it's quite good ("learn to be more legible" would be my top lesson America should learn from Singapore).
Is there any sort of actual benefit to hot cycling or other cardio in high environments? Is it just a gimmick?
So I started doing group classes at my gym, think like cycling class, and I really liked it but I also noticed that I am drenched afterwards, like my light green shirt is now a soaked forest green, even when we're just doing relatively slow yoga. And it's cuz the room is hot, must be 90-100 with high humidity. I'm not sure whether there's some actual benefit or if the trainer pumps up the heat to make us sweat because us dummies associate more sweat with a better workout and they're just hacking the metrics.
It's mainly a gimmick IMHO. Heat can help for warming up, and sometimes in non-cardio contexts (e.g. saunas, yoga), but it hinders a cardio workout.
As others point out, heat can help improve the elastic properties of connective tissues. Your tendons, fascia, etc. operate best at temperatures slightly higher than your usual body temperature. That's why "warming up" is important to getting maximal athletic performance.
However, once you're to the point of sweating, extra heat is unhelpful, if not harmful. After all, the whole reason we sweat is to get rid of excess heat. If the excess heat exceeds your body's ability to eliminate it, your athletic performance will drop, and you risk hyperthermia if taken too far.
In fact, if you're doing really tough cardio workouts, temperatures below 70F are often better, since that'll help your body stay cool. Apparently marathon times are best in quite chilly weather.
According to an anatomy class I took back in college, fascia has some interesting properties where it becomes more "liquid" as it heats up, making it easier to get more range of motion than it would in the cold. Outside of yoga and gymnastics, I don't know if this is particularly desirable or not. It may be that it makes it less likely to injure your ligaments. Alternatively it may make it more likely to pull a muscle. Who knows? I don't think anyone has done any long term studies on it that are safe from marketing and health gurus.
I don't know if there's a benefit to cardio, specifically.
Heat does loosen up muscles and joints, which can help with stretching, but can also lead to overextension. (Sometimes that tension is keeping your body from doing something damaging.) Overextension shouldn't be a problem in yoga, and I'm guessing not in cycling, either, due to the restricted amount of motion.
I personally like the experience of sweat coming out of every pore in my body. I think it helps clean out my skin, and in a more woo-woo opinion of mine, I think it helps flush my system out. Be sure to drink lots and lots of water, and make sure you've got a healthy diet that has plenty of salt and other electrolytes.
I used to do hot yoga occasionally, but I do also question the benefits. One thing it does make easier is extreme stretching, but the benefits are few and the risks are substantial.
I'd say anything that makes you less likely to work out (e.g., a hot gym where you sweat more and feel exhausted faster) is not a good thing.
Hot yoga is its own category, plenty of studios offer it in addition to room-temperature classes. Anecdotally, I enjoy the challenge of hot yoga and feel more "loose" afterwards compared to room-temp classes, but I don't know if its purported benefits have been studied. Not sure what the benefit would be for hot cycling or other cardio unless you're trying to acclimatize to work in hot environments.
I'm no expert, but unless you're deliberately trying to build heat tolerance or sweat a lot, it seems like it would be worse. For things like cardio you'll probably do less of an actual workout because the heat will force you to slow down.
Does anyone know of research or any kind of insightful writing considering whether the increasing accessibility and quality of porn over the last few decades has shifted the balance of power between genders? Or, looking forward, how future sex tech might do so and thus reshape dating, families, and society? I’m writing a sequel to EroFutures and want to base it on more than an impish urge to fantasize in politically incorrect directions :)
This is neither research nor necessarily insightful, but the 1st order effect of massive availability of porn seems to be to make a lot of males less willing to do the effort it takes to get an actual woman to have sex with them. Which means that young ladies have less choice of suitable men, which means less bargaining power. So to the extent that porn satiates men more than it does women, it appears that women are ones losing on the balance of power.
I suspect this might have been counting erotic fiction as porn, and finding some particular way to normalize across categories (number of pages turned, number of minutes per week spent, whatever).
I don’t know about the effect that free, widespread pornography has on gender equality, but I’ve often wondered if it could be at the root of the precipitous drop in sexual assault since the 1990s. In fact, I often wonder if it could’ve played a crucial role in the corresponding decline in violent crime in general.
The National Crime Victimization Survey from the Justice Department reported a significant decrease in sexual assault rates since the mid-1990s. Specifically, from 1995 to the late 2010s, there was a noted decrease of about 44% in the U.S. sexual assault rate. This timeframe would appear to correspond with when Internet porn access from home would’ve become widespread.
I've heard that on average, people are having less sex in general, not just assault, and age at first sexual experience has been going up. But a quick search was unable to find when this trend started, or how significant it has been.
But both of these are also parts of other larger trends that don't seem that plausibly connected to porn.
Don't forget, that the reduced background levels of lead in our environment have also correlated to the fall in violent crime. And this pattern seems to be playing out in other parts of the world. But correlation is not causation.
Reporting methods of sexual assault have also changed and skewed the statistics post 90s, possibly explaining some of the dramatic decrease. But I imagine that if widespread porn was having some positive effects on society, the world wouldn’t be that eager to embrace them, and consequently might be more prone to dismiss them out of hand.
It’s worth noting that none of this in any way excuses the clear harms of pornography (rampant exploitation, addiction, etc.).
Most technologies have their pluses and minuses. But, like you said, the pluses of porn are likely to be dismissed or shouted down, especially on our politically correct campuses. Maybe that's why there's so little research on the question.
I'll follow up on the sex crime stats that you mentioned -- thanks! If I find similar declines in other countries, then one could say that this isn't just an artifact of local changes in enforcement, reporting, or incident tracking.
Here's a meta-study that includes 2 studies from New Zealand, 4 from South Africa, 1 from Brazil, 1 from Scotland, 1 from Italy, and 9 from the United States.
> The range of outcomes that were significantly associated with lead exposure [7 of the studies] were primarily related to an arrest, incarceration, or conviction of some type, with increasing blood lead concentrations in childhood prospectively associated with later arrests and convictions in several studies. In addition to this association, 7 studies found strong associations between lead exposure and later delinquent or aggressive behavior irrespective of arrest status....Even in reviewed studies in which statistically significant associations between lead and crime did not exist [2 of the studies], significant relationships between lead and damaging patterns of behavior that are more likely to lead to negative long-term outcomes were still present.
>....This review demonstrates an association between exposure to lead and the later development of delinquent, antisocial, and criminal behavior. Although borderline levels of risk are seen in several of our included studies, most are above the null value and estimates of risk are generally precise.
Thanks for the suggestion! I was up and down Benthal green, though I unfortunately did not make it to E Pellicci (admittedly not a big eater, either). Nonetheless, I really appreciated the suggestion and I feel like my trip to London was better for knowing about this!
Hey, thanks for the suggestions. When I finally got around to trying to check out Charing Cross, the station was undergoing some work, so I unfortunately did not make it there, but I did make it to Leadenhall right by London! Quite nice! Thanks again!!
Thanks for the suggestion!! I can't ride a bike, but the weather was gorgeous in the week I was there and I really enjoyed all of the parks! Londoners have it good!
Hey, thanks for the suggestion! I had one at the Lyric in Soho that was pretty good. Kinda sweet, not too hoppy. I definitely would love to have another one!
They made a few custom enhancements here for Scott, when he started ACX. My guess is that those clashed with later developments, and weren't systematically tested.
1) “Vox” here is the name of the contest, with no relation to the media website of the same name.
2) The poetry solicited for the contest was explicitly formal poetry in the English tradition, with the corresponding rhyme schemes and stanzaic structures, etc.
Thanks for the reminder, Hal!
EDIT: removed rude comment about free form poetry.
> You won’t find the modern sort of “seven words an author pulled out of his narcissistic asshole and slapped onto the page in a column” so-called “poetry” here.
>EDIT: removed rude comment about free form poetry.
Wow, this is what remained *after* removing a rude comment about free form poetry?!
Wtf? That was the content I thought I cut out. Fucking substack. After I make or edit a comment, there’s no visual indication and the page doesn’t even update.
OK, that makes more sense! Substack reeeeallly needs to fix this sort of thing.
I guess you can edit a comment to add, but not to subtract? That might be reasonable, so that you can't take away the content that someone else's preserved reply is reacting to. But they should indicate that this is impossible, or even better, allow it to strikethrough but not delete the text.
Riveting commentary. Not sure what you meant, but if you wanna argue about poetry, by all means state your opinions — I may not be able to respond, but I’m sure you could get a good thread going.
As a published poet (albeit only in second- and third- tier literary journals), I'd prefer not rehash the arguments for form poetry vs the freer styles of poetry. It's a religious argument — and usually, the people staking their positions (on either side of the divide) have little understanding of the history of poetry in English (let alone other language traditions), and they are blinded by their prejudices. That "narcissistic asshole" ad hominem you tossed out suggests you are one of the true believers in form. So anything I say will likely cause you to lob ad hominem attacks in my general direction. I've got better things to do. Cheers!
Fair enough. In retrospect, I regret my phrasing. I am only so very tired of seeing bad examples of the free styles held up as the be-all end-all of poetry. I’ll see if there’s an edit button on here (and if we keep talking, I promise there will be no ad hominem from me.)
If you have favorite examples of the freer styles, I would like to see them.
I don't necessarily value any style of poetry over another, but let's talk about the purpose of rhyme and meter.
The ancients used rhyme and meter to enable the illiterate to memorize and recite long narrative (epic) poems. And this allowed their cultural transmission to younger generations of illiterates. Of course, the literate minority also composed poetry. But few could read those works unless they were in a form that the illiterate majority could memorize. AFAIK most of ancient poetry was sung. For instance, Homeric bards sang his songs accompanied by the four-stringed phorminx. They'd improvise a four-note melody around the verses to enhance the rhythm and drama of the recital. (More drachma's in the bucket if he could keep the audience's attention!)
Some way through the Axial Age various cultures developed lyric styles of poetry that reflected the interior moods and thoughts of the (literate) author. Moods and thoughts can be didactic and boring to others when communicated in ordinary language. So lyric poets started using other devices — e.g. metaphors, conceits, metonymy and synecdoches — to make poems more interesting to their literate audience. For me, the poetic fragments of Sappho stand out as some as some of the most beautiful expressions of longing written in a poetic form.
“their heart grew cold
they let their wings down”
―from "If Not, Winter"
“In the crooks of your body, I find my religion.”
Sappho makes me wish I had been forced to learn Classical Greek in school. I'm pretty sure these lines in Sappho's Greek were in a rhyming matrix, but notice that translated into English, their images are beautiful without the need for rhyme. Are here words longer poetry because we no longer retain the meter and rhyme of the author's language?
One of my hobbies is translating Tang Dynasty poetry, so I'm somewhat familiar with their poetic styles and devices those poets. The ancient and medieval Chinese used meter and rhyming schemes, and their poems were written to be sung to familiar tunes (approved by the Emperor's Music Bureau — sort of like the French Academy for Chinese music). Middle Chinese had four tones, but they were different from the four tones of modern Mandarin. And although the characters are mostly readable to literate Chinese who can still read the traditional characters (less so for people raised on simplified characters). However the pronunciation of the characters has changed so drastically twelve hundred years that these poems no longer rhyme in spoken Mandarin — and because the tones are different, the old meters no longer work. Yet school kids still recite Li Bai and Du Fu in Mandarin without the help of rhyme or meter.
The Victorian British (and French) tried to translate Chinese poetry in rhymed forms, and their translations were atrocious. The Tang Dynasty poets had all sorts of poetic devices — and the implied meaning of the poems were frequently different from the explicit meanings (Chinese poetry has always been hypersensitive to the politics of the times). And there's no one-to-one mapping of Chinese words to English words. Moreover, every Chinese word has a different range of synonyms from corresponding English words. The meanings and the implied sentiments of the original poems were lost when the Victorian translators forced them into the meters and rhyming schemes they preferred.
The medieval Japanese emulated the Chinese five-word and seven-word verse forms. The Chines also had eight-word verse forms and free verse forms, but the Japanese latched on to the five- and seven-word formats. However, most words in Middle Chinese were single syllables (but, as an aside, some linguists have noted that Mandarin is evolving into a polysyllabic language). But Japanese is a polysyllabic language — they adapted their polysyllabic language to the five- and seven- forms of Chinese poetry. Thus we get the 5-7-5 and the 5-7-5-7-7 syllabic forms of Haiku and Tanka. Although literate Japanese could read Chinese characters, the rhyming schemes and metric schemes of Classical Chinese were lost on the Japanese. And AFAIK Japan never adopted rhyming schemes for their poetry (please correct me if I'm wrong!).
When Ezra Pound translated Chinese Poetry, he didn't attempt to make it rhyme. Instead, he tried to translate the mood and imagery of the poems. Unfortunately, he got stuck on getting more meaning across by adding extra verbiage. So the meaning and the implied meanings were translated, but the elegance and simplicity of the Chinese was lost. Other poets realized, "hey, maybe imagery was more important than rhyme and meter!" Seamus Heaney (who was no piker when it came to rhyme) said in a TV interview that a poem is “some kind of housing of a moment, a snapshot of consciousness, that can be looked upon by other persons…” As the Japanese did, modern English poets largely went off chasing the snapshot of consciousness as image at the expense of form. Some decry this, but that's the way it is. And to my mind, unless one is very very careful meter and rhyme can detract from the subtlety of the image.
But let's not forget about our glorious English language (and I mean that without any snark). The Tang Dynasty poets were writing poems with a modern feel when the illiterate Anglo-Saxons were reciting their epic poetry in kennings. But English poetry evolved quickly. The Anglo-Saxon rhyming schemes no longer work in modern English. Should we translate the poem about my namesake into rhymed English? I've seen it done, but it generally requires that the meter of the Anglo-Saxon be mangled. And if we keep the meter, then it's difficult to get the rhyming scheme to work (at least this is what I was told by my dad, who had some facility with Anglo-Saxon). Likewise, Shakespeare wrote some of the most elegant poetry in the English Language. But the Elizabethan rhyming schemes don't work that well with modern English pronunciation. Would we dare to update his wording to make the rhymes work? I don't think so! ;-)
Here's my translations of some of Du Mu's poetry. Feel free to tell me if you think it's shite. I won't be offended. Even though the originals were rhymed, I think that in English rhyme would detract from the simplicity of the image in Egrets...
-------
Egrets
by Du Mu (杜牧)
snow-clad in snow feathers black jade beaks
a flock of them stab their reflections catching little fish
alarmed they fly away bright against the blue-green hills
a pear tree's blossom falls on an evening’s breeze
> original text...
鹭鸶
杜牧
雪衣雪发青玉嘴，群捕鱼儿溪影中。
惊飞远映碧山去，一树梨花落晚风。
-------
And a rhyming would detract from unguarded bitterness in his poem commonly known as "Snow Letter" (Snow Within a Letter's Heart is the literal translation of title)...
-------
Snow Within a Letter’s Heart
by Du Mu
December snow is a foot thick—
I get cranky shivering in the frozen mist
I’m in Lonely City beside the big marsh,
and the man has neglected my little fire—it smokes
Who can I complain to?
I’m worried, hurt, and have no will to grasp with.
The Son of Heaven cries out for a humane sage [to guide him]—
appoint a worthy person to be your minister—
an expert in the worldly considerations of government—
few would have the character to take this on.
The machinations of Court can be seen clearly—
it takes endurance to preserve my restraint.
If only this were a day in my great-grandfather’s time
rising [again]
like the mythical phoenix with its flowered crest.
Peoples’ abilities have rotted away—
they’ve thrown out all that’s proper!
The Northern Palace is in the hands of evil obstructionists—
I hear there’s an army 300 miles away,
and they’re leaderless and breaking up
to steal and rob, foraging like bandits.
A minister of honest virtue would find a solution—
others deserve a slow flogging with bamboo canes.
It’s as if the Mongolians convened a committee to discuss
how animals eat and lie down in their fur—
and the affair takes place in a monastery’s great hall!
You know you’re helpless,
standing on the sidelines waiting to step forward,
Does anyone know of any papers/books that compare fertility rates between resource-rich countries and non resource-rich countries?
I'm thinking of a comparison between countries A and B, where both have the same - or similar - per capita income I, so as to avoid the effect of income on fertility, but A is a resource-rich country while B is not.
> I'm thinking of a comparison between countries A and B, where both have the same - or similar - per capita income I, so as to avoid the effect of income on fertility, but A is a resource-rich country while B is not.
I'm not sure that this sort of comparison will *avoid* the effect of income on fertility. There are many differences in the distribution and type of income between resource-rich and resource-poor countries, so that if you look at ones with the same overall level of income, one will be higher in certain sub-populations and the other will be higher in other sub-populations. This would certainly be an interesting set of comparisons to make, but it might also be equally interesting to compare countries with different total income and same non-resource-related income, and probably other ways of slicing.
"I'm thinking of a comparison between countries A and B, where both have the same - or similar - per capita income I, so as to avoid the effect of income on fertility, but A is a resource-rich country while B is not."
I don't know of a comparison, but would Norway (North Sea Oil) vs. Sweden count? The per-capita GDPs are kinda different, but culturally the two countries are pretty similar.
I think you are going to find that most pairs have too many confounding variables. Switzerland and the UAE have similar per-captia GDPs, but the differences aren't just resource-rich vs not.
And the current number of countries is "small" with a large spread in per-capita GDPs so your list of candidates is likely small, too.
Japan vs Korea (including the north) might count a little bit? But, again, confounding variables ...
From beginning to end, Unfrosted is constructed with the intricacy of Seinfeld’s stand-up bits. Taken as a sequence of five-minute segments it’s wonderful, and there are resonances among and mid- and long-range connections among those segments. But you can’t carry an hour and 20-minute film on watch-making intricacy alone. There’s got to be a compelling story, a plot. Oh, we’ve got lots of plotting: Kellogg’s vs. Post, Big Milk vs. Big Cereal, Cuban sugar vs. Puerto-Rican sugar, Russia vs. America, mascots vs. Kellogg’s, and all the while NASA’s shooting for the moon. What holds that together? Pop-Tarts
And that’s not enough. As I noted in my original review, “You can’t take a Godzilla toy, hook it up to an air-pump, and expect to inflate it into a world-destroying comedic monster.” Unfrosted in meticulously crafted, but unfocused and rambling.
Pop-Tarts themselves exist at the right scale for a meticulously-crafted stand-up bit, which is where the movie started, as a stand-up bit. But in a feature-length film Pop-Tarts are reduced to being a MacGuffin. “MacGuffin” is a term of art that means – I’m quoting the dictionary on my computer – “an object or device in a movie or a book that serves merely as a trigger for the plot.” The statue in The Maltese Falcon is a classic example. It turns out to be junk, but it motivates the action.
Eh, I enjoyed unfrosted. It's not the greatest movie ever and like you said the long term plot doesn't quite work, but it's fun enough to make for a good short movie.
I recently got a combined washer-dryer (the GE Profile series) and though I haven't had it long enough to conclusively judge the mold issue, I strongly suspect that the drum being throughly dried immediately after washing will help significantly.
Mostly I just like spreading the gospel of this thing -- I put my laundry in at night and wake up with it clean AND dried? Crazy.
I've never had an issue of mold in my front-loading washer, but I've always just left the door and detergent containers slightly ajar. My washer is about 10 years old at this point.
I think there are two main arguments for front-loaders.
One is space concerns. If you're in a tight unit and you need stacked units, you have to go front loader.
The other is water usage. Front loaders have an easier time making sure all the clothes get equal exposure even with lower water levels, so they have an easier time meeting whatever efficiency standards apply (for purposes of tax credits or regulations or whatnot).
There are top loaders that spin the washing drum the same way that front loaders do (around a horizontal axis, like a wheel). That should eliminate the water usage difference. However, they're probably more like front loaders in terms of mold, noise and so on, too.
Like others said, keep the door of the washer ajar and run a sanitizing cycle regularly to avoid mold. I've been using front loaders for over a decade, never had any mold problems.
LG makes excellent front loaders, for example, WM4000 model.
I never had mold in a washing machine until I got a front-loader. I think this is because the water doesn't sit in a place vulnerable to mold; it drains out completely every time. And I think the top-loader doesn't seal completely, allowing any water to evaporate; front-loaders must have water-tight seals.
I'm a philosophy teacher and I'm thinking of writing about video games. Although I'm passionate about the subject, I suffer from scruples: shouldn't I rather use my energy studying more important subjects, such as ethics? Do you think that devoting years of one's intellectual life to working on video games is a bad use of one's time?
I would think that once you've gone the route of studying philosophy, while also being concerned with whether what you're doing is of greater value, you should be quite open to thinking that a lot of the value your work provides will be through the higher-order effects of how your work shapes the thinking of someone whose work shapes the thinking of someone whose work shapes the thinking of someone who does something really quite directly valuable.
Was Frege's clean delineation of the difference in semantic content between co-referring names particularly important in its own right? Hard to say, but it was very important for motivating him to develop quantificational logic properly, which was then extremely important for the word of Tarski, Turing, and Gödel, with all of its indirect effects through automated computing machinery.
I think it's very valuable to think about Philip Kitcher's 1990 paper, "The Division of Cognitive Labor" (https://www.jstor.org/stable/2026796). He argues that it is very valuable for the scientific researchers in a field to be distributed among different research paradigms, including some working on the paradigms that are unlikely to bear fruit, rather than having everyone work on the most likely paradigm, because it's valuable for society to have that chance of great success if the unlikely thing turns out to work. I think the same thing applies when thinking about the value of different fields of research, and not just different paradigms within a field - it's a good thing that not everyone is working on cancer cures and AI systems (or whatever one thinks the most directly beneficial subjects are). Kitcher argues that a lot of the incentive structure of academia is actually fairly well-designed to distribute people in good ways between these fields, even if these incentives seem perverse from a purely locally truth-maximizing or utility-maximizing metric.
Incidentally, have you read Thi Nguyen's book /Games: Agency as Art/? (https://global.oup.com/academic/product/games-9780190052089) It won the APA book prize a couple years back, and I think for very good reason. Even though games feel like a frivolous topic, they actually provide a really good lens through which to view core phenomena like agency, motivation, etc. I think that a lot of epistemologists should be reading chapter 2 of that book, about how goals consciously adopted for one purpose can be important for achieving another purpose. (It's no fun to play a game like Calvinball where the only rule is "try to have fun", but it can be lots of fun to play a game like Twister where you adopt these completely nonsensical goals of putting your hands and feet on particular colored circles. You end up having the most fun when someone fails to achieve the goal, but only when everyone is really trying.)
Not to say that work on video games is only valuable when it directly results in a book with these sorts of wide-ranging philosophical impacts, but rather that Nguyen read and digested a lot of work on games (and dance, and cooking, and art, and other things) and turned all of that into bigger implications for philosophy generally, and this sort of somewhat more obviously valuable project depends on other people doing all these somewhat less obviously valuable projects.
*Creating* video games might be simple artistic creation, or might be like brewing bathtub meth, depending on one's point of view. But *studying* video games seems like a completely reasonable thing for an academic to do, especially if you have passion for the subject. They exist, they are part of the world, and they need to be understood.
Depends on what the goal is that you would hope to achieve with such a project. For example, adjunct professor of History and huge nerd Bret Devereaux of https://acoup.blog/ fame aims to provide a public-facing educational outlet that frequently combines his profession with all kinds of popular works of media such as video games, movies, TV shows, and/or books, or public perception of historical topics in general. He also wants to drum up political support for ailing History departments in US universities that way, a topic which I suspect also looms over Philosophy departments. Finally, his blog has, through consistency (a post each Friday without fail) and quality, attracted enough readers that he found establishing a Patreon site worthwhile. If any or all of those goals appeal to you too, you should absolutely go for it.
A lot of people play a lot of video games, they're an influential art form, they're a big business, they have a big impact on children, they get brought up in political discussion from various angels.
There's plenty of ethically relevant things to write about video games, from the easy utils of just giving a lot of people more enjoyment from a major source of their entertainment and enrichment, to pushing for a major industry that affects our children and culture to be more ethical and better.
Also, very few people will read something that's just on the abstract philosophy of ethics. Lots of people will read something that introduces fundamental concepts from the philosophy of ethics while talking about video games they enjoy. No matter what you're writing about, an audience is always an opportunity to educate.
Is there something special about Video Games here, or is the more general question "Should I spend my time just writing on a form of art, or should I just focus on the more traditional topics that philosophers across history have written about?".
Because as a form of art, Video Games are as good as or better than many, the question doesn't change much if you replaced it with "Writing about films" or "Writing about theatre". As a matter of fact, Video Games are way more interesting from a philosophical perspective because its interactivity is unprecedented and allow fundamentally new questions to be asked. You simply can't reach the level of immersion that even the most mediocrely-graphic-ed and mediocrely-written game can induce in its player(s) in any other art form, in my very humble opinion.
This decision depends on a lot of things: Are you doing this unpaid, or are you going to get paid (but must convince those who pay you that studying video games is worthwhile)? Full time or just a hobby? Will the output be visible and/or published, or just for satisfying your curiosity?
> shouldn't I rather use my energy studying more important subjects, such as ethics
But why not both? You can explore a subject as vast as ethics from a myriad of perspectives. Video Games are a massive social phenomenon and a cultural innovation that offers plenty of question. For online games, there are the ethical questions raised by interacting with strangers as an anonymous stranger, and what kind of behavior this encourages and emphasizes. I recall a Hacker News comment once where (someone who claims to be) an Australian commented on how Filipinos and Filipinas have an absolutely cut-throat style of competition that ruins any game, and that this is ultimately traceable to how their society changed in the last couple of years (less jobs and opportunities for an ever-growing population). If this anecdote is correct, video games offer a micro-cosmos that amplifies and zooms in on existing ethical questions and tensions.
You can explore the ethics of blood and gore, and what it means to play games we fundamentally disagree with. For one example, the Call of Duty franchise in its Modern Warfare arc is an unbridled and unapologetic celebration of interventionism and the sort of pointless wars that the US military is most famously fond of since Vietnam, but they are also one of the finest pieces of art I have ever experienced in my life, their cutscenes play in my head for no reason at random times. What does it mean for a pacifist to love war games? What kind of moral statements or commitments (if any) are pressing a bunch of keys on the keyboard and moving the mouse making? Those are all very interesting questions.
Studying fiction can be as serious or as silly as you make it to be. For an extreme special case, consider Theology, a study of fiction whose scholars take themselves extremely seriously and debate endlessly over the finest minutia. The Abrahamic stories are not the most interesting or well-written stories I have seen - although there are some gems in there - but it doesn't matter: they're influential in shaping how billions of people have thought and continue to think about hundreds of topics from women to war to love to death to food, and so their scholars take those stories very seriously.
Video Games have also influenced at least many hundreds of millions on at least dozens of topics till now, they are credited with starting at least one major decade-long cultural war, they are a multi-billion Sports and Entertainement industry that whole countries like Saudi Arabia are rushing to make bank on. All of this, and they have only been around for something like 0.1% of the time that Abrahamic religions have been around for. Measured purely in the ratio of influence/size, that's impressive.
You probably have more insightful and original things to say about video games than about ethics in abstract. Do the thing you are good at.
> Do you think that devoting years of one's intellectual life to working on video games is a bad use of one's time?
Division of labor is the key to prosperity. If all of us stopped doing anything else and started writing books on ethics, we would soon starve to death. Do you have a comparative advantage at writing books on ethics? (You may have a comparative advantage at writing about the video games *and* ethics.)
I considered the path of philosophy teacher/professor before giving it up. I think that my advice in this space would be to just do what you want. That's not a rigorous or philosophical answer, but I think it's a realistic one. Most philosophers (the vast majority) do not make huge or meaningful contributions to the field, and it seems to me to be self-defeating to deprive yourself of the opportunity to pursue an opportunity that you find interesting to instead pursue something that you may find less interesting on the very small chance that your contributions may be significant to the field at large. The hits of philosophy are huge (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Bentham, Russell, Rawls, Parfit, etc.) but between the hits are comparatively large numbers of philosophers tha worked really hard just to be forgotten. All of that is to say, in light of those odds, I think that the difference in expected value between doing video game philosophy or something more traditional, like ethics, is actually probably pretty small.
This could be read as a pessimistic take, but I would instead read a sort of optimism into it. You get to have your cake and eat it, too, in a sense. I would also like to add that I did sort of smuggle in my own way of decision making into my answer; maybe you disagree with following expected value (i.e. there's some grander duty to really think about questions like ethics, which have the potential to be more universal, than there is to think about games, which seem to have limited appeal, even in ideal circumstances). Finally, depending on your situation, the games thing may just be a better route for you in terms of getting published (and tenure). There's already philosophy on games generally, but I don't think it's as robust as ethics/meta-ethics/whatever. You could pretty easily build on the existing literature and dominate the field. Plus you could get really smart people into philosophy (i.e. by using video games to explain questions in ethics, aesthetics, value theory...).
Absolutely not. Suppose your goal is to do a lot of good in the world.
The good of studying ethics -> I guess you know more about ethics? best-case scenario you write a book or make some major point that really resonates with people and so you influence the world in a macroscopic way. This almost never happens and seems really hard. Likely out come is that you slightly-positively influence a few people in conversations. I doubt it actually makes you _more ethical_, because you already have the moral intuitions that lead you to want to study ethics, so you're not going to get those from studying it. Maybe you are like slightly better at trolley problem type decisions? But honestly I that just comes out in the wash; ethics are too fuzzy for fine-grained detailed calculations to make a large difference in the world.
The good of making video games -> well naively one might say there isn't any. But the fact that it is *hard* to quantify the moral value of making art, doesn't mean there isn't any. In fact I'd argue that the moral value of art is huge; it is the entire point of art; all the great art, especially great literature, was valuable and widely-appreciated precisely because it had a moral effect. Either it injects new ideas into the water supply, or it shows new perspectives that certain people are looking for, or it gives substance to their anxieties or tensions in understanding the world, or it makes them feel empathized and therefore less alone, or it shows them parts of their world they can treasure, maybe by casting their daily life in a good light, showing them lovely emotions, gives them hope for changing things, reminds them how to enjoy the small things, or maybe it shows them how to understand the things that threaten them, lets them reckon with their enemies and dangers... or maybe it just gives them some enjoyment in their downtime, lets them pass the days of an otherwise stressful life in a way that gives them joy.
Like yeah, if the game you would make is some stupid mobile casino game, skip it. But if you're drawn to making a work of literature? or a piece of immersive performance art? Even doing that badly is a much high moral +EV than reading about ethics. Reading about ethics by definition does not have a positive outcome--you'd be kicking the can down the road, hoping for a positive outcome from some unspecified act of creation _after_ you do it. Whereas making art has a positive outcome _directly_, because it's an act of creation _now_.
While the area of ethics might be more impactful, it's also very crowded. Video game philosophy is very neglected, so I think there might be low-hanging fruit left.
Why not try it out and see if it resonates with you and your audience?
How do you determine which subjects are more or less important?
I might not be philosophically minded enough to tackle this, but I'd argue that being passionate about the subject is as important as it gets, and no rational argument can - or should - change that.
The thing I found unethical about video games is they're addictive. Specially for kids. I know one who does nothing else.
One way you could do great service to such kids is by helping their parents understand this and educate them on how to cure them of this addiction, using insights you have.
You could also educate people on how to avoid this addiction.
I think you could make a different case game by game. If you're talking about developers who just made mario or something, and it's "addictive" in the sense of being fun, with "I can't put it down/stop consuming" as a side effect the way a page-turner of a novel can be, I don't think there's much case to be made.
But if "addictiveness" is a design feature you're aiming directly at, implementing gatcha mechanics, pings to remind players that they haven't played in a while, etc. If you're design process looks more like casino design aimed at keeping players in the app where they can be monetized than it does like writing a good novel or movie where your audience wants and loves to be there, I think there comes a point where you can call it unethical design, especially if your target market is children.
Not sure - I think I'm at the "I'm confident I can make a case that X is unethical, but still being very careful before making concrete policy proposals about it" step for now. Might read up a bit and see if there are any organizations with good ideas I can glom on.
It's an interesting coincidence that Jonathan Haidt's book is being discussed elsewhere in the thread - that had some proposals (phone free schools, age-gated social media, etc) that are kitty-corner to this and I thought sounded good, but they're not spot on for this and were described mostly at a high level, so more food for thought than concrete fixes.
Interestingly, it's casinos that took a page from the tappy game mechanics to increase the addictiveness of gambling.
If you're looking to make an impact, aim at the unscrupulous nature of apps that are designed to unbalance your life and foster an unhealthy relationship to your device so they can squeeze a few bucks out of you. I wonder how much improved human flourishing we'd find if we could eliminate the tappy game phenomenon.
Games are designed to be fun, both in the short term and in the long term. Most things in life are not, especially not in the short term and kids are notoriously bad at thinking ahead.
Not all games are designed to be fun. Some are designed to make money, with various ways of supporting that, such as beautiful graphics, leader-boards, competitiveness, etc.
I hate games designed to make money, and wish people would look at that more when evaluating games, as to whether it is actually fun to play instead of the latest thing or something.
The two are not exclusive, but of course you can only optimize one, and anything that involves multiplayer or mtx invariable maximazes the money making.
Still, unless the game does a good enough job in fun department it is not going to make any money, and that baseline game is usually enough of a trap intself for some people.
All the money-making schemes that are built on top of it of course make things a lot worse, usually.
But even a single player game with no competitive content and no mtx can trap a kid for years if it's fun enough.
I don't think so, computer games have gone from not existing to taking up a huge amount of the worlds bandwidth in a very short space of time, so their impact is really underserved intellectually.
When and why did it become religiously important if people believe it not? As I understand e.g. ancient Greek religion or Old Testament Judaism, the important thing was that you did the right rituals and behaved honourably and all was well. But then we get to 300 AD and suddenly people are having fights over obscure questions of trinitarianism and what people believe in their hearts is suddenly really important. What happened? Was it "the Axial age"? Mystery cults? An unique Christian thing? Has doctrine always been important but it's harder to see in the sources? If anyone has a book recommendation or article I'd be super interested!
At various times, certain sects of Pure Land Buddhism have been effectively faith-based. The rough idea was that if you say the right 3 words even once, with enough faith, the bodhisattva Amitabha will guarantee that you will be reborn in the Pure Land, where you will inevitably achieve enlightenment. So one practice was to recite the words, over and over again, as sort of a meditation, in hopes that one of the recitations would be sufficient. And as I recall, in a few cases there were also more violent means used to encourage unwilling people to say the 3 words, in extremis, but I forget where I read that.
Namo Amida Butsu. You're likely referring to Jodo Shin Shu, which is currently the most popular form of Buddhism in Japan. It is an extremely simplified version of Pure Land, often reduced to reciting the nembutsu (the phrase at the beginning of this post). It has a fascinating history, going from being effectively outlawed for its tendency to inspire peasant revolts (the Ikko-Ikki), to a few centuries later effectively being the state religion with mandatory enrollment at the local temple functioning as a sort of census of the commoners. Of note, when becoming an official state religion it was deliberately adjusted over the years to make it a more competitive religion with Christianity by offering things like weddings, funerals, and weekly services with sermons etc, mimicking the structure of Christianity while retaining Buddhist cosmology.
Which mentions that it persisted in various places, including Satsuma, up until the Meiji Restoration. That of course makes me wonder if it had anything to do with the Satcho Alliance to overthrow the Shogunate, but I don't see anything on Wikipedia. It would make a cool "Da Vinci Code"/"Assassin's Creed" style revisionist history, though!
"Once a monk declined this gift, saying that he had no faith in Amitābha, and that it would be hypocritical for him to chant the name. This caused a crisis in Ippen's thinking [...] This doubt was resolved during a trip to Kumano, where a manifestation of Amitābha assured him that faith was immaterial; the Buddha's power was indeed enough to bring beings to rebirth."
Buddhism as it emerged in the Axial Age didn't really care about the bigger philosophical questions. You were a Buddhist if you agreed with the Four Noble Truths of Suffering and the Eightfold Path to escape suffering. Of course, Buddhism spawned a fabulous effluorescence of philosophical inquiry during the first half of the first millennium CE. But with rare exceptions, during its 2600-year history, it's been fairly tolerant of other religions and of its heresies.
You said it yourself, "if you agreed with the Four Noble Truths of Suffering and the Eightfold Path to escape suffering". Those are questions of belief. If Buddhism didn't care about belief and was oriented towards right practice, instead of what you wrote it would be something like "as long as you did the right kind of meditation".
The take that I like the best was that the 4 noble truths are like a doctor's prescription: this is the disease, this is the cause, this is the cure, and here's your prescription. If you don't think you suffer from the disease, that's fine, you can go about your life normally. If you do think you suffer from the disease, then think about it, maybe give it a try, and see if it works for you. They're not articles of faith, they're a working hypothesis. The sect I was involved with had no faith involved whatsoever. Despite being mystical, it was very empirical and treated all the supernatural elements as metaphor.
But one of the other main functions of the 4 noble truths is to identify who is a Buddhist and who isn't. A lot of the early structure of Theravada Buddhism can be seen in light of the surrounding Hindu practice, and its periodic gurus who'd form new and exciting sects. These could cause problems like social unrest, and one thing the rules accomplished was to make it clear that Buddhism was not a problem. They're not coming for your women, they're not a sex cult, they don't want parents to abandon children, they do have forms of practice which are compatible with everyday life. That sort of stuff. People can take parts of Buddhism and go off and do their own thing, but then they aren't Buddhists, so all the pitchforks and torches should go to those people over there doing their own thing, and not bother us Buddhists over here.
Hmmm. The first noble truth is that we suffer. Note that it doesn't say we suffer all the time (though some Buddhists seem to interpret it that way). That statement sounds to me like it's verifiably true — and thus it's not an opinion or a belief — unless you think it's possible to live without feeling pain, loss, and fear at some point in one's life. The other three truths and the eightfold path follow from that first premise. And the Buddha said you don't have to believe him or in his self-help formula He urged his followers to test his system out for themselves. No one was burned at the stake for not buying into his system.
But having said that, Buddhism has diverged into a bunch of different sects and traditions. The first Sangha that I belonged to was made up of people from diverse traditions. After I moved away I never found a Sangha with that sort of ecumenical spirit. I hopped around between different groups, and I noticed that people were uncomfortable if I mentioned how different groups did things. All the groups I encountered were sort of insular, and they all felt they were practicing Buddhism the right way.
One aspect to consider is that Christian identity is determined *entirely* by belief. Judaism was the religion of a particular ethnic group; even today there is basically no Jewish evangelism. I think they're actually opposed to the notion, and "conversion" generally happens only for someone who is marrying a Jew. Christianity, in contrast, seeks to proselytize the entire world. So if being a Christian is determined by what you believe, it's important to have those beliefs be generally clear and agreed upon. Otherwise you end up with 2 groups of "Christians" who don't actually believe the same things, and therefore have no connection to each other. Doubly so when communication is slow and you're going to be sending missionaries as far away as Gaul, Ethiopia, India, central Asia, etc; you have to have all those things nailed down quickly.
Additionally, Christianity was somewhat unique at the time in its unwavering belief that there were no other gods (Judaism also had this belief, as far as I know, but they rarely had enough power for it to matter). Once Christianity took over the Roman Empire, it became much harder to sustain the idea of "keep your existing gods, just also pay tribute to ours" that had been the status quo. In this context, performing rituals to other gods and to the Christian one makes no sense--if you believe in Christianity, you have to give up the old rituals.
One last difference between Christianity and other religions (probably tying back to point 1) was, well, their entire conception of the divine. In Christianity, God is an omnibenevolent entity who primarily asks for your faith, and wants you and all other humans to willingly join him in heaven after you "die" on Earth. He also knows what you truly believe, regardless of what you say or do. In other religions, gods are capricious, jealous, selfish, and limited. They care about whether they're given respect and sacrifice, but may not even know what worshippers are thinking. They give and take away Earthly rewards seemingly at random and with unclear motives. Faith just matters to Christianity more than rituals.
It's also worth noting that religious doctrine was important in the past. For example, one Egyptian pharaoh attempted to replace the existing religion with one of his own invention (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akhenaten#Atenism), which caused a great deal of strife over 1300 years before Christianity. This new religion did involve replacing rituals as well as belief, but it seems clear that the people of the time did actually care *who* they were worshipping and what that god did.
I'm not a Christianity expert, but from what i remember from the old testament I am pretty sure that it is a very early Christianity move (by Paul?) - an explicit replacement of Torah observance by Faith in Jesus, of the sacrifices in the (already destroyed anyway) Temple by the death of Jesus...
I'd agree, I'd add that the Christian move also sheds light on some events in the Old Testament too - was Moses only interested in ritual when he saw the Israelites worshipping the golden calf? Or was he interested in ritual as an act of faith (or, sacrilege)?
I wouldn't say "sheds light". At most, "suggests reinterpretation ".
I also think that "being only interested in ritual" was somewhat strawmanned by Christianity. Some "rituals" are arbitrary, but some make at least internal sense. Worshipping the golden calf was an act of unfaithfulness in the sense that cheating on your wife is, and is very different from just thinking about other woman.
Sorry I wasn't clear - for me any ritual qua ritual will always have some implicit beliefs behind it, certainly for Moses the Law was a visible act of faith in the true God whereas worshipping the golden calf was a visible act of unbelief.
Oh, then I generally agree - except I think it was more of a loyalty issue, and not of belief as such. So maybe not "implicit belief" but "implicit value/virtue". Do you agree?
Also, I don't see it as a contribution of Christianity.
Oh, then I generally agree - except I think it was more of a loyalty issue, and not of belief as such. So maybe not "implicit belief" but "implicit value/virtue". Do you agree?
Also, I don't see it as a contribution of Christianity.
Paul's letters are worth a read - on the one hand he's defending some liberalising of the Law (circumcision, dietary requirements), on the other hand he's saying this liberalisation is actually a re-disovery of the Law as an act of faith.
Judaism & Islam are/were legalistic communitarian religions with a heavy emphasis on orthopraxy. Christianity took a more philosophical/theological approach (influenced by Greek philosophy), and particularly in the form of Protestantism emphasized individual orthodoxy over ritual. This may be a W.E.I.R.D. thing.
Islam is very heavy on believing, much much more than any modern or historically recent form of Judaism.
The very first cornerstone of Islam, and the first thing that a new convert to Islam must do, is saying "I testify [i.e. believe, and publicly declare so] that there is no God but Allah, and that Muhammed is the messenger of Allah". Islam also vehemently denies even the most remote possibility that Muhammed is not the last messenger, a "Muslim" who believes in the possibility of other messengers after Muhammed will be declared an Infidel by all Muslims I know, even if they are otherwise identical in how they worship and practice Islam to those Muslims.
Not necessarily born, just entering it by any means. Even if you just converted.
Islam is by far one of the worst of the 3 Abrahamic religions, rivaled only by very extreme Christian denominations like Evangelicals. It combines the worst praxis from Judaism with the worst theory from Christianity, all in one shitty package.
I suppose I look at religions as archives of texts, practises, rituals, arguments, stories. Every archive at some point needs a retention policy. That policy can be more or less philosophical but it can't avoid being more abstract than the things it is organising, and it can't completely avoid questions about fundamentals - what are the key texts/rituals of our faith?
Most believers in any religion don't know enough about the dogma to have strong feelings one way or the other. It is still true nowadays, when practically everyone is literate. It was probably much worse at the times when absolutely majority could not even read.
People who were arguing about obscure questions of dogma were also mostly people in positions of power, which often involved power struggles between them. So I would not take dogmatic arguments at the face value, really.
I don't think it's the whole story - some of the arguments probably were about beliefs and the dogma, but it surely played a role.
I also notice that any surviving religion has different alive branches and often even more variations that did not survive, and often surviving branches played an active role at the death of the ones that did not make it. And when the history allows us to zoom in enough to analyze it, it's not at all rare to find less-than-pure motives there, too.
FWIW, Buddhism does make quite a big deal of belief. Theravadins have the Three Characteristics, and Tibetans tweak them into the Four Seals (terminology varies because there is no universal translation of the original Pali or Sanskrit terms). And of course everyone has the Four Noble Truths.
I'm not Christian, my understanding of ancient and medieval Christianity is that what the common person believed was considered really, really important. It comes up a lot. One can hardly deny that these issues had become way more important from Christianity on.
The point of the Credo (meaning "I believe") being a prayer or a part of liturgy was to make sure that everyone knows what they are supposed to believe. I believe this, I believe that.
Just by googling for a few minutes I've found this description of early baptism, (which references the Apostolic Tradition, a book from either the 3rd or 4th century):
A typical procedure would follow the lines set out in the Apostolic Tradition ascribed to Hippolytus—‘And when he who is to be baptised goes down into the water, let him who baptises lay his hand on him saying thus. “Dost thou believe in God the Father almighty?” And he who is being baptised shall say. “I believe”. Let him forthwith baptise him once, having his hand laid upon his head. And after this let him say, “Dost thou believe in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, Who was born by the Holy Spirit from the Virgin Mary, Who was crucified under Pontius Pilate and died, and rose again on the third day living from the dead, and ascended into the heavens, and sat down at the right hand of the Father, and will come to judge the living and the dead?” And when he says. “I believe”, let him baptise him a second time. And again let him say. “Dost thou believe in the Holy Spirit, in the holy Church, and the resurrection of the flesh?” And he who is being baptised shall say, “I believe”. And so let him baptise him the third time.’
See? I believe this, I believe that. I would be very surprised if you can find anything like this from before Christianity.
The last seems most likely to me. Our written records on a lot of ancient religions are spotty and vague at the best of times, and our understanding a synthesis of a broad tradition rather than the beliefs of a specific time and place. Recordkeeping for Christianity is an order of magnitude more complete, which gives us enough detail to actually see the arguments.
Religion without doctrine, religion that doesn't care about what people believe in their heart, exists even today - just look at Shinto - therefore it's quite plausible that some pre-Christian religions were like that.
Our records may be spotty but if belief had been as important in pre-Christian Greece and Rome as it was in Christianity, it would show up in the sources we have.
I agree with that. For Medieval Cat, there happens to be a book review on "Egypt's Golden Couple" in the current contest. This is on the Amun/Aten controversy in Ancient Egypt during the reign of Echn-aton (formerly Amen-hotep IV). From the record it's impossible to fully tell apart the political and religious parts, but it's at least partly a controversy about obscure questions like whether the Pharaoh "brings about cosmic order (maat)" or "lives in cosmic order". Questions that have political implications, but obscure questions nonetheless.
Probably the Neo-Babylonian Empire (Nebuchadnezzar) and its fall by Cyrus the Great also had religious aspects to them. From wikipedia:
"Religious policies introduced by the final Babylonian king Nabonidus, who favoured the moon god Sîn over Babylon's patron deity Marduk, eventually served as a casus belli for Persian king Cyrus the Great, who invaded Babylonia in 539 BC by portraying himself as a champion of Marduk divinely restoring order to Mesopotamia."
Perhaps this is less obscure and more political. I haven't found a book review on that matter yet.
That's because overuse of em dashes leads to chaos — you can't just go around placing vaguely-connected clauses next to each other with no connecting tissue.
I prefer the en-dash – whose typography flows more naturally to my eye when surrounded by spaces. Many but not all manuals of style demand otherwise with an em-dash—it must be used in a "closed" form without spaces. I find this construction distracting, but adding spaces would make it particularly "heavy."
Fortunately, both characters are easy to type on systems that support a 'compose' key, which is naturally found on Unix- (Linux-) derived desktops and can be easily added on Windows desktops via the free 'WinCompose' utility.
Agreed. There seems to exist a US-UK divide on the matter (with Oxford breaking the American em-dash way). On the other hand, I do prefer to use a hyphen instead of an en-dash for compound adjectives (Sapir-Whorf as opposed to Sapir–Whorf) which is technically wrong, but visually more appealing to me.
TIL that there are different types of dash with different names. I had no idea.
But what do you call the normal dash, the one you have just used in the middle of the word en-dash? I have always used that one for all grammar purposes - for example, I'm using it now - see? The one that is right there on my keyboard and doesn't require me to press multiple keys at once. Am I doing something horribly wrong by using it for everything? Why do I have to press multiple keys, when one key does the job?
I believe "en" and "em" refer to the widths of the characters 'n' and 'm', and how wide the dashes are. How they're used is a different question. En-dashes can be used as minus signs, or hyphens, or with spaces as an ASCII-easy replacement for whatever the normal use of an em-dash is.
I usually call the - character a 'hyphen'. Note the same character gets used in math formulae as the 'minus sign' as well, but it's the same character code either way.
The ASCII-derived - is actually called a “hyphen-minus”. There's a separate real minus sign (− instead of -) at U+2212 which is quite useful in prose because (given a suitable font) it matches the plus sign properly in length and vertical positioning, and then there's a separate unambiguous hyphen at U+2010 which is rarely used because the hyphen-minus is usually rendered as a hyphen in running text.
Isn't a minus sign usually longer than a hyphen but shorter than an em dash? I don't know if it's the same length as an en dash (but I don't know what an en dash is for anyway).
International Criminal Court issues arrest warrants for top Hamas and Israeli leaders, including Haniyeh and Netanyahu. Exceedingly unlikely to bring them to the dock, of course, but would seem to be a major development insofar as the discourse goes.
As others have noted, the ICC has requested warrants, not issued them. Presuming they are issued, the interesting one is Ismail Haniyeh. There is approximately zero chance that any Israeli government will ever extradite Netanyahu or Gallant; really this just means those two people can't have any more European vacations and all the people who already have 107 reasons to hate Israel will now have 108. Similarly, any hypothetical postwar Hamas leadership in Gaza is not going to extradite its own leaders, and if Israel winds up controlling Gaza then they're going to be taking any local Hamas leadership off to their own prisons (and interrogators).
But Haniyeh is based out of Qatar, and his job requires frequent travel to e.g, Turkey. So if the ICC issues a warrant and Qatar or Turkey then ships Haniyeh off to the Hague in chains, that would be a huge feather in the cap of the ICC and would establish them as an organization that is at least sometimes relevant. If Haniyeh has to flee to Iran for protection, that would be a lesser but still significant win for the ICC (and for civilization). If Haniyeh gets to continue going about his business, maybe without the European vacations, then the ICC looks weak and ineffectual and Israel would be able to say "yeah, we'll get back to you on Netanyahu when you've dealt with Haniyeh, which you never will".
The cynic in me says that the most likely outcome is that warrants are only issued against the other four, with some lame excuse for not including Haniyeh because they know that really a warrant for Haniyeh will not be honored and will thus make the ICC look useless.
This would make sense even beyond any cynical optics. There are reasonable grounds to believe that Haniyeh and the Qatari station did not know about the October 7th attacks.
Most prosaically, operational security. Very few people were told at all. The mission chief/Hezbollah liaison in Beirut was apparently phoned thirty minutes prior to commencement. There's a video clip floating around of Haniyeh and others showing surprise at seeing the attacks on the news, followed by a genuflection in gratitude. Which, sure, could be a piece of theatre to put themselves in the clear, but a) they're not especially motivated to avoid culpability; b) they'll never be in the clear anyway in the eyes of the one country that might on any given day decide to kill them.
All that secrecy backfired, to an extent, because Iran and Hezbollah were not happy about being blindsided by something so big. There are other reasons for keeping their powder dry, but this resentment contributed to their support being much less robust than what Hamas had hoped for.
That's the sort of factual question that we generally want to see hashed out in a court of law, at least once a judge has decided there's enough evidence to justify a warrant. So if someone is trying to make sure that trial doesn't happen, and if they succeed, that's not a good look for the court in question. Maybe it's not their fault, but it still makes them look weak and irrelevant.
The trials for Netanyahu et al were never going to happen, which also makes the ICC look weak, but "...OK, not actually up to moving an Immovable Object" is a level of weakness that still allows for good work to be done in other contexts. But Haniyeh, living in a country of which he is not a citizen and which seems to want to play the role of "honest broker" in Arab-Israeli affairs, would seem to be an ideal test case for whether the ICC can actually do anything useful.
**If** the arrest warrants are granted, they will be a huge deal and a big reason for optimism. I say """If""" because all media sources I have seen report this as "Seeking" or "Applying" for an arrest warrant without clarifying what this actually means, and according to other comments in this thread it means that other people will decide on whether or not to grant the warrants requested by the general prosecutor Kareem Khan.
All the recent headlines from hours ago go something along the lines of "Netanyahu's worst fear have come true, he is now officially a loser" along with an unflattering photo of him. So, despite International Pseudo-Law being complicated, and despite loyal attack dogs like the US and Germany potentially getting out the big guns for this to save their genocidal BFF, it does seem like it that yeah, this is a pretty terrifying thing to Israel and its politicians, which means it's a great thing for human rights enjoyers everywhere.
As a reasonable first-order heuristic, if a target is terrified of being shot by a weapon, the weapon that terrifies them is likely pretty effective. Herzog and all the underlings are already screaming in rage (despite the arrest warrants haven't been granted yet) on how oh their fucking god how dare you compare them with Hamas. That doesn't sound like the nonchalant reactions that we would expect if we were to believe those who like to think that the arrest warrants are a useless gesture. Israel has been behaving nonchalantly to reports about human rights violations and to resolutions by the UN general assembly since forever, so we know how that generally looks like, and this set of reactions isn't it. It's a very panicked set of reactions. It's something new.
What can anyone say, may this please please be the *start* of something. Kareem Khan is accusing Netanyahu and Gallant of engaging in extermination, that's the same charge being investigated by the ICJ, only against the whole of Israel and the IDF not specific persons. Let us all hope that whoever grants those arrest warrants does grant them and doesn't pussy out under the inevitable concentrated bullying that is coming.
Always hope for the best, always expect the worst.
"Herzog and all the underlings are already screaming in rage (despite the arrest warrants haven't been granted yet) on how oh their fucking god how dare you compare them with Hamas."
The Biden administration appears to have joined them, quite vocally.
Ironically, that might be the most concrete outcome of the prosecutor's move. The Bidenites get a small, costless opportunity to flaunt their pro-Israel credentials to help balance out whatever feeble pressure they might decide to apply.
Yeah, yet another bootlicking contest between the Republicans and the Democrats in the US gov to see who is most loyal to "onLy JeWiSh StaTe".
I can't wait to throw up in disgust at the sight of the submissive pieces of shit going through the rituals of willing slavery. Truly a sight to behold.
The page you linked has the prosecutor's application for warrants. Have they been granted?
Obviously jurisdiction is the biggest question here. The page you linked says that the court has asserted it's jurisdiction, but the statement is fuzzy on the grounds for doing so. It seems to be somehow asserting authority over Palestine and therefore, by the controversial terms of the treaty, over anyone at war in Palestine.
Presumably the belligerents will not cooperate in the handover of their leaders. And any attempt to enforce this claim to the court's jurisdiction over non-parties will be opposed by the U.S., Russia, and China. I wonder what the prosecutor is hoping to achieve here.
The main thing that the ICC arrest warrants will achieve is the prestige and legitimacy blow that 120+ countries (the signatories to the Rome Statute [1]) refusing to host, or ever interacting with diplomatically, or ever tolerating those to be arrested on their soil will deal. Those signatories include nearly all of Europe, Australia, all of South America, the majority of Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as Canada and Mexico.
Now theoretically, a country can just tell the ICC to fuck off and simply not comply, it can even claim that its security apparatus will deal with the fugitives itself (while not doing so), but when South Africa did so with Putin in 2022 or 2023, it was a huge deal and people kept bringing it up and being angry about it for months.
It's just more diplomatic friction for Israel, which have enough diplomatic friction as it is that their song contest team was being booed and heckled. It might also set a chain reaction, for example the ICJ judges might take it as a relevant input that the ICC thinks Netanyahu and Gallant, the head of state and defense minister, are engaging in extermination.
I mentioned this, there appears to be at least 2 instances of Putin and South Africa. In one, Putin visited South Africa and South Africa didn't enforce the ICC decision, which made it face international backlash. In another, Putin decided not to attend a BRICS summit out of his own accords, though probably influenced by South Africa quietly telling him to fuck off because they don't want trouble, possibly maybe.
As I said, anybody who understands the extent of the power of International Law and how nation states work shouldn't put too much unrealistic hope or expect crazy things like blue-clad UN personnel riding on white horses and powering through Tel Aviv to get Netanyahu to Justice. It's a purely diplomatic blow, Netanyahu - after the arrest warrant is granted, which people on HackerNews are saying the ICC panel has a track record of almost always granting - will be a fugitive in the eyes of 124 states. Those 124 states willingly said "Whoever the ICC deems a criminal, we will arrest" when they signed the Statute of Rome, and the ICC is on the verge of declaring Netanyahu a war criminal.
Whether the regimes of those countries like or not - and oh boy is scum like Geert Wilders going to rage so hard at this -, their official position - if the arrest warrant is granted - becomes that Netanyahu is whatever the ICC says he is and is not allowed on their sovereign land until he faces trial. Whether they follow through is an entirely different question.
This has more implications for the ICC than for either the discourse or real world politics, and I don't think anyone takes the ICC seriously enough for that to be notable.
If it's unlikely to accomplish anything concrete, then why is it a major development? It sounds, then, more like a talking point for whatever point of view you espouse.
It may not accomplish the arrest of any of these individuals, but if it means that these individually effectively can't visit half the countries of the world, then that's something concrete.
You are correct that it doesn't mean "nothing at all". But the combined facts that Putin has stayed in Russia and that the war in Ukraine continues seem to indicate, then, that if warrants are issued then nothing will change.
If anything, it may impede the peace process. Anyone wanting to talk will have to travel to Israel (I cannot see anyone traveling to Gaza to talk peace). It may entrench Israel's position, making them harder to move.
I did say "if anything". I still do not classify the development as anything "major".
Interesting point about this potentially making negotiations harder. But the leadership hasn’t been traveling personally to do the negotiations, have they? I thought it was representatives.
I suppose there’s also the question of how this shifts the political situation for the next elections in Israel. I would guess that anyone who would be turned against Netanyahu by this was already against him in the past few elections, and anyone who would turn towards him would already have turned towards him during his domestic criminal trials. But it’s hard to know for sure.
No, I mean whichever side you favor (or oppose), if you feel fervently enough about it, this would just be one more point to excoriate the opposing side. It won't convince anyone. In what sense is this different from any other fact, real or imagined, however obliquely relating to the subject, that makes it major?
I mean, I'm more against Israel, but I'm perfectly ok with them calling for the arrest of the Hamas leadership too, and think it's a really good point they're making.
I wonder about the not-ending excitement about the Northern lights; pictures flood my Notes timeline. Do people not understand what happened and what the causes were?
All the data are apparent, especially regarding consciousness and unconsciousness. If you are interested in this, please read my May 14th piece.
To save anyone else the trouble of reading this guy's blog, he believes that the auroras are caused by some kind of military experiment, and the Vatican is also involved somehow.
I understand that the post is too complex for you. You don't understand HAARP or what is going on in the world. But that is perfectly fine. Have a good time with your perception.
"On what grounds does an airline tell you how heavy your dog can be in the cabin?
You can't base the training of a dog on how much it weighs. Another example of moronic limits."
Are you familiar with the SF short story, "The Cold Equations"? That explains how it's not about weight = training, it's weight = fuel consumption. You have a lot of fake pseudo-science of the gibberish strain on your Substack, but if you're going to pretend that what you're presenting is based on Real Science, then at least try and understand the limits that you are criticising.
The heavier the dog, the more fuel is consumed to move that weight along with the weight of passengers, baggage, the aircraft itself, and the fuel. This is why airlines calculate weight and fuel economy, why there are baggage allowances and extra charges for going over them, etc. Cheap flights mean cutting costs as much as possible, and that means working out the minimum fuel you can get away with, and that means even things like yes, it does matter how big and heavy your dog is.
"Fuel burn is crucial to the efficiency of aircraft operation. Empirical analysis shows, that it takes on average ~ 0.2 kg fuel to transport 1 kg of weight over a distance of 1'000 km. It also takes an additional ~ 0.02 to 0.03 kg fuel per 1’000 km for every kg of weight added. This is known as the marginal fuel burn rate (MFB). The opposite is also true: a reduction in weight by one kg saves ~ 0.02 to 0.03 kg of fuel per 1’000 km or ~ 2 to 3 €cent respectively."
I also understand what happens when a rainbow appears, and when a solar eclipse occurs, but that doesn't make either of them less beautiful or breathtaking.
I mean, there's not a lot of mystery about what's going on with a waterfall or a big canyon, and yet, many of us also find those things wonderful to look at.
Question for people who think that (a) consciousness is a crisp phenomenon, well-defined, conceptually distinct from physical stuff, hard problem makes sense, etc., and also (b) are very confident that simulations are necessarily conscious (an in particular, equally conscious to the system they're simulating).
The question is, why do you think this?
To elaborate a bit, you can generally analyze a system on three levels of abstraction: the physical structure, the computational steps, and the input/output level (these are called marr's levels). If A is a simulation of B, then they will coincide on the input/output level, but that's really it. They don't have to have the same physical structure, obviously, but they don't even need to perform the same or even similar computational steps. In fact, the more detailed the simulation is, the more the computations performed by both systems come apart. E.g., suppose you simulate a brain on a digital computer; if the simulation computes what each atom does whereas the brain just computes with neurons, then the steps performed by both systems look very different.
And generally an equivalence on just the input-output level is considered not sufficient to make two systems be equally conscious. If it were, a large lookup table would be conscious, which most people don't think it is.
Hence the question -- why do you think a simulation has to be conscious? (Note again that I'm *not* asking people who think consciousness is just a computational abstraction anyway; I realize that in that case, the question isn't even meaningful.)
Sidenote: Integrated Information Theory is a formalized and functionalist theory of consciousness (arguably the only formalized functionalist theory that exists) and its math implies that digital simulations are not conscious. So the "functionalism implies simulations must be conscious" idea arguably scores 0/1 on empirical predictions, but I know that lots of people strongly believe it regardless.
>then the steps performed by both systems look very different.
From a particular vantage point at a particular scale, yes. But why should this perspective be privileged? A low level ideal simulation necessarily reconstructs the information/state dynamics of the real system at the level at or above the basic units being simulated. Why should some external coordinate system from which we note differences in causal dynamics play a role in determining what systems are conscious? It should be based exclusively on internal considerations. But internally, the real system and the simulation are doing the same thing.
Thanks, I think this kind of reply gets at the intuition that people have.
So the starting point I use is just the physical steps performed by the system. (This is also what IIT does.) If you think the starting point is the internal working of the system, how do you define this? Like, if consciousness is a real thing, presumably there would ultimately be a precise theory that tells you the consciousness of any input system. Can you gesture at how that would look like?
Maybe a different way to get at this question is that your internal pov ultimately has to be reduced to the external pov since you have to start with a physical description to figure out what the internal pov is, and I don't see how that works.
My starting point is the question: what can the system know on its own terms? The raw material for decision making is distinctions, the ability to discriminate one state from another. So the question is what are the distinctions the system is capable of? This orientation starts to get at the system on its own terms as a cognitive entity, independent of the perspective of an outside investigator, and even independent of the particulars of the system's construction.
For example, I consist of a brain with a very fine grained set of neural states that entail my mental states. But none of that is accessible to me; I do not know the state of any one of my neurons. I am blind to the distinction between neuron X in an actively firing state vs a quiet state. Most of the details of one's makeup visible from an external perspective are completely inaccessible to the system considered on its own terms. There is a space of possible distinctions that any cognitive system can access in principle. Anything outside of this space is utterly inscrutible. Call this the epistemic context of the system. The epistemic context defines the system's "cognitive self", the kinds of facts, distinctions, concepts, belief states, desires, intentions, etc the system is capable of. It is dependent on the organizational properties which constitutes the system, but is independent of the particulars of the implementation details beyond these organizational properties.
With this concept in hand, the physical implementation is mostly an aside to the workings of the cognitive self. Not irrelevant as the system needs a physical implementation of some sort, but highly constrained in the manner in which the details of the implementation can impinge on the workings of the cognitive self being instantiated. The internal point-of-view doesn't reduce to the external point-of-view precisely because the epistemic context is much constrained compared to the external context. The internal point-of-view is fully determined by the organizational principles that define its implementation, i.e. the nature of the information dynamics being instantiated. The causal particulars beyond that which defines the information dynamics are incidental.
Consciousness is relevant to this analysis as (in my view) consciousness is the manner in which state distinctions are accessible to the cognitive system on its own terms. Consciousness facilitates discriminations of the external and internal environment relevant to cognition. The particulars of the organization and the qualities of consciousness are such as to maximize intelligibility for decision-making. Why does space have a seamless 2.5D look to it? Because this maximally facilitates effective cognitive decision-making in a 3D world projected onto a 2D sensor plane. Presumably all phenomenal qualities are similarly an apex in facilitating effective cognition in some particular context.
"If it were, a large lookup table would be conscious, which most people don't think it is"
I assume you're thinking of a huge lookup-table for what the computer should do for every possible combination of sensory input and memory. Aside from being ridiculously infeasible, the problem with it is, "how do you fill in the entries in the lookup table?". The only apparent way would be to run some other kind of simulation for every possible input/memory combination to see what it does. But then you've just moved the question of consciousness to this other simulation. So "huge lookup-tables can't be conscious, lol" isn't actually such a knock-down argument.
Fwiw Eliezer also doesn't use it as such, he makes the "trace back" argument but then states at the end that a lookup table isn't conscious.
> Well, then it wouldn't be conscious. IMHO.
> I mean, there's got to be more to it than inputs and outputs.
But yeah, whether you think the lookup table is conscious or not, I don't see how the traceback or "its too big to fit into the universe" things are relevant
Eliezer gives a cell phone analogy. You have a conversation with a little device, and not knowing what a cell phone is, conclude that the device must be conscious. You're sort of right - there is a conscious being that you're conversing with. But unknown to you, the cell phone is not the physical locale of this being, but only a transmission device. Same for the lookup table.
But I think Eliezer misses a point when concluding that a randomly-generated lookup table that by coincidence happens to produce a sensible conversation would not actually be conscious. That's true, but is interesting only if we might have been inclined to think it is conscious. We normally think that if something has behaved like a conscious being, that it is likely to be conscious. But that's a simplification. Really, we think something is likely to be conscious if we think that (if not destroyed) it is likely to behave in the future like a conscious being. It's an inductive conclusion. But if we know that the lookup table was filled at random, we will not think that the future responses will be indicative of a conscious being, even if the past responses have seemed to indicate consciousness (because we know that that was just chance).
Well, what do you think does matter? What are you trying to argue for? You seem to be asking, "why do you think a simulation has to be conscious?", and questioning that based on the lookup table idea. But actually the lookup table idea doesn't refute anything interesting.
I don't understand the refutation of the GLUT. Your point was about locating consciousness in the creation process of a GLUT, and about ability to assess whether a GLUT will behave humanlike in the future. Neither seems to indicate that a GLUT itself is conscious, which is what matters. (And I guess about size of a physical GLUT, which also doesn't seem relevant.)
Umm... Since this is a thought experiment, and one is allowed to use hypotheticals which are completely unrealistic: What if the entries are filled in by capturing them from monitoring a human? ( Frankly, I'm not so sure that such a lookup table _isn't_ conscious, but I'm also sure that my intuition about such things breaks down many _many_ orders of magnitude before getting to a system with _that_ much embedded information... )
I think a lookup table doesn't have state. This means previous queries don't affect later queries. I just don't see how such a system could ever be called conscious.
Many Thanks! Hmm... Lack of state would indeed cripple it - but, I think, to the point where it couldn't pass the Turing test. There is an ambiguity in Radford Neal's
>I assume you're thinking of a huge lookup-table for what the computer should do for every possible combination of sensory input _and memory_.
[emphasis added]
If memory here _just_ means long term memory, like the frozen weights in an LLM, then, yes, that would severely cripple it, sort-of like an LLM with no context window. I don't think such a thing could come close to passing the Turing test.
On the other hand, if memory here includes short term memory as well as long term memory, then the system _does_ have state. I think that that is sufficient to make consciousness plausible again.
Perhaps, but to still call such a system a lookup table is kind of ridiculous. Yes, if you have an infinitely large lookup table prefilled with every possible input, you can do arbitrary "computation".
Consider: there is a real information difference in a reply that comes back immediately and one that is identical, but delayed. "Why did you hesitate?"
Chalmers argues for equivalence of computational steps implying equivalence of consciousness. This is basically the definition of functionalism but not relevant for simulations since they're only equivalent on the input/output level. (This is why I've mentioned marr's levels.)
People here are really into the pronatalism thing. I'm curious to hear your arguments.
I never wanted kids because (a) I'm too selfish to do a good job and too unselfish to do it anyway (b) I'm lazy and don't want to work hard...juggling the job and all the childcare stuff they want you to do nowadays and driving the kids to five afterschool activities...forget it! (c) I already bow and scrape all day to a boss, doing it to my wife when I come home doesn't sound like fun (d) I think I'd probably get divorced for any of the thousand reasons (including for fun) women do that nowadays and wind up paying alimony and child support to an ex-wife I hate and children I never see (e) I'm bad at the whole 'being sexy' thing and put off improving that way too long due to a combination of low self-esteem, second wave feminism in my teenage years, and general shyness and laziness (f) on account of (c)-(e) I genuinely resent the opposite sex at this point and don't want to get involved.
However, I'm 45 and just clocked over $3 million total assets (mostly index funds) as a result of years of hard work at a career I don't really care for. (I went to the secondhand bookstore to celebrate.) I have (based on all those 'calculate your life expectancy charts') an estimated 3-4 decades to live, and theoretically could retire if I wanted to. What I really want to do with the rest of my life is fight feminism, but there are very few avenues available for that which would actually be productive given financial constraints...it's not like I have a few billion to fund a think-tank. (Relax, I'm NOT Elliot Rodger...I don't believe in violence and that sort of thing would ultimately *help* the other side anyway due to the media coverage!) So...maybe just suck it up and bear the vile, degrading, cross of modern fatherhood? I mean, it's what I'm *supposed* to do according to every other culture in the world, right? Also, as the only child I hate to be the end of the line. Given my age I'd have to marry substantially younger, which increases the risk of divorce by a huge amount, but I could probably, if that's all I wanted to do with my life, produce grandchildren (probably with a woman no doubt looking to rip me off), even if half of them would be autistic by this point (and not in the fun 'Silicon Valley software engineer' way).
I don't know. Guys like Jacob Falkovich and Bryan Caplan and Malcolm Collins seem to think everyone should be having more kids (though Mr. Collins has hurt his credibility with the 'future police' thing), but I kind of feel like there are people who just shouldn't breed, and I'm one of them. It seems unfair to my parents, though, who really didn't do anything wrong. If I made it the only point of my life, I probably could produce grandchildren. I just don't want to. What do people think?
EDIT: Thank you for all the thoughtful replies (even the hostile ones!). I'm pretty much confirmed I am not going to have kids. I'm not going to use the word 'childfree' because I think it devalues parents, who are doing the ugly work of raising the next generation.
EDIT 2: Thanks to the lot of you for your support (one way or the other). I think it's time to stop hanging around here and do something worthwhile with my life (not to say that you who continue to hang around are not doing worthwhile things with yours!) Godspeed and I wish you all the best.
b) Ok, I see you don't use "childfree" - but I am one. I do want to emphasize that mariage and children do not have to be a package deal. If you are sure, as I am and was, that you do not want children, get a vasectomy. That takes children firmly out of the picture.
c) Re feminism: There have been several (4??) "waves" of feminism, and
1) There was a lot of variation from wave to wave.
2) There were lots of variations between what individual feminists _within_ each wave wanted
3) Not all women are feminists.
Personally, I'm perfectly happy with anyone who wants equal pay for equal work, and perfectly disgusted by misandrist control freaks. I can certainly sympathize with having a grievance against the latter, but remember that they are far from the only women in the population. I was married for 30 years to my late wife, and, while we had our frictions, feminism wasn't the cause of any of them.
Re pro-natalism. Yeah, the industrialized world's population is going to very very slowly shrink over the coming decades. The timescale is longer than AI advances, longer than climate change, longer than geopolitical churn. Writing from the usa, I'd suggest mostly ignoring it. ( Ok, if I were in South Korea this would look a bit more alarming. )
If you don't want to have kids, don't. If you don't like women, avoid them.
Congratulations to making lots of money! If you don't like your job, retiring seems like the right choice. If I had that much money, I would retire instantly.
> What I really want to do with the rest of my life is fight feminism, but there are very few avenues available for that which would actually be productive given financial constraints
What financial constraints? The most important thing you can buy is your own time, and $3M seems enough to buy you 8 extra hours every day. That would effectively *double* whatever free time you have left. If being political is how you choose to spend that time, you could read books, write blogs, meet people, record videos, give speeches, organize protests, etc.
Caplan's point, if I understand it correctly, is that *people who want to have more kids* simply should go ahead and do it. No need to worry about providing them expensive toys and universities, because their life outcomes will mostly depend on biology anyway, if you succeed to provide them a not-too-dysfunctional family. (So it seems that you are not the intended audience.)
> It seems unfair to my parents, though, who really didn't do anything wrong.
People who want to have grandchildren should try to have more than one child. Bad luck can happen to anyone, but the extinction of one's line is more likely with only one child. It is not fair to put the entire burden of their legacy on you.
I have to figure out the health insurance thing, but that's a good point. I actually doubt I will be very convincing politically, for the reasons others have stated (bitter people make poor spokesmen).
As you point out, I'm not Caplan's target audience (if I really need to worry what he says anyway).
Not knowing you, I'm agnostic on the question if you "should" be a parent, but since you asked for reasons to do it, based on what you said.
1. If being stuck in a bad marriage/with a bad divorce is that big of a deal to you, you can do surrogacy. At your wealth level it's probably more cost-efficient.
2. "What I really want to do with the rest of my life is fight feminism" Given that you're, by your own description (correct me if I'm wrong) an intelligent but uncharismatic guy with a bunch of money, having children who are similarly temperamentally disposed and which you can raise on your own values is probably one of the better ways to do so.
3. If your parents are alive, they'll probably be really happy if you have children.
4. "I'm too selfish to do a good job and too unselfish to do it anyway" means you are probably overeestimating the effort it takes to do "a good job".
5. You already don't enjoy your job, so what are the chances you'll enjoy raising your children even less?
I would think my little screed would be pretty good evidence I wouldn't, but of course that's a snapshot of a person at one point in time.
1.Haven't really looked into surrogacy. It strikes me as a terrible idea.
2. I doubt I could pass on my values, and they might change over 18 years of childrearing (i.e. having a daughter would likely cause me to place her welfare over my own).
3. They're alive. I've actually been avoiding them over my embarassment over this issue.
4. I mean...I guess? It just seems like a lot of work, and I'm kind of a spent force at this point.
5. It's unclear. It might well be more rewarding. But is it worth inflicting my crappy parenting on the kids?
> 4. I mean...I guess? It just seems like a lot of work, and I'm kind of a spent force at this point.
Dude, that makes it clear. Can you allow yourself once and for all to drop all these stories about what others expect of you, and just *take it easy*? Forget ideas, figure out what actually feels good to you and allow yourself to enjoy it. You've earned every right to it.
1. Why? It saves you a ton of time, effort and money finding and mantaining a relationship with a woman. It's expensive, but well within your means.
2. Why not? They're going to have half your genetic material, and spend their formative years with you.
3. I might be unusual in this, but I think that's a good incentive to have them (not just to make them happy, but because it'd be good for them)
4 & 5. Here I have to defer to you in your self-evaluation as "a spent force", but if you're smart and hardworking enough to be as successful as you are (yes, you got lucky with stock market timing, but eh), I believe child-rearing shouldn't pose that big of a challenge. Children have had happy childhoods in way worse conditions than you'd be able to provide without even trying, unless you're worried you wouldn't be able to perform to the standard of "not criminal negligence".
If I was in your shoes, I'd consider becoming a priest. No expectation of having kids, get to enjoy a position of local prestige in a patriarchal institution, and (in the US) you get to claim income going toward housing expenses as a tax-free allowance. Many denominations have programs to transition middle aged men looking to start a second career in the clergy.
Frankly, that's a big responsibility, priests are supposed to be shepherds of souls and I'm not in a position to be shepherding anyone, and I respect the Church too much to disgrace it with my presence.
It's a difficult topic so I'll try my best, apologies if it still comes out incoherent.
Your asking a bunch of internet commenters about this is a big part of your problem, which, I think, is that you don't know what you are. Bear with me for a moment:
- "People here are really into the pronatalism thing" - why do you care what other people think?
- "I already bow and scrape all day to a boss" - that particular choice of words is interesting... what exactly does bowing and scraping entail?
- "doing it to my wife when I come home doesn't sound like fun" - why do you think you will need to do this? Again, what exactly do you think these words describe?
- ""What I really want to do [...] is fight feminism" - why? is this somehow related to what you think you'd have to endure if you were married?
- "[...] *supposed* to do according to every other culture in the world, right?" - why do you care about what other people think?
-"Given my age I'd have to marry substantially younger" - why?
- "with a woman no doubt looking to rip me off" - why would you marry someone like this?
- "Jacob Falkovich and Bryan Caplan and Malcolm Collins seem to think everyone should be having more kids" - why do you care what other people think?
This is enough - there's a pattern of an argument with imaginary "others", filled with unquestioned assumptions about what these "others" want you to do and how terrible all of this would be.
What do you want? You, yourself, forget Caplan or your parents (your parents' happiness is not your responsibility, you're 45 y.o., it's your life). Forget big categories, clever words like "feminism", "natalism" "fatherhood", etc. You don't want to have kids? Fine, no one can force you. You don't want to marry? Fine, no one can force you. You don't want to work for a crappy boss? Don't, you have enough money to stop and figure out what's next.
Why seek strangers' approval for your life's choices? Stop that, above all.
You have a point. Why should I care what they all think?
Mostly I was somewhat sympathetic to rationalist points of view, and they all seem to be ranting lately about the fertility crisis, so I was curious what arguments they had, particularly since there seemed to be undertones of 'smart people aren't having enough kids'. I'm pretty sure now I shouldn't have kids.
The rationalist argument for having kids isn't said out loud all that often because it has undertones of the Horrible Banned Discourse.
In short, current fertility trends are claimed to be dysgenic, with smart people like you (who are in all likelihood going to be way above average parents) thinking they don't have what it takes or being unwilling to make the needed lifestyle changes.
On top of that, there's the (not really rationalist but rather humanist) argument that having lots of humans around is good - this is based both on economic arguments like competitive advantage and specialization, as well as considering the existence of conscious life a good in itself.
The memes that have taken hold in developed countries recently ("humanity is actually bad because patriarchy/capitalism/etc", "I don't want to birth a child that is doomed to live in a bleak future because of Trump/climate change", and so on) are abominations that should *not* be considered any sort of sensible baseline. You are alive because an unbroken chain of your ancestors went about the business of keeping the world populated. Pay it forward. *That* should be the standard, common sense position.
I would argue the average person with my IQ would likely be a way above average parent, but I would be below average.
I actually don't like a lot of those memes. People have had kids into worse environments than climate change, and the leftist arguments that humanity is bad because patriarchy/capitalism I frankly find risible. But...I think, in my case, it's a bad idea.
Understood. It's natural to feel influenced by people whose general viewpoints resonate with you. But especially when it comes to children, it's such a huge decision, and having them has such an impact on the rest of your life (not just next 18 years :) - once a parent, forever a parent), that others should have 0 unwanted input into it.
Best of luck to you, hope you figure it out.
FWIW there's some research showing people in their 40's are often at the most unhappy point of their lives... so maybe take that perspective into account....
Have you considered going to Bangkok for 6 months and just partying your butt off?
Like, no joke, you sound insanely depressed, like "wouldn't play with a puppy" depressed. And I want you to consider the possibility that your depression is making you act irrationally. I want you to consider the possibility that, on $3 million at 4% you can withdraw $10k/month forever and for $10k/month you can rent a freaking penthouse in Bangkok, go see awesome art and beaches and nature and culture and then return at night and party your tuckus off with hot women who will be very into you. Or just read on your balcony, whatever.
But I want you to consider the possibility that if you did that for 6 months, your perspective would be insanely different. And that it's a big beautiful world full of awesome people and not every place is the West. That if you resent American women...just go somewhere else where the women are different. They'd be more than happy to have you.
Dude, whatever you're doing now and wherever you're living, it's not good for you. You're not trapped there. There's nothing in the world stopping you from quitting your job tomorrow, jumping on a plane, and enjoying every day of the rest of your life.
I can't logically argue pronatalism anymore than I can logically argue for puppies. It's not a logical thing, it's an emotional thing where...one day you wake up and everything is so awesome and the only way it could be awesome-r is if you were surrounded by people who love you.
This is great advice. OP, if you're unsure about following it, just spot me the 10k and I'll go to Bangkok for the first month for you, and let you know if it's worthwhile.
I don't know. Bangkok usually implies sex workers, and that's just an exploitation level I'm not comfortable with. And even if they're not being paid, I doubt they'd be into me as much as my American dollars.
By the way, I can't remember ever wanting to play with a puppy. I don't like dogs.
That said, an extended vacation probably isn't a bad idea.
You hate all women and yet you don't want to "exploit" prostitutes? Bro, pick a lane!
Genuinely, you sound overconscientious. It's been my experience that people actually like and respect you more when you stop thinking like that. In certain ways it's quite acceptable and even desirable to be selfish. The only way to find out exactly which ways is try on different mindsets and see what happens.
It's more that sufficient resentment exists that I don't want to be in a relationship, but not that I want to exploit random people who had no role in creating my circumstances.
Overconscientious. There is no one evaluating you on this stuff. You don't get a cosmic pat on the head if you're good enough. Try exploiting people a bit - odds are you'll find they don't mind, some will actively like it, and you'll end up realising you were totally wrong about what the word "exploitation" means.
If you don't want to marry and have kids, then don't marry and have kids. There you go, simple. If you hate women, don't get involved with women. If you hate women but happen to be heterosexual, I don't know what advice I can give you, other than either try not to hate women and find a woman you can tolerate for as long as it takes to have sex, or try the various medications the side effects of which are to reduce sexual drive.
If I sound unsympathetic, it's because I am. I'm not married and have no children for some of the same reasons as you, yet I don't find it necessary to cry about my poor hard life where those bastards, all men, would just use and discard me so how can I best use my time to fight masculinism and/or take up the vile degrading cross of modern motherhood?
If you don't want it, nobody is making you do it. Are your parents standing over you beating you with sticks to get married and give them grandchildren? Why do you feel you need to carry on the family name, given that there probably are cousins or other branches in existence which will carry it on?
If you think you're a bad genetic gamble, then don't have kids (that's one of the reasons I never wanted to have children, myself). Once again, nobody is forcing you into an arranged marriage and you sound as if you don't need to get married in order to provide for yourself.
You don't like women, you don't like kids, you don't like your job, you don't much like the modern world - is there anything you do like? Then go and do that.
And why do you think fighting feminism would improve your life, given that you still would have the same reasons, in a traditional society, for "I don't wanna get married and have ankle-biters because that would take up my time and money and I'd have to be nice to the mother of my kids and yuck that's all horrible"? You would resent even more not being able to divorce her and get rid of her and shove off responsibility for the brats onto her and whatever family would help her.
Oh, you're right on that last point. In a traditional society I'd probably be even more unhappy.
I think you are right overall: I should avoid the opposite sex and kids. (It's more of a resentment than a true hatred, BTW; I know the opposite sex is human--the definition of species doesn't really make any sense otherwise--but there's enough bad blood I think any relationship would be poisoned. Ironically there is very little real-world evidence of this; I've had women try to get back together with me after breakups I've initiated, sometimes over bizarrely long periods of time! I also remained friends with some exes for fairly long periods, sometimes long-term. They are, of course, unaware of my views.)
I haven't really cried about it outside here, and don't intend to. I was curious to get the perspectives of one of the few sites I thought I might find sympathetic people, but your perspective is quite valid and probably would be closer to most people's.
Quite a few women *do* do just that, by the way. (Ever seen the book 'How to Date Men When You Hate Men'? I read the whole thing start to finish in the bookstore...) I haven't decided to be an antifeminist yet (apart from some postings on Astral Codex Ten), and I still may not.
There really isn't much I like anymore. But attempting to form relationships would probably bring nothing but grief to all parties.
If I'm reading you right that you actually get along well enough with real-life women, but an ideology that sits entirely within your conceptual mind is actively poisoning that relationship... well, I'd strongly suggest flushing the ideology into the toilet and applying a suitable amount of brain bleach.
Sorry for the snarky tone, but I think it's important to say that it can be done.
I'm brusque in my replies here, because I'm sort of in the same boat but not really. From my mid-20s onwards, my mother was dropping heavy hints until she finally came out and asked me outright in my late 30s or so, was I ever going to get married?
My answer there was "No" and I've stuck to that ever since. I know she was motivated by concern, she said she didn't want me to be lonely. Well, lonely or not, this is how I am.
I think you're feeling the pinch of societal expectations. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm assuming you were never married (though you do mention past relationships?) Thus, at your age - mid 40s - it's very unusual not to be married or cohabiting. Being divorced would be acceptable, but "in his 40s, never married, no kids, no partner - what's *wrong* with him?" is something that stands out; it's still a human adult rite of passage to form families, and even though marriage and children have now been cloven asunder (remember all the same-sex marriage stuff about it being about two people who love each other and that's all marriage is about), still forming couples or other intimate domestic relationships is an expectation.
I think you're feeling the consequences of being left out, of being the third wheel where you aren't in a couple, your friends/family are probably all married by now and many of them having children, and now you're isolated from all that because you're the singleton who sits alone and the groupings have all changed now to be couples + kids.
But I don't know. I'm just guessing. You mentioned you've had relationships so you must be able to get on with women in some capacity, were there really none you ever felt that you might make a go of it with them?
However, if you really really do not want to be living in proximity with someone, sharing space, having them involved in your life and with a right to call on you, don't get married. You'll just make yourself more miserable and resentful, and make the other person unhappy as well. What person, man or woman, wants to be on the receiving end of the trope:
"I bust my butt all day working in a job I hate to be the breadwinner, and I come home to my bitch of a wife complaining about 'do this, do that' and expecting me to kiss her ass all because she managed to pop out a couple of rugrats, on top of 'do your fair share of the housework' and shit".
Funnily enough, I'm watching as a guilty pleasure a ton of Youtube 'text' stories which seem to be Japanese/Asian in origin, and they're clearly revenge porn for women, and they're all on the lines above: husband is workaholic (or claims to be) in the Japanese style - they're ostensibly set in America but no way are these American - who either (a) makes a big deal out of "I'm the breadwinner, you're only a housewife, do what I say or I'll divorce you" (b) interfering mother-in-law who expects the daughter-in-law to be her servant and threatens to have her son divorce her or (c) wife is working, husband resents this because she's not at home full-time to be devoted to his every wish and whim. Often he's cheating on the side and this comes out when he does divorce her/she snaps and asks for a divorce. The story ends with her triumphant and him (or the affair partner who stole the husband/boyfriend) having their life ruined.
I'm smiling because a lot of the 'bad husband' set-up is precisely as described by your original comment: I make money in a job I hate, I don't want bratty kids since I can't be bothered trying to raise them, I don't want a nagging wife who I'm expected to be nice to, I only got married because my mom wants grandkids/society expects it.
Even though I sometimes disagree with some of your takes, I am usually glad to read them - and when I completely agree with your take, as in this one, I am extra thankful that you are here.
Anonymous Dude- my recommendation to you is: do not have kids. At any given point in time, there are probably several tens of millions of people that are regretting parenthood. As you are now, you will probably fail at being a parent, and there's probably nothing but mutual resentment in store if you do start a family.
People who are 'successful' at the whole 'happy family' thing tend to inherit or painstakingly acquire and maintain specific types of social capital that give them an 'edge' over the average person that knocks somebody up/gets knocked up and ends up with a spouse/kid. Specifically:
(a) The 'successful' types tend to invest incredible amounts of time in finding the right partner to start a family with. Like-many start searching for the 'right person' right from their late teens and usually start panicking if they haven't found a soulmate by their twenties/thirties. At 45, your options are pretty limited, and you'll realistically have more opportunities to be somebody's stepfather than have kids of your own.
(b) The whole 'it takes a village' thing is real. Parenting is a time and effort intensive commitment that spans decades. Successful types usually have at least (and I do mean <i>at least</i>) half a dozen people with sizable amounts of time, money, logistical capacity, affection, experience, and enthusiasm that are actively rooting for you and yours to be successful. Life will inevitably throw a curveball every now and then. When that happens, you'll either be humbled and extremely grateful for having this safety net, or will be humbled and sorely feel the safety net's absence.
(c) Finally, its pretty important to remember that your children aren't going to fill your life with joy-it's the other way around. You are your kids' competitive advantage in the world. Having kids is not a particularly noteworthy achievement. Giving said kids an advantage in the world- by being a capable, sane, stable and dependable parent is the thing to be admired. If you're not able to be that person, don't bring misery into your life or that of others.
Also, you said you're 45 and think you have 'an estimated 3-4 decades to live'. Yeah, I'd revisit that notion. Realistically, you have about a decade and a half of okay-ish quality of life. Once you hit 60, your body and mind will probably start to fail and chances are, your time and energy will be focused on trying to maintain the quality of life you used to have.
If I were you, I'd consider staying single and child free. Develop quality relationships that will last you a couple of decades, be the cool uncle for somebody, if you can. Start living the life you want, not the life you think society wants you to have.
(Source: was conceived to check a box in a socially conservative country, have depression and PTSD from miserable childhood, leaning towards antinatalism consequently.)
This doesn't match my experience, as someone who became a father at age 51. Neither (a) nor (b) apply to me. I don't think my mind started failing after age 60. Regarding (c), it can be both ways around.
I was lucky that we have a healthy child and are financially secure. My sympathy to those not so lucky in those respects.
Radford: I think you were very lucky. Luck notwithstanding, finding a partner to start a family with and becoming a father at 51 are impressive achievements in themselves. But I think that (a) applies to you. If I'm not mistaken you're the retired Canadian professor Radford Neal, and you seem to have published a blogpost titled "Down Syndrome and Decision Theory" in 2008 about how you and your wife navigated the risk of down syndrome during your child's birth.
My point in (a) was that successful 'happy family' types highly prioritize finding the right partner to start a family with, and are aware of all the downstream benefits of being married to the 'right' person. I think the level of marital stability where both of you calmly discuss and prepare for all possibilities of a high-risk pregnancy definitely qualifies as evidence of the kind of social capital I was talking about in (a).
I don't know you personally, so I'm unsure about (b). But say, in a hypothetical alternate timeline, you and your wife had died in 2009. Did you, at the time have enough of a family/social circle and safety net that your child would have had a solid chance at becoming a well-adjusted adult? If the answer to that hypothetical is 'yes' then I think you qualify as a village-haver. If the answer is 'no' then you (and the kid) are just very lucky.
Re: (c), yeah, it *can* be both ways around, but shouldn't have to be. See my reply to D8Mole.
Anyway, my advice to the OP is of the "don't forget the foundation when you build a house" variety. I'm not saying a family at 45 is a pipe dream per se.
I kinda get where you're coming from, but I think we're talking past each other. I mean, of course it is *possible* to be married with kids. You don't even need $3 million for that. What I'm trying to say is that if you want to consciously increase the odds of having a happy family life, a certain minimum of social capital is necessary - that lots of people already have- but many do not, and (painstakingly) need to create said capital from scratch.
OP would prefer to avoid acrimony and isn't desperate for a hail-mary-leave-everything-to-god kind of marriage-at least, that's what I surmised from the OP's query. And so:
(A) Yeah, finding a good partner comes down to luck, but my point was that *having* a compatible partner is a prerequisite for a happy family life. You need to find a *compatible* person, at the very least- that is, somebody who doesn't drive you up the wall (and the partner feels the same way about you), somebody who you won't get bored or grow distant with (and partner feels the same way about you), somebody you don't mind growing old with, in sickness and in health, till death do you part (and the partner feels the same way about you). Also, all of this should be easily achievable, with 20% to 40% of your ordinary mental and psychological bandwidth, the remaining bandwidth needing to be allocated to raising kids and generally functioning in society.
My point was that finding someone compatible takes non-trivial effort, not that it was impossible. If you have this kind of partner available already, cat's in the bag. If you don't but still marry, misery usually follows. Also, I'm from one of those 'poorer socially conservative countries', and I can tell you that finding a *compatible* mail order bride is fairly difficult. For one thing, if money is your only selling point then your poorer in-laws might want you to spread the wealth, or else. And this might strain your marital relationship and waste your time. For another, even mail order brides are full fledged, agentic, living human beings. Also, once they set foot on American soil, American laws and social mores apply and the shackles of poor country conservatism are gone. So the pros and cons of marrying a foreign woman and a local woman are mostly identical.
(B) By 'it takes a village' I didn't mean hire-able babysitters or close-knit joint family type setups. You and your wife probably have *a* group of sane, normal people that are interested in your and your kids' well being, even if its you and your wife doing the heavy lifting. My point was that its better for kids to have exposure, through their parents, to a group of useful, productive adults with healthy social skills and personal and professional relationships.
In contrast, for example, in the ACX social sphere, Aella's Substack posts about her batshit crazy fundamentalist Christian childhood is a good example of someone having a catastrophically dysfunctional social setting to grow up in. I can also point to my own family, that has a significantly above-average number of mal-adjusted weirdos and loners; and family get-togethers and even weddings and funerals are tense, combustible stand-off situations where most people are stroking their egos with chips on their shoulders.
As long as you have, like I said, at least 6 normal, well adjusted people in your social circle, that have the bandwidth to mentor and engage, intellectually and emotionally, with you and your kids, and provide a safety net, emotionally, psychologically and maybe financially, you're doing great.
(C) Yeah, ideally. Ideally there is mutual joy. But, like ethically and morally, on whose shoulders would you put the burden of family life being a joyful experience? The parent or the child? Also, $3 million and first world citizenship are great things to have. But I'll just quote what I said to the OP: "Having kids is not a particularly noteworthy achievement. Giving said kids an advantage in the world- by being a capable, sane, stable and dependable parent is the thing to be admired. If you're not able to be that person, don't bring misery into your life or that of others."
I assume most women acting in good faith to find a partnership would not want to get involved with a bitter person who dislikes them because of their gender. Unless you are willing to work very hard on your outlook, things will be tough. It is still possible to find fulfilment in other ways outside of marriage/kids. Best of luck, but I don’t think it sounds like you have the skills or mindset for a healthy relationship & kids right now.
I was all ready to make the case for having kids, but this post isn't an antinatalist argument. Thus post is a cry for help.
Women and children would very definitely add meaning to your life, but they're not fungible objects. A woman might make you happy - but you are talking as if that means *any* women should make you happy. Which obviously isn't true because a lot of them are shit.
You have to find amongst the dross someone who's worth it, who doesn't make you feel like she's a vile, degrading cross to bear.
Your problem is that if you find her tomorrow, you'll be unable to land her because the kind of woman you need won't be attracted to the kind of person you are right now.
The only "attractive" thing you have (going from this post) is money; well that's only going to attract the kind of girls who've given you your current opinions.
Best thing you can do right now is improve yourself. Not because you want to get a woman: because you want meaning in your life and this is a way to get it.
A bitter, unhappy man saying, "feminism sucks," is an advert for feminism. A cool, attractive guy who says feminism sucks will have the girls disowning feminism in droves.
I'm not sure meaning is necessary, frankly. The meaning of life is only what we give it; there is no external meaning (I guess I would call myself an existentialist in that regard, though my politics are less left-wing).
You have an excellent point that bitter people are poor spokesmen. I do not think anything could make me cool or attractive, but there may be other ways to exert change that do not require serving as a spokesman or role model. Thank you.
You seem like a thoughtful person, that's a big plus you have going for you. As opposed to partying in Bankok as other people have suggested, I'm going to recommend to take up some kind of grounded, physical activity. Build a piece of furniture; grow your own food, that kind of thing. In the modern world, we have lost our connection to the visceral experiences that make the concept of "being alive" mean something more than a symbol pushed around on the stack. This seems to be the one thing that postmodernism got right, as much as I dislike the stuff downstream from it like feminism and critical theory.
Just one more thing to add: feminism doesn't exist. It's a word on a page, it does nothing, compels no action, causes no consequences. Not once in an argument with my wife I had a though, "oh, feminism made her do/say this; if it weren't for feminism, she wouldn't".
A cool, attractive guy who says "feminism sucks" (when unprompted - I can see it as a direct answer in context) seems like an oxymoron...
Come to think of it, my girlfriend and I have never discussed the energy crisis. Phew, good thing that means no consequences, cause everyone was saying that was gonna be rough.
While there's a point the OP could heed about allowing tribal division to blind you to reality, saying "There's no such thing as feminism," is a lie. More to the point, it's the kind of lie you tell to shut someone up and make it hard for them to identify what's being done to them. It's the kind of lie you repeat until society has changed enough that you can instead start saying, "There's always been feminism, And That's A Good Thing."
Without the word "feminism" we all have to keep saying, "that point when suddenly, for no reason at all, 70% of women turned into horrible bitches."
Without the word "feminism" we all have to keep saying, "that point when suddenly, for no reason at all, 70% of women turned into horrible bitches."
I can't... even...
Are you sure it's 70%?
What percent of women were... that... before "feminism"? 0?
The point about "there's no such thing as feminism" is that it's irrelevant to this specific person's issues; moreover, the term is so overused as to lose all its meaning. In fact, it's a cognitive kill switch, much like "socialism" or "capitalism" are. Once brought in, productive discussion becomes impossible.
I think It would benefit the OP to formulate his issues with relationships with women without the use of grandiose words like "feminism"; also, use "to do", not "to be", as in, "she does this" as opposed to "she is this"; "I do this" as opposed to "I am this". Then the fog may lift and an understanding of what the actual problem is, and what could be done about it, may emerge.
It is exactly 69% of women but I round it up so no one feels the urge to comment, "Nice."
OP has a model of the world which is true but not nearly to the extent he thinks it is.
Part of that model is that feminists will lie, evade, and gaslight whenever you shine a light on them. Your post pattern matches perfectly to that. OP is within his rights to reject everything you say for that reason alone.
And while your followup contains some generic advice, your first post seems motivated more by my suggestion that cool people can harm the social standing of feminism than by any interest in helping the OP.
>I think It would benefit the OP to formulate his issues with relationships with women without the use of grandiose words like "feminism"; also, use "to do", not "to be", as in, "she does this" as opposed to "she is this"; "I do this" as opposed to "I am this".
Yes, that sounds very plausible. Shrug. Any relationship has frictions. Some can be negotiated. Some turn out to be deal breakers. But the useful action is to discuss the _particular_ conflicts and see if what each person wants can be negotiated to some livable compromise or not.
“You leave crusty dirty dishes in the sink for days and it pisses me off” is specifically actionable: I may choose to wash dishes right away, or plead for understanding, etc. Productive discussion and a resolution are possible.
“You are a f..ing jerk I hate you!” - surely packs a punch, but what am I supposed to do here? What’s the action item to address?
I like carrying things. If I receive inadequate levels of gratitude, I carry them back, pick the girl up and carry her back to them, so it's more convenient for her to carry them herself.
From a utilitarian perspective your better off donating the money and time you would lose.
And from a "personal happiness" I can't judge what would make you happier.
I think ultimately people have kids because they want to. Meaning that they feel within the core of their being that their life would be more meaningful with kids. That they don't want to age alone with no family.
Only you can decide if that's true for you or not. But if you feel that it is, then you can reexamine your reasons and see if they still hold true
(a) too selfish to do a good job and too unselfish to do it anyway => Probably still holds true. Unless you are defining "good job" as being some kind of super-parent. Like, I think even if you are in the top 80% of parents your kids are probably more or less fine. And if you have that much money that already puts you a leg up.
(b) lazy and don't want to work hard => Maybe still holds true. Depends if your desire to not work hard is stronger or weaker than your innate desire to have a family
(c) I already bow and scrape all day to a boss, doing it to my wife when I come home doesn't sound like fun => Again, it depends if your desire to not work for your wife is stronger or weaker than your desire to have kids. You could just try to find a low maintenance woman. But of course there is no such thing as a low maintenance 1 year old.
(d) I think I'd probably get divorced for any of the thousand reasons (including for fun) => This is probably a reason not to do it. While prenups can protect your money, it's not great for the kids. I would say only get married if you believe you are capable of commitment.
(e) I'm bad at the whole 'being sexy' thing => That's not a reason not to go for it. I mean, not a reason not to try. Worst comes to worst you fail. But anyway being sexy could be a learned skill.
(f) I genuinely resent the opposite sex at this point and don't want to get involved. => Don't marry a woman if you hate women. Maybe marry a man and adopt?
I think you're correct. I won't do it. Thanks for your time.
(And I'm not doing the gay marriage thing. I might be a little bi but I doubt there's enough gay there to support a gay marriage, and frankly I don't think I should be raising kids.)
It sounds like you're having a mid-life crisis. If you're a self-confessed selfish person, I think having children is a mistake, even if you feel some kind of pressure to have some. You need to actually figure out what you want in life.
Of course, having kids or even relationships is, financially, a stupid idea. You are guaranteed to have less money than you would otherwise. But ask yourself what your money is actually FOR. It ought to be easy to earn $150k a year on $3 million, with only a paltry 5% return (which you can get close to with treasury bonds, and easily pass with certain dividend stocks). So you retire, and do...what? Only you can figure that out.
I'm not an antinatalist; I don't think *I* should have kids. And I don't plan to dump all the hard work on the (hypothetical) woman; I'm not a feminist but they are right about that much.
The older porn is, the more unwatchable/unworkable as porn it is; it's difficult to see victorian erotica as even being erotic at all, while the saggy body parts of 70s supposed "golden age" porn make it awkward viewing today. Even enhanced, post-Pamela Anderson 90s porn seems uncomfortably plasticky. Assuming that this is a trend that will continue, in what way will porn develop to make today's porn unviewable to a future audience, given that porn is (you'd think) kind of like athletics, right now as professionalized as it's possible for it to be?
I continue to hope against hope that porn in the future will have basic elements of film editing to convey emotion (specifically horniness). The single camera style will be as archaic as the Great Train Robbery.
The comparison to athletics gives you the answer; porn steroids. Biological enhancers that probably mess people up in the long term but allow crazy superhuman stunts.
Alternately, cartoons currently offer utterly impractical scenarios, and improving technology will allow cartoons to appear more lifelike. A video with a 4x4 grid of bouncing squares that x-ray through different layers of clothing as they pass over people standing behind the grid, will no longer be the sole domain of hentai videos.
I still have an idea for one, where everything is pitch black but any sound that's made creates a sonar-like ping that illuminates the area around it.
> right now as professionalized as it's possible for it to be?
My impression is that there's a wide variety, from random people filming themselves, all the way up through commercial productions. So whatever the near-term trends are, they're probably already out there, but something that you personally don't consider attractive.
Longer term, I'll make a wild guess that today's stuff is all 2D, audio-visual-only, non-interactive, with mere humans instead of custom AI-designed avatars that are more real than any mere flesh-and-blood body can be. It's not even using biofeedback!
I guess the main question is whether AI generated porn gets good enough to make human actord superfluous or if a. it never gets good enough in some way or b. a large enough audience continues to care about watching human actors to keep that market afloat.
Why do you think it's as professionalised as possible? Given that it still uses real humans, there is only so much even surgery can do there (and that leaves the women still looking plasticky).
AI generated porn will presumably be the next step, with anatomically unrealistic bodies in superhuman perfection and capable of flexibility that real bodies aren't, never mind what other imaginative requirements the consumer may wish the dolls to perform. Making the unreal look more and more 'real' will be the hurdle.
Okay, that's sort of topic but I still want to ask...
> I know pop stars used to be sexy but all the modern ones leave me cold.
I wonder if that's really a sign of changes in you, or in the modern western culture?
I have this impression that newer generation of western pop stars is not trying as hard to look sexy as pop-stars of 80s and 90s did, especially the latest bunch (2010s and newer). Of course they are young and attractive, but they are not dressing as agressively (or should I say undressing?), there's less emphasis on dances and especially on obviously sexual dances (but then again there's still some that do that stuff, too).
In comparison, korean boybands and girlbands are clearly trying to look very sexy and they are fairly popular in the west too (and I'd argue that it's big part of the appeal, but that's a whole other topic). Do they also leave you cold?
It's not the best test and the results would not be conclusive, but maybe that would offer you some food for thought (or maybe not just for thought I don't judge).
Right. They'll solve the problems with AI movie generation and you'll be able to dial up a 3D simulated sexual encounter of your choice. You tell it "let me sleep with Aella" and a digitized Aella appears and talks to you about her research while you have sex with her.
(I've chosen the one celebrity I'm fairly sure would not object.)
I'd love a "More than you ever wanted to know" post about micro plastics. It seems like one of those new "could be an enormous problem or relatively benign" type things and I'm really not sure how to feel about it as of yet.
Yeah I don't know what the sensitivity of the tests they use to detect them in biological organisms are. The amount presumably matters, and these days our tech is good enough that you can detect very tiny amounts of stuff if you try. Really need some kind of cohort comparisons (here's group A with 10x the level of microplastics that are found in group B, let's look for differences in acm or whatever).
I wonder how much it would cost if it turns out that we would benefit greatly from reducing them. Some plastics are easy to replace with cardboard or biodegradable variants (PLA or whatever), but then a lot of the bits also come from car tires and that's a much taller order to find a good substitute for.
I love Hinduism as much as anyone, but honestly I don't think the philosophical arguments you link to are very convincing. It reads like motivated reasoning, or "apologetics" as religious scholars like to call it, where you know where you want to get to and then wrangle concepts around to make it sound inevitable.
To give just a few examples: your argument for time being infinite is "you can always imagine one minute before a given time", and that it feels intuitively that it should be so. But our imagination and intuition are shaped by experience and culture, which operate at a certain local range of scales or orders of magnitude, and tell us basically nothing about what happens beyond those. The argument falls flat because it "proves" too much; by the same kind of reasoning one could have dismissed the possibility of e.g energy being quantized before physicists started to find evidence for it.
Then you have a whole variety of arguments that more or less amount to "if X only happens once among an infinity of occasions, then the probability of X at each occasion is zero, which entails non-X, so if X happens at all, it has to happen an infinity of times". But that is a mathematical fallacy, which once again proves too much. If the argument were valid, it would mean that the identity function over integers, which only takes the value 0 once, couldn't exist.
Then, your "tweak" of the idea of moksha, making it extremely long but not permanent, is completely incompatible with the Hindu view of it, and also with the Buddhist (seen from this far they're almost the same). Ultra simplified, the Hindu and Buddhist idea of liberation is that conditioning is finite, and liberation is what you get when you stop adding more, so the current load eventually runs out.
And finally, the argument that a religion is more likely to be true if lots of people believe in it completely ignores cultural evolutionary forces. Practical ideas on how to build stuff do evolve somewhat in accordance with reality because the proof is in the pudding, if you build your ship wrong it sinks instead of sailing. But religions thrive on their ability to make a culture cohesive, inspired, stable and competitive, and that has nearly zero to do with how true their underlying philosophies are.
I'm wondering if one can be reincarnated as a mineral, a stone. Would you retain a soul? Could that soul then migrate to a tree or a stalk of corn? Rocks live. They just have a slower "metabolism".
A half century ago I did some cross-country backpacking in wilderness areas in the Far West, and it always seemed to me the geological landscape was as lively as the pikas and marmots.
Stone is alive, I think. Once, after taking LSD, I found an obsidian bird arrow at 13,000 feet.
The idea of being igneous rock for a few million years, say, in Glacier National Park is appealing. Then maybe your next incarnation might be as a Mayfly or a cicada, before you move on to work as a root system for Sequoias in the Sierra Nevada. Maybe souls aren't just for mammals.
From my very limited understanding, there are hells in Hinduism as well, just not permanent forever hell. But they are unpleasant, they do last a long time, and they are punitive.
Hinduism is a very wide topic, it's difficult to say that there is one 'official' Hinduism; it encompasses everything from varying schools of philosophy and theology right down to peasant folk beliefs.
In what sense is reincarnated you you, according to Hinduism? We know people don't remember anything from their previous lives (even if reincarnation is a thing). If, after I die, all my memory is reset, then for all purposes that matter IMO, it's equivalent to dying, and a new person/animal being born.
I was recently quoted by Scott in his post on the highlights for the Hanania book review about how we might not see any correlation between test and job performance amongst those hired for the job even though the test might be a very good predictor of job performance (end of Section 4):
Some commenters on the post asked me to further clarify what I was trying to say and engaged me in discussion, noting that my claim wasn't exactly what the standard treatment of Berkson's Paradox talks about.
It turns out that the exact claim I made in my comment isn't quite true. Even at perfect calibration of the hiring criterion with the determinants of job performance the measured effect size/correlation still turns out to be positive.
However a variant of it does hold and I've made a post in which I do a deep dive of just how strong the Berkson's Paradox variant effect is for the claim I was making in my comment:
The policies are chosen based on evidence, political consensus, and precedent. I’m happy to say that they’ve received good feedback from those in tech and in the political milieu, so I’m hopeful they can achieve something tangible. Regardless of the above however, it would be great to get the community's feedback.
I think you're mistaking some of the pushback. The bigger pushback I've been seeing is from people who say that phones aren't the reason for adolescent mental health issues - it's actually climate change and racism.
Is the consensus around here that climate change is not a major issue? Because in my info world it certainly is one of the world's biggest and most pressing problems.
To the extent that there's a consensus in the community here, I would say that the consensus is that most people who understand its significance have then gone on to endorse overhyped versions of the problems associated with it. Some people here are definitely then getting into the opposite failure mode, of thinking that if something is overhyped, then it must not actually be significant.
To me, the issue is that global poverty is as big and pressing an issue as climate change, and many proposals about dealing with climate change make it much harder to deal with global poverty, but I also see that climate change causes a potentially irreversible set of changes, which makes it hard to properly compare them. Also, I agree with the statement that was issued about a year ago that "mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war" - and this statement pointedly left out climate change, which is definitely also a societal-scale risk, but seems to me to pose less risk of actual civilizational collapse (or extinction) than AI, pandemics, and nuclear war.
It's hard to properly convey my thought that we should societally be doing more to address all five of these problems (poverty, climate change, AI risk, pandemics, nuclear war), but also that it doesn't help to make unrealistically confident predictions of worse versions of climate change than the science supports.
I'm about 95% in agreement with you. Indeed, I'd say global poverty is actually a bigger problem (in the sense of human flourishing) than AGW. I also don't see how AGW anywhere close to serious forecasts can threaten civilization. It will make things a lot worse in some places, and that's bad and we should avoid it if we can, but it's not going to cause the collapse of first-world countries anywhere.
I'd also say that a lot of the big things being done to address AGW don't seem likely to have much effect. (Often they are about being seen to do something rather than doing something; sometimes they are actively harmful.) I think the best way to make things better involve technology--LED bulbs, better heat pumps, better/cheaper solar panels, better batteries, etc. Solutions that require democratic governments to intentionally make their voters much worse off for a decades-away improvement in the world seem unlikely to be sustained.
If someone manages to get working fusion reactors or figure out how to unsnarl our ability to build fission reactors, or gets energy storage technology that makes it economical to mostly rely on intermittent renewable sources, then CO2 emissions will fall very quickly in a way that involves most people being made substantially better off.
Not following the pushback, but I read the book itself and found it thought provoking. Phone free schools strike me as a good idea. It also gave me the nudge I've been needing to get around to moving my phone charger into the living room instead of next to my bed, which I've been meaning to do for some time to cut down on the temptation to doomscroll social media instead of going to sleep - that's been pretty successful and assuming it continues would be a trend I'd continue with kids.
I generally like his proposals for more precise age bracketing for social media. It's a fair point that COPPA was enacted in 1998 and its hard to say with a straight face that 13 was picked at the time with a much understanding of the implications of social media for the 13-16 age bracket.
To an extent this is preaching to the choir for me; my spouse and I are currently not-exactly-working-to-avoid having a first kid, and I've seen enough negative cases in my own social circle to be primed for "yeah, we're not going to be tablet raising a tiny human," but I thought it was a good read.
I don't have access to the wired article since it's paywalled, but the tone of what I can see seems more like it's arguing that tech in childhood is a fait accompli rather than that it isn't harmful ("[w]hatever your views on kids and technology are... connectivity is now a part of childhood"). I'm admittedly not the choir for this one, but if that's Levy's line of argument it strikes me as a pretty poor one - "it might be harming kids, but you haven't proven it and even if you did nothing can be done" is not a good best-foot forward if one is looking to persuade.
Is this anything more than the latest technology scare? Video games were leading kids astray. Before that, videos were doing it. A few years from now, it'll be whatever AI babysitter/teacher combination that is in common use.
If I go by that article, Haidt is doing "In my day we had none of this, we went outside and played and fell out of trees!" old codger line. I'm an old codger type myself, so I sympathise, but sheesh, reading too many books instead of going out and getting your leg broken in proper manly sport (or whatever the equivalent for girls was) was also considered to be a bad thing I was warned against:
"At one point in his new book, Haidt expresses unhappiness that hospitals aren’t seeing as many boys show up with shattered limbs, because it means that young males aren’t bulking up with the requisite toughness that will stand them in good stead during adulthood. He seems to idealize the Leave It to Beaver-style aimless hangouts of an earlier era, taking for granted that it’s a superior environment than the online one where people might make friends from anywhere in the world but not fall out of trees with them."
Okay, so how many of you broke limbs as kids and how many of you are weak four-eyed nerds? 😁
Well, there is a well-documented increase in mental health problems among the latest generation that is crying for an explanation and hopefully some kind of remedy, because it amounts to a pretty huge amount of suffering.
But the world is changing so fast that it's hard to figure out what the main cause may be, if there is even one. I've actually been reading Haidt's arguments for a while on his Substack, and I think he makes a decent case that smartphones (and more specifically social media feeds) are a major force.
Was a weak four eyed nerd at least through high school but seemed like I had a revolving credit line at the ER. Too many broken bones, stitches, even a couple reconstructive surgeries to even think about without making my head hurt.
>>"At one point in his new book, Haidt expresses unhappiness that hospitals aren’t seeing as many boys show up with shattered limbs, because it means that young males aren’t bulking up with the requisite toughness that will stand them in good stead during adulthood. He seems to idealize the Leave It to Beaver-style aimless hangouts of an earlier era, taking for granted that it’s a superior environment than the online one where people might make friends from anywhere in the world but not fall out of trees with them."
I suspect this a a creative bad-faith reading by the author of the article, given the snarky delivery and the fact that I recall absolutely nothing like it from my reading of the actual book itself. Haidt definitely talks about the importance of unstructured play ("leave it to Beaver-style aimless hangouts of an earlier era?") and the value of play in person relative to play that is moderated/soft-managed through a device, but I don't recall anything like "break legs, it builds character."
I never broke any limbs which I think must be owing to having fairly strong bones, because I was pretty clumsy and preferred to play outside, and further preferred to play with boys if they would have me. My particular thing was getting the wind knocked out of me. I remember clearly the shock, then panic, the first time it happened.
The rest of the time I definitely spent too much time with both TV and books but in fact the latter was (accidentally) controlled by the fact that parents (or at least mine) didn't care whether kids read or not, didn't monitor that - so that my book supply was constrained by whether my mother would take me to the library, and as she was not much of a reader then, in her busy years, this was not a weekly occurrence. The downside was that I read anything that came in my way to fill the void and this in turn led to reading inappropriate stuff.
As for TV I feel I watched so much, mostly the same reruns over and over, more so than what was new. But again, constrained not by wise parents but by our having but one TV so at night it wasn't mine. This is surely a difference worth noting. And yet that too furnished happy memories of the times we fractious bunch watched a movie as a family. Never "scheduled", just by chance.
But children like me were called "bookworms" precisely because few children found text similarly addicting.
When I see the good parents of today riding bikes with their children, all helmeted and learning the proper rules of the road - I have this exact reaction: I wish I (and more particuarly my spouse) had done this with our kid, had been good parents in that way.
I never think - I wish instead of playing freely with the kids in the hood, I had ridden bikes with my parents. "Catch" is a great pastime for parents and kids for a reason - it is just the right length.
Well, I hope you're happy to have let down Jonathan Heidt and not used the broken limbs to turn you into the manly man who can win the battle of human strife in the world today with your toughened muscles and knitted bones 😁
Okay, so how were *you* ruined by the technology of your youth? And if you claim "But that was different, it wasn't at all as sophisticated as it is today", well the tech of our times was way more sophisticated than that of our parents and so on backwards.
I'm not saying Haidt does not have a point, I'm saying that claiming what is going on today is uniquely bad and dangerous needs to be backed up. I'm well aware myself of how much "this is just different to what I know and what was around when I was that age" as an attitude affects my reactions to new technology separate from the virtues or faults of that technology.
Haidt is very late Boomer/early Gen X, like myself. He may indeed be out of touch, you have to take *that* into account as well before treating every word as true, true.
That well could be. It could also be social contagion (right now it seems to be almost de rigeur to present yourself, as a teenager, as having some kind of problem or condition; to be able-bodied, mentally healthy, cis and het is the worst thing in the world, double worst if you add in white and male to that).
There could be more diagnoses now than in the past. There could be other social and cultural reasons. I'm not denying that "addictive solitary online time stuck in front of screens all the time" is bad, but I'm asking how much of that is true. The review makes it sound like Haidt's solution to the ailments of modern life is "make the kids go outside and play". That's never a bad thing, but will it work now as well as in the past? Are there no differences between expectations for little Jimmy today and back when little Jimmy's grandpa was Jimmy's age?
I think the internet + phones mean that 13-year-olds at their maximum susceptibility to social contagion are exposed to the most infectious social contagion produced anywhere in the world. It's like the difference between your kids being exposed to childhood illnesses in a small town somewhere, and your kids being exposed to raw sewage from a huge city.
What makes it different now, though? Yes, smartphones seem to be very addictive, but we've made it so that even adults have to be plugged in 24/7 in case work calls them, so they may as well look at their phones all the time anyway.
We've had this about "people are all reading newspapers on the train instead of interacting with their neighbours" and every new tech that comes along gets this treatment. I don't think having young children stuck in front of screens as a replacement for human contact is good, but do you remember the concerns over "latch key kids"? And when was the last time that popped up as a hot topic area of concern?
Apparently Gen X were all latchkey kids, but funnily enough when people are discussing generations they're either complaining about the Boomers (still) or Millenials. Poor old Gen X is constantly forgotten!
Absolutely they shouldn't be glued to their screens. Or plonked in front of the Saturday morning cartoon shows as substitute babysitters. Or let run around in the streets like feral dogs because the parents can't be bothered to look after them.
It all does have to do with parenting. Decent parenting means being aware of what is going on and monitoring such devices and saying "no". Poor parenting is giving the four year old an iPad because that's what everyone else has. Parents who buy their kids scramblers and then let them run wild are not better parents merely because the kid is outside in the open causing mayhem and injuring themselves and others.
Simply saying "This thing is Bad!" isn't enough, we *do* need to interrogate it - and the role and responsibility of parenting. Smartphones and other devices don't simply grow on trees or fall out of the air into the hands of children.
I'm not really sure what you're disagreeing with here, have you actually read Haidt? You seem to agree that the current common usage patterns *are* problematic, which is his main point.
Of course it all does have to do with parenting, but parenting does not happen in a vacuum. If you want parents to not feed their kids into a social media feed addiction machine, you want to do exactly what Haidt is doing at the moment: trying to create shared momentum of parents, schools, etc. working together to make that possible.
>>Absolutely they shouldn't be glued to their screens. Or plonked in front of the Saturday morning cartoon shows as substitute babysitters. Or let run around in the streets like feral dogs because the parents can't be bothered to look after them.
I'm actually pro-letting-kids-run-around-like-feral-dogs. Running around a suburb with a group of kids my own age, without adults around to solve problems and resolve disputes is a big part of how I was successfully phased into independence as an adult.
Adults should be reachable if something kids truly can't handle happens (e.g. when one of my friends broke an arm playing street hockey, there were adults near enough for us to run to a friend's house and grab one), but they can be too close in addition to being too far.
Yeah, if we have exceptions, it's probably for literal Nazis and the stupidly woke, but even there I think this would have been over the line? Other than that, I'm not sure if I can think of topic areas that we'd tend to give people exceptions for.
Scott's made a case for "niceness, community, and civilization", and that seems like as good a motto as any. There's also the (somewhat lapsed) Victorian Sufi Buddha Lite comment moderation rule, where comments should be at least two of "true, necessary, and kind".
To be specific, instead of "I am just so cherishing watching the relentless tech optimists scramble and furiously try to discredit his thesis on behalf of the nervous overlords. He's clearly struck a chord because it smells like desperation up in here. And it's triple chef's kiss delicious."
You could have written something less overtly hateful towards the people you disagree with. Such as
"There's a type of person who seems to agree with anything that tech companies do. I dislike this; it seems obvious that social media is making the world worse in a lot of ways. Even if his book is not exactly right in all the details it is a relief to see the basic thesis being taken seriously and the onus being on defenders of technology to refute it, rather than the other way around. Gives me hope that we might be able to start making positive improvements in the future."
There's also the matter of 'I honestly don't even care how much of the story he may or may not have exactly right', which while it may well be a *completely accurate* summary of his feelings is a very poor attitude to flaunt in a nominally rationalist forum.
Instead of agreeing or disagreeing with a thesis, sort of painting one side as evil for having the opinion at all, and making vague conspiracy-ish allegations for why someone would disagree with something without backing it up, all in a kind of snide and superior tone.
I dunno, seems to me he's pointing to something novel and modern - Luddites now have the power to hurt feelings as well as smash machines, we must suppress this line of thinking about tech.
I concede the uniformity of the response to the book had that quality of the morning memo that some of us do indeed marvel at, in our conspiracy-minded way. Fast as the speed of light, everyone understood that a major change being questioned for possibly wreaking major changes, was not the accepted "contrarian" thesis; the contrarian thesis (yes, this is how it's typically presented, have cake and eat it too) would be that kids have always had these screens if you are good enough at analogizing things.
Even Tyler Cowen's take on the book was basically that the internet and social media and screens would have been great for him as a chess-playing, grade-advancing non-average kid eager to be in touch with his counterparts around the world, or something.
I just discovered that the Art Student Owl Tumblr has disappeared. I wonder if anyone saved a copy of it. It's always a shame to see parts of the past internet disappear like that.
Is it on the wayback machine?
A bit of a rant, but I'm continually amazed at how bad Youtube recommendations are. I can't remember the last time I actually found a video to watch through Youtube, in spite of putting lots of effort into trying to curate recommendations in the past. You'd think that sites would have halfway competent recommendations nowadays with the rise of AI and all, but it never seems to happen. And Netflix is even worse, though in the case of Netflix, I suspect that the static homepage is a strategic move to cover up for their lack of content.
I suspect that YouTube recommendations are a combination of "things you like" and "things everyone likes" for the specific topic/keywords (e.g. music videos if you are watching a music video, or politics if you are watching politics), and your efforts have diminishing returns because no matter how much you optimize that "things you like" part, there is still the "things everyone likes" part that you have no impact on.
At least my recommendations seem like a mix of the stuff I typically watch, and the stuff I would never watch but seems like the kind of thing that would be popular. For example, if I watch any video about politics, half of my recommendations would be conspiracy theories and Russian propaganda.
That makes sense. Part of the problem is that it seems to work on negative reinforcement. Like if I go through and mark "not interested" on everything, that just makes the recommendations even less relevant because it reverts to random crap that other people watch.
Maybe a long shot, maybe the wrong time to ask, but I'm trying to track down a short sci-fi/story with the same sort of sill pun punchline as in some of Scott's stories (I'm pretty sure it wasn't by Scott, but I would probably have come across it in a Scott-adjacent space), called something like "She Listens To Everything", in which some sort of alien or machine intelligence is able to take over much of the world by its omnipresent listening powers, making it impossible for people to speak and coordinate against it, until a resistance manages to form by communicating in musical form, focused in Appalachia and in the urban cores of big cities, and the punchline was to the effect of "She listens to everything ... except rap and country". My powers of Google are a complete failure here - does anyone know where I can find it?
Another sighting of the new meaning of the word ‘nonplussed’. I know, I know language evolves but sometimes I like to indulge my inner pedantic twit. At some point in the past I had to open a physical paper dictionary and learn what the word meant. Back then we couldn’t just right click on it, blah blah..
Today’s Politico newsletter says;
“So in the same week, President Trump goes to the bright-blue Bronx and another political party’s convention, a week before that he goes to bright-blue Minnesota, and before that, he has stops at the Teamsters headquarters and SneakerCon and even a town hall on CNN during the Republican primary,” Trump adviser JASON MILLER texted us this morning. “What’s now clear is that President Trump is changing the game and living in what normally would be considered Joe Biden’s political territory, and this has to terrify Democrats.”
New paragraph, here it is:
“Biden world is ‘*nonplussed.*’”
Using it the sense that Biden world really doesn’t care instead of its original meaning of befuddled or confused.
I literally almost had an aneurysm when I saw it.
> Back then we couldn’t just right click on it
Whoa, I guess I missed that, somehow. I usually just Ctrl+CKV-Enter, but this could be faster when I'm mousing!
Is there any research in neuroscience/cognitive psychology on how the brain distinguishes between video and real life? Given video is so new in evolutionary terms, and a constant feed of video on every conceivable topic is now the norm, I’m curious how the brain/nervous system reacts differently.
I ask this because it seems like many people have a hard time incorporating the fact that the person is choosing to be on camera into their theory of mind for said person.
For example, there’s a lot of videos you see going viral on social media that will be, for example, a woman in tears about losing her job, or the fact that she’s a single mom etc. People give their takes, draw broad conclusions about society from the video, and offer their advice to this person. They basically address it as they would a crying woman in person, applying the same heuristics to draw their conclusions.
But their mental model is leaving out the most telling detail about this person, which is the fact that they made the video at all. Think about what kind of person, when going through a low point in their life, would want to set up a camera at that moment to film themselves at their most vulnerable moment for the world to see. For most people that’s horrifying. This is bizarre behavior from a person who is likely mentally unwell.
Theres other things I wonder, like the effects of having every single person in America watch the George Floyd snuff film. If you saw that happen in person, it would be perfectly understandable to be traumatized, need therapy etc…. How is the video different in the brain/nervous system?
> For most people that’s horrifying. This is bizarre behavior from a person who is likely mentally unwell.
Would it be much better if this were somehow their standard reaction to life events? I see kids performing for non-existent cameras sometimes, and I assume they got that from TV. I've heard other people talk about sex partners who unconsciously act as though there were a porn camera in a particular location in the room, because to them that's just how people have sex.
> How is the video different in the brain/nervous system?
I use video chat with some friends and family, and it's not the same as being in person, but it's pretty much identical to a video, except with interaction. I'd almost be more worried about the "interaction" part, in the other direction, actually. (I say as I write a comment on someone else's blog.) It's like there's an urge to make everything a performance, and then react to other people as if they were performing, and one's own reactions are themselves a performance. Which in general has always been true, but I feel like something's different now.
A question to people who pay for at least two different streaming services instead of streaming illegally: why? Is it moral conviction, fear of legal consequences, convenience, something else?
If it’s convenience, what would illegal streaming have to look like so that you’d choose it over paying for subscriptions?
Primarily convenience. I do a lot of my streaming on an android TV, and it's extremely inconvenient to directly access a browser probably for this exact same reason.
I can plug a laptop into my TV, but it's not optimised for navigating remotely (on a couch, without a mouse, imprecise). I can download the show onto a USB or a mobile device and plug/stream it into the TV, but that's an additional step when I want to watch something now (to be fair, I have done that when it's something I really want to watch).
I have considered learning how to jailbreak the TV, but my primary motivation has never been to pirate - it's because the default home screen of android TV shows you a bunch of ugly ads which I want to get rid of. It seems too much effort for now - I'll try when I have time I guess.
Look, I try to pay for every ppv but I will admit I occasionally pirate a boxing/ufc fight if money is tight and the price isn’t justified. So yes I’m a hypocrite. But I’ll admit it’s obviously immoral and anti social behavior. It’s stealing, plain and simple.
It’s the same reason shoplifting is garbage behavior. Yes, the store is probably not hurt by that small thing you stole. But if everyone had that same thought, there would be no more store. So you’re essentially freeloading off the good morals of other people, and your entire ability to be a piece of shit depends on other people being good.
Convenience (I don't have to dribble around all the spamvertising, figure out which "play" button is the real one, can easily change the audio language and the subtitle language, can choose the subtitle font and size, the site remembers at what point of what episode I'm at...), plus them being so cheap (if they cost 3x as much I'd probably just stream illegally)
Convenience with moral conviction. If streaming were expensive and/or inconvenient enough and illegal was convenient enough, we might do otherwise but most likely we would just not use the streaming service. I don't have a moral issue with watching stuff for free, but since I got old enough to pay for the things I want I do like to support companies who produce good products. I do have a moral issue with bypassing a convenient pay service to get a product that wasn't intended to be free. Some things are not possible to watch at any price, but can sometimes be found for free online. Old games used to be like this and some still are. Probably a bunch of old movies hardly anyone remembers.
We pay for Netflix, Disney, and Amazon Prime. Prime we get our money's worth from the free shipping and almost certainly wouldn't have it otherwise. We do watch it some since we have it. We've had Netflix since it was discs in the mail and have felt we got good value from it, though that's going down over time. We would be most likely to cancel it if we were reducing. Disney we seem to watch pretty often and get good use out of it, mainly because it has a number of movies my family likes to watch often.
When I had two, it was moral conviction, yes. People should have the right to distribute their work at their discretion. But then I canceled Netflix when they raised their prices because I was barely using it anyway. I've still got Amazon Prime, but mostly because I'm on an island and the free shipping generally pays for itself so any shows are a bonus.
I have fewer qualms about old videogames, I'll emulate anything from NES to PS1. Especially if I owned them before. But having emulated something will serve as a tiebreaker for buying a remake. It's why I own the Trials of Mana remake, because I played the emulated fan-translation of Seiken Densetsu 3.
Youtube gets adblocked because they pre-empted a video with a goddamn 45-minute ad, another ad that consistently broke two seconds in and rendered the rest of the actual videos unwatchable, and the same political cartoon approximately seven thousand times. If the adblock ever breaks then Youtube's getting dumped.
In the case of video game emulation, it provides an experience that can't be had legally, so there's that as well.
Live on an island? Am I remembering correctly that you are in AK?
I probably shouldn't confirm or deny that.
But yes. There's a movie about us! https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0046885/
Edit
Hmmm… Homer to Ketchikan
40 hr (1,894.8 mi)
via BC-37 N and Alaska Hwy - those damn mountains get in the way
Homer to Seattle
26 hr (1,117.8 mi)
via Yellowhead Hwy E/BC-16 E
AK is a BFS and you are at its southern tip
Guess we won’t be having a beer together.
As a note that has tripped up many a poor unwary traveler trying to drive to Juneau; the Alaska Marine Highway is not a standard highway, it's a ferry route. You come and go by plane, or ship, or birth and death.
My family lived in Homer when I was a pre school little shit. I remember a surprising amount about it though. Flying into Anchorage and driving to spend some time around Homer with Mrs Gunflint in a few weeks.
Is the Begich political family still extant up there? Their American origin is my small Minnesota home town.
I recall my mom and dad referencing Ketchikan pretty often.
I pay for content so there is an incentive to make more content. Isn’t that pretty obvious?
I don’t know you so how could it be obvious that this is your reason?
Hmmm… my bad. Sometimes guys with a Boy Scout outlook think everyone has a Boy Scout outlook.
What I have noticed asking this question is that there is a lot of typical-minding going on. At least some answers read to me like the person giving them sees it as “the obvious one”, sometimes explicitly so.
Except that these “obvious” answers are actually different from person to person.
I hear you. It was a momentary slip on my part.
Wouldn't it be more efficient to buy the blurays of only the content you like, and pirate by default? More targeted incentives that way, unless you like pretty much everything available on the streaming service.
Problem with that is I don’t know what I will like until I see it. I do go to see films in the theater if it’s by an actor or director I know I like. Or I might pay to own a film that I want to watch multiple times.
> Problem with that is I don’t know what I will like until I see it
That's the solution, not the problem. If you don't like it, you don't want to incentivise its creators to make more, but if you already paid for it, you already have done so. The trick is to pirate everything first, then if you like it, buy the bluray AFTER you already watched it.
I don't watch much tv anymore. In my observation those who pirate watch 1..n hours every day. Sometimes I'll find a stream online for an old film (on archive dot org or whatever), but most often I just won't bother or watch when it's available on Netflix or Prime, or even rent it. I think Prime is a weak deal but the wife has it.
Morality is part of it. These products are made because people pay for them, and those who don't pay are piggybacking on the rest. I don't care so much if it's old stuff (including games, I'll use ROMs rather than re-purchasing what is a glorified emulated game).
Negative attention is another. I don't want to have to deal with VPNs or any of that shit to torrent because the mere act of using one could put a crosshairs on your activities. That could be mitigated by jumping through more hoops, but I don't want to. It's better to be boring.
Convenience. Illegal streaming would have to have the same UX and ease of use as legal stream for me to use it. That would mean its: easily accessible on apple tv, when i select something to watch it will play at high quality and be the content I expected. Right now, my experience with illegal streaming, is that I have to spend a lot of time searching for what I want, hope the link works, spend lots of time closing gambling and porn pop ups, then hope that the quality will be watchable.
I have a good paying job. The cost of streaming services is nothing to me. My time is worth more to me than saving the cost of streaming services.
As a non American it's somewhere between less convenient and impossible to pay to watch the television shows and films I'm insterested in compared to pirating.
Other things like PPVs and music are usually easier to purchase so I rarely pirate them.
That's how it used to be for me in the US a decade ago, and hence I pirated everything. Nowadays, it's like Julian said for me: there are legal convenient streaming services for most things and the cost is insignificant compared to my income.
Agreed. I used to pirate most videogames, but now Steam's made paying for them a more pleasant customer experience than piracy ever was. Gabe Newell was right: piracy is a service problem, not a price problem.
When I was a poor student, I pirated all the things, telling myself that I would pay if I could.
Now I can afford all the things, so I am keeping my word.
I do so because I have a life. And because I don't believe that every single petty advantage to me is paramount over everything and everyone else.
I am not sure what you are trying to say. "I have a life" sounds like it just seems to inconvenient to bother, the next sentence sounds like you think it's selfish/immoral.
Can you clarify?
Of course it's inconvient to bother. Do you really think that people *wouldn't* pay a bit of money for considerably more convenience?
of course it's inconvient, I am merely saying that I hadn't understood whether that was his main reason.
It is a reference to the second meaning here: https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/get-a-life
There is something rather pathetic about someone who is constantly angling for every trivial advantage, including every conceivable legal advantage. They are not so much immoral as they are deserving of pity.
I understand the expression, but I am still not following.
Do you think it's pathetic because "The morally right thing to do is to pay. Instead this person tries to wiggle their way out of a moral obligation for a completely selfish reason." or do you think "Putting oneself through inconvenience just to save a little bit of money is pathetic, legal or not."? Or something else I am overlooking? A mix of both?
I'm not sure I can explain it any clearer than I have. I thought I was quite clear that the morality of the specific act has nothing to do with it.
Hey my friends, if anyone is pretty up-to-date with AI and ML and LLMs, I need some assistance! I can pay a small sum for useful stuff (via Bitcoin? I'll be slow, but honest; PayPal is easier).
Upshot:
→ I want to write a response to some claims I often see around, online, that seem questionable to me — but I'm bad at researching this stuff (I often read something about XYZ at some point and then can't find the damn thing again), and fear I will miss a lot of relevant info...:
• I recall reading about some cases wherein AI diagnosticians outperformed humans. Is anyone aware of these, or any other examples of AI models outperforming human judgement? Am I remembering wrong — does it not ever happen?
• Can LLMs and other AIs extrapolate and "reason"? Are there good examples of this? E.g.., I see people saying sometimes "if you train an AI to look at moles and decide if they're cancerous or not, and it sees a mole that is a different style than in its dataset, it cannot apply a general rule like 'well it still has such-and-such features [e.g. size, irregularity] that I have abstracted out from previous examples' — it will be unable to do anything!"
....this seems questionable, to me; I thought this ability to evaluate never-before-seen examples was a large part of what made the scaling hypothesis and ML in general useful in the first place; but I'm not too sure how to make a case for this (if I'm not wrong, heh).
• Art, legal decisions / plagiarism / etc: if anyone is aware of any rulings on whether AI art is plagiarism by its very nature, or well-thought-out essays on this topic, please let me know!
I keep seeing people say "AI cannot make anything original", but it /seems/ wrong to me; the art seems about as original as a human "inspired by" a style; but I'd like to look deeper into it.
• Finally, bias and AI models: I recall reading about some controversial cases where an AI was found to be using features people don't want used (e.g. race, zip code, etc.) to make judgements; if anyone is aware of specific instances, again, please let me know!
Secondary question: is this objected to because it results in inaccurate results, or are these things actually predictive & the objection is an ethical one? I'm guessing it is the latter, but again, may be wrong.
Cheers for any assistance from people who actually know this stuff / keep better track of articles they read, heh; if you help out of pure shining goodness, I kiss the ground you float above, but if you want some financial incentive I can pay a small sum¹ per useful source/argument/etc, no problem.
Thanks for readin'!
---------------------------------
(¹: /How/ small depends on how many people help, heh... I lost my job fairly recently, but I saved up enough that I'm not starving or anything — BUT it does make me slightly less generous with payouts than I might otherwise have been. 😛)
The questions you're asking about reasoning are really outside the scope of LLMs. They don't work that way.
https://manifestodestiny.substack.com/p/the-new-guy
Good read, well-written — but I don't see that it actually explains *why* you think so, just presents an example of a hypothetical (though undoubtedly based-on-actual-disappointments) bad LLM user experience.
It literally cannot be otherwise. LLMs do not have "knowledge." They don't generate outputs that way. Their outputs and inputs are exclusively language, linguistic constructs without relationship to an outside world. That's why they cannot help but make factual errors and "hallucinations" that compromise their utility. People are sinking billions of dollars into hardware and software to optimize and refine models, without regard for this fundamental limitation. These companies and their researchers are well aware of this limitation, but they are competing to see who can fool the most people the longest.
I have worked in enough AI startups to know exactly how this sausage is made. This is a fundamental, unbeatable problem for this type of "AI."
I suggest you try some free LLMs and ask them something about topics you genuinely care about. Then you will see approximately what they can and cannot do.
The most interesting use case I found is generating high-level summaries, such as "tell me the similarities and differences between X and Y". You could probably find all that information by web search, but you would have to read dozens of pages and compile the results, while the LLM will give you the result instantly and you can ask additional questions.
I've used them a fair bit, but I'm not familiar enough with the technical background to see definitively whether a statement like..
"an ML AI like these LLMs is stymied by anything novel and can only mash together things it's seen before"
(or)
"an image classifier will never develop general rules such that it can correctly identify something that wasn't exactly in the training data"
...or other such questions — are actually broadly correct, or not.
That sort of question depends both on the actual training process, and on the results of more quantitative tests, I think.
It might be that I need to just start learning the field systematically, heh... but I didn't intend to become AI Ambassador or anything, exactly (though of course I shall not refuse the mantle! bring me my robes of office!) — just wanted to either correct my own misapprehensions, or else make a quick read to push back against those of others (depending on whose intuition turns out to be closer to the truth...).
"If you find a hammer lying in the road and sell it, you may ask a low price or a high one. But if you keep the hammer and use it to drive nails, who can doubt its worth?"
If you use an AI regularly, you will soon find out what it is good at, and what it fails at, and this will give you better intuition than reading other people's opinions on the internet. Do you want to know if the AI can do something novel? Ask it to come up with something clever in an area you understand well. (Ok, there is always a risk that the AI knows something that seems novel to you, but it was actually invented by some human.) Maybe it turns out that the abilities of AI do not exactly match the categories that most people debate about.
I asked ChatGPT to make jokes about Soviet Union and mathematics or physics or computer science... Some of them were lame, some of them were pretty funny.
"In Soviet Russia, Schrödinger's cat watches you. And it's not sure if you're alive or dead until the KGB checks."
"In Soviet Russia, quantum entanglement means your fate is tied to the nearest comrade. Better hope they're good at math!"
"In Soviet Russia, the laws of thermodynamics are simple: You work, state gets warmer. You slack off, state gets colder. Either way, state always wins."
"In Soviet Russia, if you try to divide by zero, you don't get infinity. You get a visit from the KGB for attempting counter-revolutionary mathematics."
"In Soviet Russia, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is simple: if you know where the particle is, you don't know where the KGB is watching from."
"In Soviet Russia, when you try to integrate, the function integrates you into the collective consciousness of the proletariat."
"In Soviet Russia, prime numbers aren't just divisible by 1 and themselves. They're also divisible by the secret police."
"In Soviet Russia, relativity isn't just a theory; it's a way of life. Everything is relative, especially when reporting to the Party."
"In Soviet Russia, math textbooks don't have answers at the back. The Party tells you what's right, comrade."
"In Soviet Russia, math problems don't have multiple choice options. The only choice is to solve it correctly or face remedial labor camp."
"In Soviet Russia, when you ask 'When will I ever use this math?' the answer is always 'In service to the state, of course!'"
"In Soviet Russia, the only noble gases are those who serve the Party without question."
"In Soviet Russia, the reaction rate isn't determined by concentration. It's controlled by the state's need for progress."
"In Soviet Russia, if you're caught studying nuclear chemistry, you're either a genius or a spy. Either way, you're in trouble."
"In Soviet Russia, if you discover a new species, it's either named after a Soviet leader or classified as a threat to the regime."
"In Soviet Russia, computer doesn't crash. It voluntarily participates in planned downtime for maintenance."
"In Soviet Russia, AI doesn't replace humans. Humans replace AI with comrades who uphold Marxist-Leninist principles."
...do any of these jokes qualify as "novel"? I couldn't find them in google. If a human wrote these jokes, I would not suspect them of being a machine, or lacking creativity.
Ironically, in my experience ChatGPT fails at math and following the rules precisely. And those are things that should not require anything novel.
>Finally, bias and AI models: I recall reading about some controversial cases where an AI was found to be using features people don't want used (e.g. race, zip code, etc.) to make judgements; if anyone is aware of specific instances, again, please let me know!
Not AI per se, but there has been a ton of commentary on the use, in criminal sentencing, of algorithms that purport to predict recidivism, and in particular the "black box" nature of most of them. See here https://today.duke.edu/2017/07/opening-lid-criminal-sentencing-software and here https://afraenkel.github.io/fairness-book/content/04-compas.html
Thank you! Greatly appreciated — these are just the kinds of things I am always reading or reading about, then losing... and then finding myself *really, really wishing I had them handy* months or years later! heh... maybe I ought to start keeping some sort of organized note file...
I'm familiar with AI and ML principles in general. No payment required, feel free to make a small donation to a charity of your choice if you want to.
*Superhuman AI performance*
- AlphaZero beats humans at Chess and Go, and AlphaFold beats humans at figuring out how proteins will fold.
- There is no general principle which says AI must perform worse than humans. However, in general an AI system is only as good as its training data, and in many real world cases the training data is human derived (this is almost always the case for LLMs). In such cases the AI may do an excellent job at learning the patterns in the training data, but what it has learnt is how to imitate a human.
- In other cases where there is an objective measure of performance that can be used for the training data ("did this turn out to be a tumour" / "did I win the game") there is no inherent skill ceiling. (However it's harder to build such systems, because you can't use human intuition to identify areas of improvement once the AI surpassed human performance).
- Re cancer detection, see https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2045(23)00462-X/fulltext (the Results section in particular); BBC article here https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-67264350.
*Extrapolation - AI in general*
- In a technical sense, all AI extrapolates, in the sense that it learns features which it will use to assess any data, whether or not it's similar to the training data.
- However, the patterns it learns may or may not map to the thing you care about. If you train an AI to say if an image is of a cat or a dog, and you train it only on German Shepherd dogs and Persian cats, then if you give it a Bichon Frise it will probably decide it's a cat. We would say the AI is 'wrong', but that's because we have a concept of cat and dog that goes beyond what we taught the AI. We've successfully trained a "big tan thing vs small fluffy thing" detector, and that's a totally reasonable direction to extrapolate in - it's just not the direction we wanted it to pick. It is actually very normal to use AI outside of the training distribution, but a lot of the art of machine learning is identifying training data that encourages the system to extrapolate in the 'right' direction, rather than the wrong one. This is often down to the ML engineer's intuition For this reason it's critical that at least the data you _test_ on should be close to the real data you expect, even if you don't have enough real data to _train_ on, since this allows you to confirm whether you've nudged the model into the right extrapolations.
*Extrapolation - LLMs*
- It's important to remember that LLMs are (broadly) trained in two stages. Stage one ("foundation"): learn to predict how to complete a piece of text; Stage two ("reinforcement"): learn to respond to questions in a way that humans will say is good.
- The training set for the first stage is "basically everything humans have ever written", but the training for the second stage involves much, much less data - a huge number of chat logs derived from human volunteers, but not enough to capture "all reasoning humans have ever done".
- Because of the two stage approach and the vast volume of the first stage, it's hard to rigorously define what extrapolation would mean. The hope is that the AI learns a general theory of human thought and language during the first stage, and then during the second stage is able to leverage that understanding to learn how to be a good assistant and how to respond helpfully and accurately to questions.
- The scale of data in the first stage means you end up with a really, really good text completer at human level performance. But prior to the second stage it doesn't know that it's supposed to answer questions; if you ask it to complete "The proof of the Riemann Hypothesis is..." it will say "still undiscovered". It also has as much poor reasoning in its training data as good reasoning (most writing on the Internet is bad writing) and doesn't know to prefer the good stuff.
- The second stage (hopefully) imparts enough examples of good, helpful reasoning that it learns the general faculty, effectively nudging it in the direction of valuing the 'good' input from its first stage training and disregarding the 'bad', as well as teaching it to respond in a question/answer chat bot style. This seems to work in the sense that you can ask an LLM reasoning questions that weren't covered specifically during its second stage and it will do a good job at answering them (it has learned to leverage its first stage knowledge in a general way).
- The term 'extrapolation' is then ambiguous because it has two very different sets of training data. In the first-stage sense, LLMs are very good at guessing the next word in sentences that weren't in their first stage training data. In the second stage sense, they are good at reasoning about things that were not in their human generated reinforcement data. However in a general sense, if I ask an LLM about a question it's never seen (let's say "Is Mickey Mouse a Kantian reasoner?") then whether you would call that 'extrapolation' given it has seen lots of data about Mickey Mouse and Kant, and lots of philosophy essays, and lots of argumentation in general - is an open question. I'd be tempted to say that it's technically more like interpolation, but I'm also tempted to say humans are no different.
*AI Art and Plagiarism*
I'm not qualified to talk about the legalities here. I think AI is doing something similar to what people do when they make art, but considerations of scale and cost make the consequences of AI art feel ethically different.
*AI and Bias*
- AI is fundamentally a correlation detector. If people from majority-black zipcodes are more likely to default on a loan, the AI will learn that (if you allow it to use zipcodes as part of its training data) then it will learn to rate people from black zipcodes as riskier loan candidates.
- People have attempted to solve this by restricting what input features the AI is given to things which aren't linked to protected characteristics, but this is hard because controlling for them is notoriously hard (as any researcher knows) - and the AI is often clever enough to find that signal within other combinations of features.
- I'm not an expert on this area, but I generally feel humans have fuzzy intuition here. We don't have concensus on what bias free human hiring looks like, so it's unrealistic to expect us to be able to encode it statistically.
- That said there's plenty of uncontroversial low hanging fruit, like "don't just train your facial recognition system on white people" or "make sure you aren't directly passing race as an input into your hiring algorithm".
- Debiasing LLMs is a bit different and usually involves evaluating the probability of an LLM saying biased things, then nudging the model's weights in the opposite direction.
Hope that helps. Happy to answer further questions.
Fantastic — thank you very, very much! Perhaps, if you do not mind, I will link you to my completed essay/video (depending on your preference) and you could tell me if I've said anything totally wrong and dumb?
No worries if not, however, because this is already by far more complete and in-depth than I had any right to expect! Same with these next few questions — feel free to ignore them, as you've already helped plenty enough. 🫡
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★ Extrapolation/reasoning: ★
→ The particular claim that spurred me to consider this runs as follows:
• "Suppose you train an AI to pick out photos of cats. It learns to do so, and then you give it a set of photos that include also a photo of a cat plushie, which you also wanted it to pick out. But it won't know to do this, and you can't tell it 'I wanted also plushie cats' without another huge expensive training run with hundreds of thousands of plushie cat photos included. Therefore, the term 'Artificial *Intelligence* is a misnomer — they're useless except in extremely narrow, pre-defined domains, no different from any old human-written program to do the same."
This was an old YouTube video I ran across, and at the time I just went "hm" and moved on; but thinking about it since then, as I've become more and more impressed by the recent LLMs, it's bugged me — I don't know, just seems... "in the wrong spirit" maybe?
Like... it seems to me I probably *could* tell Claude (e.g.) something like "sorry, I meant that also you should include plushie cats", and it WOULD know what that meant and re-do the thing to include them. (I would test this but I'm not sure how to give Claude OR ChatGPT a bunch of photos at once, heh.)
This is, as you mention, undoubtedly because the training data was so comprehensive that Claude does "know" plushies; still, this being the case, the criticism seems mis-aimed — if it doesn't even apply to the AIs most of us will be thinking of, right, then isn't it just sort of re-stating "narrowly-trained and small AIs are narrow and small", if you know what I mean?
This is related to the question of "originality", perhaps (re: the art and stuff) — is it making new art, or just mashing up old art; is it abstracting a principle from this data and applying it to that data, or was it all baked in?
You mentioned something about using them on O-o-D data all the time, though, so I *think* I'm closer to the right end of the stick than t'other... I hope, heh.
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Although, as you mention also, it's sort of a fuzzy question: to what extent is what the LLM does different from what a human does, right; like, if one gets sufficiently broad with the categories, one can say no human really reasons "out of distribution" too.
So... if the statement I wanted to either update upon or argue against is something like "AIs suck because they can't respond to novel data or extrapolate to handle it" — I guess it sort of depends on what we mean by "novel" (and "handle", and "suck") perhaps...?
(Still, I feel like it's... it's missing something. It's like someone when the Internet started saying "the Internet sucks because it can't enable real connection and communication between people", you know what I mean? Like, I mean, I guess it depends on defining "real connection", but it's obviously wrongheaded even so... right—)
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★ Superhuman performance: ★
→ Thank you very much — especially as I had read something about an AI detecting carcinomas well, and just could NOT find it again; was REALLY hoping someone might have it or something similar, because I thought it was a salient example of the potential here that isn't "just another game"...
...and my hero Godshatter (isn't that from a novel? I remember wanting to read it I think) came through! 👊👊
...I guess no questions here, heh, just wanted to share that boring story and express appreciation again. *cough*
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★ Bias and debasing: ★
→ I remember reading — I think on here, in fact — about how in an OpenAI paper (and another one I can't remember who published it), it appeared that turning up the "harmlessness" of the model ended up costing you on the "helpfulness" end. I can see this meaning that "we tried to remove bias and it made it less accurate", but — ....it could also mean something else, heh.
(If you know off the top of your head what it is I refer to here, I'm interested in your thoughts on it; if not, no worries, as said!)
SURVEYING FRANCE? I'm writing from France - in Marmande 60km east of Bordeaux. This is a small city - about 18,000 people - and another 12,000 in the periphery. But a big national music festival - called GAROROCK - will take place here over 3 or 4 days with many genres of music. About 150,000 people are expected - mostly young people in their 20s and 30s - but older people are also expected. They come from all over France - and from nearby countries as well - some even from the USA. Would doing a SURVEY of this population be of interest to anyone? What questions would be interesting to ask? what should be the methodology? This is a generally privileged well-off crowd. I am not a data scientist but I do play around with Bayesian Networks (Netica) which I don't often see discussed here in spite of the Bayesian mind set.
Reference to France --> recommendation to read Graham Robb's *Discovery of France* (found on Tyler Cowen's reading list), or how Paris colonized France in the Industrial Revolution. C'est vraiment très bien.
Have any of you participated in a Big Brother Big Sister program, as either a big or a little? What was your experience like? How much time did you spend with your little/big? Would you recommend it? I am considering volunteering as a big sister.
The part where I got to stamp on human faces with my boots was doubleplusgood.
I participated as a big brother - I would recommend it, as long as you have the time and will to stick to it. We did an outing (2-3 hours) about twice a month for five years, though frequency tapered off as they got older. Outings ranged from lunch, movies, sports, even a theme park day one time.
I’d say the best skill it teaches is how to be what someone else needs, not what you want to be for them. Once you get that down it becomes a lot of fun! And you learn a lot from your little too.
I... think so? There was some bigger kid who showed up at the house once or twice, probably was something like that. I got nothing out of it, I've never liked being around people. I doubt they got anything out of it either, I'm unpleasant.
LOL!
You can't be *that* unpleasant if you're aware you're unpleasant!
I was less aware of it at the time.
Our youngest daughter (recent graduate) took part in several such volunteer programmes as a recipient (we are in NZ so a somewhat different culture from the USA) so she clearly found value in them. She sought out 'mentorships' with adults starting in her early teens when she was in Scouts, whereas, none of her 3 siblings did ie I think it reflected her deliberative personality. She continues with regular contact with an assigned adult volunteer mentor (provided as part of a scholarship) from her last year at school, though at an 'exchanging Christmas cards' kind of emotional level.
Being an 'assigned' mentor (like I imagine the Big Sister role is) can be somewhat thankless as the two of you will likely be quite different in personality. It can take the passage of quite a few mutual activities together before a mentee begins to lower their guard even when they think you could be of value to them (adults are scary!). However, if you 2 'hit it off' I imagine it would be very mutually rewarding. I think our daughter used her mentors as sounding boards more than as someone to imitate, seek advice from or be reassured by.
Doing 'good works' like group cleanup of litter or a pro bono task (say a logo design) is easier because it is less demanding of you and the rewards are clearer.
Thank you for sharing your daughter's experience.
Also [can't edit comments in the mobile app!]: in whatever ethical system you subscribe to, is it a good use of time compared to other types of volunteering? e..g. packing food at a local food pantry or picking up litter in a forest preserve or doing pro bono design work in my licensed profession, or some hypothetical ethically optimal volunteer opportunity.
This doesn’t directly answer your question, but I have heard/read that the data on big brother/big sister programs suggests that they are surprisingly effective.
Huh, something for me to look into! I've heard anecdotally that they are very effective at keeping teens out of trouble and encouraging prosocial activities, but I didn't know there was data on it.
When comparing options, keep in mind that if you *enjoy* doing something, chances are you will do it better and keep doing it for a longer time. So choosing the option that seems more enjoyable is actually a good strategy.
Good point!
Why prediction markets aren't popular. Especially notable as the authors are former pro-prediction market advocates.
TLDR: It's not regulation that is holding prediction markets back, but *the lack of demand*. Unlike financial markets and sports betting, there's no built-in mass of dumb money to subsidize accuracy. And private market subsidies are far too expensive for anyone to want to do that. In the rare cases where prediction markets are actually useful for hedging, the existing financial system has already developed other products that fill the same niche.
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/why-prediction-markets-arent-popular/
American Jews have become quite excited as of late regarding the matter of local antisemitism.
To be fair, many of my people have tended towards an obsession with the subject since forever but I've been able to ignore their manias or to suggest psychiatrists so long as their fears were (nearly) entirely imaginary.
As of late they've become less imaginary and though I myself still regard American Antisemitism as a joke, as a rabbi I am getting called upon more and more to address the matter.
I regard this fretfulness over internet hitlers and students in tents as a distraction of the worst kind so I've decided to outsource the matter of "understanding (American) Antisemitism" to Ben Hecht.
As mentioned, this isn't my kampf, as I regard American Antisemitism to be a silly matter at the moment and am therefore working full time to stave off the less silly Antisemitism coming down the pike due to the criminal stupidity of those of my fellow rabbis and jewish leaders, but, if nothing else, the cancelled Ben Hecht (cancelled for trying to stop the Holocaust) was a more delightfullly brilliant writer than anyone else I've read so even if you agree with me that what Jews need be concerned about isn't pathetic internet nobodies or C- students trying to escape their finals you will hopefully enjoy this excerpt from the end of his Guide For The Bedeviled, written in 1943.
The rest of it deals with the ACTUAL antisemitism ongoing in his day and has sime of the smartest things to say about the Torah that I have ever read but, for fair enough reasons, Americans are mainly interested in America so he threw in his theory about the 4 categories of American Antisemites as he closed his manifesto.
Those archetypes are:
The Goon
The Man With A Nowhere Ticket
The Loon
Napoleon In The Shadows
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/a-theory-of-american-antisemites
Thank you for introducing me to Ben Hecht. The excerpt from "A Guide for the Bedevilled" is very good. Others must agree, as the price of a used volume is pretty high.
Thank you for your note of appreciation!
His autobiography was recently republished so it should be more easily available. It's called "Child of the Century". You'll love it. Please stay in touch if you read it. I don't tire of hearing from people who like Ben Hecht.
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-beauty-of-concrete/
Next iteration of the where did all the classical-looking buildings go?
Surprise, elites want novelty, it was never about cost - according to the essay.
Okay, one one hand I really love HongKongism, but on the other it would be good to look at architectural committees arguments over the past century, and the cost estimates for the submissions. (It's quite possible that the "trad" ones were all too big, expensive, low space utilization proposals, and brutal functional utilitarianism won almost every time?)
What amazes me is how the author can spend so long writing about casting technology without ever making a case that modernism is actually bad.
I think the real reason for the decline of ornamentation is WINDOWS. Modern technology means that you can make buildings that are almost 100% windows, which is really nice for the people who work there. I'm sure that people in the past would have built giant glass boxes too if they had the technology.
All that fancy ornamentation people pine for is just cope for the lack of windows. The British government building comparison in the article is telling. Note how the one on the right has much more window space.
I want a full on Greek classical temple, but with floor-to-roof windows between all the columns.
> Modern technology means that you can make buildings that are almost 100% windows, which is really nice for the people who work there.
Tastes vary here. Due to my fear of heights, I loathe being in rooms high off the ground with floor-to-ceiling windows. It makes me feel like I'm in the House Arryn's Sky Cells from Game of Thrones. Windows are nice for views and natural light, but I want the bottom part of the wall (at least to waist level) to actually look like something that would stop me from falling.
Similarly, I hate the fashionable internal design motif of multi-story lobbies with catwalks or balconies on the other levels where the safety railings are made of plexiglass or cables.
This rings true. Over the past couple months I have had cause to spend several days inside our state's capitol building which is a very handsome neoclassical pile that was completed in the 1880s. I was struck more than once at how much less appealing the building was when spending full workdays inside it, than it is to look at from the outside.
My regular office is in Chicago's Loop and happens to be in one of the landmark buildings of the transition to steel-frame construction. (It's called the Monadnock Building and has a long and very rich Wikipedia article.) Being a big ol' history geek I've always liked spending time inside the Monadnock notwithstanding some "old-building" type challenges. But I think your point is spot-on: the most striking quality-of-working-life difference between this building and the neoclassical ones which still exist is: windows. Big windows allowing in lots of natural light when/if wanted (which for most people most of the time, it is).
So in sum: I love looking at neoclassical architecture, as works of art it beats the modern-era stuff hands down. As places to work or live in though, have to admit that I'll take the modern all day long.
P.S. And for my money ultramodern "brutalist" stuff tends to be the worst of both: ugly to look at and oftentimes with big blank windowless walls. Yeccch.
I think it's fair to say that it's possible to build in ways which allow you to make the most of modern technology (e.g. huge glass windows), but which also don't look like boring 1960s rectangles.
I think we're still discovering what that architectural style might look like, but I've seen it in a few unlikely places, like the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas:
https://preview.thenewsmarket.com/Previews/WYNN/StillAssets/800x600/504208_v2.JPEG
https://cdn.wynnresorts.com/q_auto,f_auto/Wynn%20Las%20Vegas/Experiences/Spas/Encore%20at%20Wynn/encore_spa_atrium_2-828x466?h=466&iar=0&w=828
https://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/0e/09/bf/d6/building-entrance-drive.jpg
The interior spaces are heavily ornamented, but they look like something fresh and modern rather than a rehash of a historical style. They make the most of things like vast glass skylights and interior gardens. They're impressively large, but not so vast as to be sterile like an airport terminal. Now, not everything in the world needs to look like a Las Vegas casino, but visiting the Wynn makes me feel like a new ornamental-modern architectural style is possible and just hasn't been properly distributed yet.
It could be interesting to compare the weighting of "designing from the inside out" to "designing from the outside in."
I don't think the author wants to convey any (strong) value judgment. (And who knows who gave the title, they or an editor.)
Though in 2022 the author stated that "uglification" is happening, but also hints that it's possibly because of every generation's bias to find recent buildings uglier.
"Suppose, though, that our eyes are to be trusted. If this is so, strange and eerie truths rise before us: that ugly buildings were once rare, that the ‘uglification of the world’ is real and that it is happening all around us."
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/against-the-survival-of-the-prettiest/
I don't necessarily buy the bias explanation, because I think most critics of modern architecture would say that the absolute nadir was 50-70 years ago, before most of us were born. Most recent buildings are a lot better than the concrete monstrosities which were going up in the 1970s.
Most recent buildings are fairly pleasant, but not actually beautiful.
Yes about glass cladding, though glass curtain walls are quite recent ie I guess post 1950.
Curtain walls are, yes. I'm near the Inland Steel Building in Chicago which was a landmark of that technique when completed in 1957. However buildings using steel frames immediately had much more window glass than was previously possible; I'm sitting in a 17-story example that was completed in the early 1890s.
My grandfather's retirement job was as live-in caretaker of Wellington's, NZ, first glass curtain 'skyscraper'. It was completed about 1960. I recall an investigation was launched after one of the glass panels fell off (the glue failed).
Is Stormy Daniels liable for breach of contract?
She was allegedly paid hush-money, but didn't stay hushed. Doesn't she have to return the money, at the very least?
Depends on what forum she's been unhushed about it in. I don't follow it enough to point to any specific interviews she's given or books she's written on it where a breach could be implicated, but I can say that with respect to any testimony she's given in the current criminal case she shouldn't have any liability issues.
Pretty much every boilerplate NDA includes an exception for disclosures that are required by law (i.e. if you are subpoenaed to testify in a criminal case about it), and even if the clause isn't explicitly in there a court is unlikely to enforce a claim that an NDA was breached based on you testifying in court - I'd expect a defense that the breach is enforceable for reasons of public policy to stick in that case, even in the absence of a clear written exception in the text of the NDA itself.
But isn't the trial about giving her hush money using campaign funds? So someone somehow found out about it, but SHE wasn't the one to disclose it? I had thought she was just encouraged, somehow, to come forward with the accusation.
I could be wrong (please correct me) but I think the accusation is that the hush money helped Trumps campaign and so is a campaign expense, and these have to be disclosed (which it wasn't).
I'm not asking about that trial; my opinion doesn't count on it. But it seems to me like she was paid hush money and isn't hushed.
I had to do some googling to refresh my memory on this, but it was the WSJ that broke the story just before the 2016 election that Daniels had had an affair w/ Trump. Then in Jan 2018 it broke the story that Michael Cohen (after the 2016 WSJ story broke), had paid $130,000 to Daniels for her silence during Trump's 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. I haven't found out how the WSJ found out about the story. Afterward, it came out that Daniels had signed an NDA — but that piece of information came from Cohen. Daniels then sued to invalidate the NDA, because Cohen had broken his side of it. And she won.
Also, when Cohen wired his money (not Trump's) to Daniel's attorney late in Oct of 2016 — he used a Trump org email address to authorize the wire transfer and represented himself as "Special Counsel to Donald J. Trump"(!). <insert Homer Simpson "D'oh">
Who leaked the payment story to the WSJ?
1. Possibly Stormy Daniels or her attorney leaked it.
2. Someone in Trump's inner circle could have leaked it to put Cohen on the spot — which it did — but not realizing that it would eventually blow back on Trump.
3. Also, Daniels had been trying to shop the story since at least 2011. No one purchased it, but the WSJ could have been aware that Stormy Daniels was trying to sell her story before the 2016 election. And Cohen left a paper trail.
She won that lawsuit to invalidate the NDA because Trump had never signed it. Trump's attorneys conceded that point on the record in September 2018: “Mr. Trump does not, and will not, contest Ms. Clifford’s assertion that the settlement agreement was never formed, or in the alternative, should be rescinded,” the filing says. “Moreover, Mr. Trump covenants that he will not bring any action, proceeding or claim against Ms. Clifford to enforce any of the terms of the settlement agreement.”
Trump's lawyers have attempted to use the above facts as evidence that he was unaware of the hush money arrangement at the time that Cohen was arranging it. This point of contention has been the focus of a lot of the courtroom activity (witnesses called and cross-examined) during the current trial.
In public late last week Trump undermined the idea that he didn't know about the hush money arrangement at the time, by complaining that NDAs are normal but only his was found to be "illegal". Which isn't accurate -- it wasn't ruled illegal it was found to never have been fully executed -- but anyway the point is that he spoke about it as "my NDA".
Thank you for your research! It still isn't clear, but at least now I know why: the answer isn't obvious.
I'm not sure identifying oneself as "Special Counsel to Donald J. Trump" means much in of itself, unless it was for the specific matter at hand. If it is simply an automated signature, it ought not to count for anything. After all, if I communicated by email with someone about something questionable using my work email address, it would identify me as a software developer for my company automatically, unless I delete it.
Also a quick google - Trump & Daniels crossed paths in 2006. That's a long window for Trump to have told any number of people that he banged a porn star (it's not like the man is known for his discretion). Anybody so told could be a source for the WSJ, and all of these possible non-Stormy Daniels sources would be brought up by her attorney if Trump were to try to sue for a breach of the NDA.
I thought the prosecution was arguing that Trump *should* have used campaign funds?
No, that would have been in violation of campaign finance laws.
Under NY State law, Trump has been charged with falsifying his business records to hide other crimes which are — Cohen's illegal campaign contribution, tax law violations, and Trump's participation in conspiracy to influence the 2016 presidential election through unlawful means. *But Trump has not been charged with those crimes by NY State — only that he falsified his business records to cover up crimes.* Falsifying a business record is a misdemeanor, but falsifying it to cover up a crime is a felony.
UPDATE: From Judge Merchan's instructions to the jury today (as I understand them): (1) To convict Trump for the misdemeanors of falsifying business records, they only have to conclude that Trump falsified them or caused them to be falsified. (2) To convict Trump on felony counts, they each only have to conclude that Trump was committing some other crime by falsifying his business records. If some jurors think it was election fraud, and others think it was campaign finance violations or tax fraud, that’s OK – as long as they all vote that there was some crime involved to make the falsified business records a felony instead of a misdemeanor.
This past Sunday, I fell hard on my left knee. I'm hoping it's all soft tissue damage-- I'm recovering fairly quickly. Arnica is my friend, and so is ibuprofen.
I've gotten a recommendation for CBD oil, but apparently the quality and type vary quite a lot. I live in Pennsylvania, and I'm not sure what's available for me. I would want some which is good for inflammation/swelling.
Any recommendations?
The best thing I did was a previous decision to keep a cane where it can be found easily. If you need a cane, the last thing you need is to need to look for it.
I strongly recommend Garden Kneeling Stools for anyone who has a reason to kneel for extended periods or has or might have problems getting off the ground.
https://www.amazon.com/Garden-Kneeling-Stools/s?k=Garden+Kneeling+Stools
My one experience with CBD oil was that is was excellent at separating me from cash and did absolutely nothing else.
Yep.
I've got Hempz, and it seems to help.
Recommend looking at Pain Science site run by Paul Ingraham. I would recommend diclofenac topical for the knee. It's an NSAID that's hard on the system when taken as a pill, but you can bypass all that by applying it topically. There's a weaker form available over the counter, and a strong form you can get by prescription. Have a friend with an arthritic knee who reports it helps a lot.
And *then* I read the information about it. It's for arthritis pain and emphatically *not* for strains and sprains. I'm going to look for someone to give it to.
Really? I'm no expert -- sorry if I sent you to the wrong stuff. Just googled "diclofenac strains" and most hits seemed to be in articles in favor of the stuff for pain relief of sprains. Didn't pursue it further. What did you see that said it was the wrong thing for injuries, opposed to arthritis?
The piece of paper that came with the diclofenac.
I'll look into it some more.
A search turned this up: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1864448/
It's plausible that the manufacturer was overly cautious.
Oh, I remember being horrified by what was on the paper. The no doubt faded and distorted version of it that remains in my mind 5+ years later is "do not use this if you have even a suspicion something is wrong with your gi tract, liver, kidneys, circulatory system, or lungs. Can cause fatal blood clots, liver toxicity, strokes, pulmonary hypertension and just plain old george t. death." I asked about the paper on the Ask Reddit medical thread and someone who had the badge signifying they were an MD said it was safe to apply, the warnings applied to taking the stuff orally. (You have to send Reddit proof of your degree to get the badge -- I was on there and had to send the mods a copy of my license to get the psychologist badge. It's possible to fake it, of course, but this person probably was an actual MD.). And most people who are using it for arthritis are elderly and many probably have other health conditions, so I can't see how the stuff could be for sale over the counter if it were dangerous to use topically. But if you pursue this and find out more can you let me know?
Thank you, it's probably alright for me to use topically and occasionally. I might count as elderly (age 70), but otherwise don't have much wrong.
Thank you. I've ordered some.
I'm organizing an event next week that explores the socio-cultural factors of psychopathology, inspired by Crazy Like Us and The Geography of Madness, but one of our speakers canceled recently and it's not looking likely that we're going to find a replacement. Does anyone have an idea for what to replace that timeslot with, perhaps a topical video or a lecture that's publicly available? The audience is psychology PhD students.
Freddie deBoer wrote another essay [0] on Israel-Palestine. I'm not sure why, but this guy that I keep disagreeing with on plenty of issues and on broad worldview has a knack of independently re-deriving all of my views and feelings on the particular matter of Israel and Palestine.
From the NYT op-ed [1] The View Within Israel Turns Bleak, which Freddie mentions:
> It was the pictures of Palestinians swimming and sunning at a Gaza beach that rubbed Yehuda Shlezinger, an Israeli journalist, the wrong way. [...] “These people there deserve death, a hard death, an agonizing death, and instead we see them enjoying on the beach and having fun,” complained Mr. Shlezinger, the religious affairs correspondent for the widely circulated right-wing Israel Hayom newspaper. “We should have seen a lot more revenge there,” Mr. Shlezinger unrepentantly added. “A lot more rivers of Gazans’ blood.”
And this, dear deniers of a Genocide in Gaza, is why people think there is a genocide happening or in the first stages of happening or imminently will happen in Gaza. If you're so upset by this, make your best case for why the above is not a representative of a society that is engaging in Genocide or very seriously planning to. I'm all ears, tell me how all of this is normal and happens in plenty of other societies.
From Freddie's piece:
> this kind of eliminationist rhetoric has become entirely commonplace in mainstream Israeli politics. [...] This was the basic point of Stack’s column, which delivered a lesson that many Americans simply refuse to learn - that Israel’s government and society has become filled with ultra-nationalist, ultra-religious, ultra-militarist ultra-conservatives. If you would like to blame that reality on the Palestinians, you are free to. But it is reality. There is no longer a secular liberal state of Israel. As commentators like Gideon Levy and Gershom Gorenberg have been documenting for many years, the drift of Israel has been towards a more and more unrepentant embrace of hardline religious fanaticism and rejection of internationalism and multiculturalism.
> What fries my noodle is how few people in the public conversation - how few of you - seem willing to stake out a very simple and obvious Zionist position regarding this reality. It goes something like this.
[Imagined Zionist position] >>>> I support Zionism and the state of Israel. and I will always advocate for a safe and prosperous Jewish state. [...] I believe that Hamas bears the blame for what has happened following the attacks on 10/7, and that Israel had and has a right to use force to rescue hostages and dismantle Hamas. Palestinian lack of self-determination is ultimately the fault of Palestinians; Hamas’s rule is the biggest impediment to Palestinian peace and prosperity.
[Continue Zionist Position] >>>> However, the response to the attack has clearly been disproportionate, many specific incidents of violence against the Palestinians have been disturbing, and no matter how many civilian lives have been lost, the figure is far too high. The ongoing war is not making Israel any safer. A ceasefire is in the best interest of everyone. It’s far past time that a permanent settlement be made with the Palestinians, which must entail either a real Palestinian state or some sort of integration of Palestinians in the territories into Israeli political life.
> This isn’t my ideal statement or anything like it. As you are aware, I am a critic of many aspects of modern Israel, and in the broadest terms am motivated by my rejection of a) ethnonationalism and b) state religion. [...] And I don’t agree with this basic notion of who holds what kind of blame. But this position seems like a constructive and honest assessment of the current situation that could be held someone who is deeply invested in Israel and its future without betraying those values. But there’s so little of it to be found, from my admittedly limited perspective, and I don’t really know why. I know that there are many Israelis and American supporters of Israel who are anguished by what’s happened, but by and large defenders of Israel seem unwilling to concede that things have gone too far.
The rest of Freddie and Stack's NYT op-ed are worth reading, and I mostly agree with them (which is quite easy to do when they're just describing facts) on all broad outlines.
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See also this gem of genocidal rap [2], which among other wisdom contain lyrics like "Not even prayer will save you, decedents of Amalek." This is one of the artistic output of this totally not genocidal phase of totally not genocidal society. Keep in mind the YouTube channel that posted this, Documenting Israel, this is not some Pro-Palestinian outlet rage-hunting for the maximally-bad cherry-pick that would make Israel look bad, this is a Pro-Israel channel that posts weddings of IDF soldiers and Iranian intellectuals talking about the Islamist threat, while every once and while posting a celebration of genocidal violence and a cheering on of this violence using genocidal rhetoric.
[0] https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-missing-middle-on-israel-palestine
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/16/opinion/israeli-palestine-psyche.html, archive in case of paywall: https://archive.ph/PsnoI
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vnrEHbl5Qc
Did you read the other NYT piece Freddie linked to? That was some serious reporting. It's long, but I think it may be the best thing I've read about what's going wrong inside Israel.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/16/magazine/israel-west-bank-settler-violence-impunity.html
Especially when you consider that those two parties (Mafdal–Religious Zionism and Otzma Yehudit) have 13/120 seats in the Knesset, which means they represent almost 11% of Israelis. Not to mention whatever sympathizers they may have who vote for other parties for their own reasons.
"And this, dear deniers of a Genocide in Gaza, is why people think there is a genocide happening or in the first stages of happening or imminently will happen in Gaza. If you're so upset by this, make your best case for why the above is not a representative of a society that is engaging in Genocide or very seriously planning to."
No, it's your job to make the case that the opinions of one person--which, by the way, do not call for genocide in the way it is typically understood (i.e. the total extermination of a people)--represent the plans of an entire society. Do Israelis want revenge? Yes. Do a lot of them want to see Gazans suffer? Yes. I can't say I blame them. But there is a huge gap between wanting revenge (even revenge against civilians) and committing genocide.
One problem is that a lot of people are nowadays basically using the word "genocide" to mean "war crimes". There's a far smaller gap from "Do Israelis want revenge? Yes. Do a lot of them want to see Gazans suffer? Yes." to war crimes than to genocide.
> which, by the way, do not call for genocide in the way it is typically understood
Ah huh, calling for "Rivers of X blood" is not a call for genocide against X? Would you have said the same thing if this was a Hamas sympathizer calling for rivers of Jewish blood?
> represent the plans of an entire society
Perhaps you missed the entire last 7 to 7.5 months of posting by me, an understandable lapse. This "One Person" shares the same opinion as the Prime Minister, the President, the Finance Minister, the Internal Security Minister, and multiple Knesset representatives, to say nothing of several instances of groups of soldiers repeating this.
No True Israeli ?
"Ah huh, calling for "Rivers of X blood" is not a call for genocide against X? Would you have said the same thing if this was a Hamas sympathizer calling for rivers of Jewish blood?"
Yes. In fact, Hamas did spill rivers of Jewish blood on Oct 7, and I still don't call that a genocide.
"No True Israeli ?"
Many true Israelis are murderous fascists, just like many true members of other societies are murderous fascists. That still does not mean Israel is engaging in a genocide. You're welcome to argue that it plans to, but then you'd have to explain why it's taking them so long. Are they the most incompetent genocidaires in history?
Sorry, am I missing something? What's the case for actual genocide here?
I go check wikipedia (1) and it shows roughly 10,000 Hamas dead and 32k Gazan civilians dead. The population of Gaza, meanwhile, is 2.3 million (2). This is...roughly 0.18% of the Gazan population. That seems roughly comparable to Yemeni casualties of ~450k out of a population of ~34 million, or 0.13% of the population (3). This does not seem comparable to, say, the Armenian genocide of 600k to 1.5 million out of a population of 1.9 million (4) (5)
I keep hearing the "genocide" thing, at a glance I just don't see the bodies, am I missing something?
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_invasion_of_the_Gaza_Strip_(2023%E2%80%93present)
(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_Strip
(3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yemeni_civil_war_(2014%E2%80%93present)
(4) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_genocide
(5) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenians_in_the_Ottoman_Empire
In addition to calculating percentages wrong, and in addition to missing that this is 8 months of war not the 10 years of the war on Yemen or the nearly 15 years of the war on Iraq, you also miss a very simple fact: Genocide has nothing to do with overall death count.
Yes, definitely, death count serves as a "Smoking gun" for Genocide. There is no other reason why someone would kill 70% (or 60% or 50%) or higher of a group if they didn't want the decimation of the entire group. But a sufficient condition is not a necessary condition.
For example, here's [1] an instance where the ICJ ruled that there was a genocide on evidence of "just" 8K casualties, and a wider atmosphere of merely 25K to 30K displaces/ethnically-cleansed people. For reference against Gaza, 8K is less than 33% of 25K, the estimate of civilian Gazan casualties that you get by subtracting 10K Hamas fighters from a total of 35K dead. And 30K displaced person is a staggering 3/90, or 1/30, of the number of civilians who fled Rafah **alone** since the start of the Israeli attack about 2 or 3 weeks ago, which is 900K according to IDF reports in Haaretz.
The ultimate authority on what a genocide is a treaty, the same treaty establishing the ICJ and giving it its powers. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide [2]. It's *surprisingly* readable and understandable given the mouthful of a title, here's Article III:
>> The following acts shall be punishable:
>>> (a) Genocide;
>>> (b) Conspiracy to commit genocide;
>>> (c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;
>>> (d) Attempt to commit genocide;
>>> (e) Complicity in genocide.
Take a good look on point (c), by the way. This needs no proof except being caught on video multiple times saying "Human Animals" and "Rivers of Blood". Just the mere incitement to Genocide is a crime according to a treaty that Israel was one of the first signatories to in 1948.
Here's article II, the definition of Genocide:
>> genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
>>> (a) Killing members of the group;
>>> (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
>>> (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
>>> (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
>>> (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Causing mental harm to the group, such as by forcing nearly 95% of them to become homeless, killing children at random by unpredictable airstrikes, and destroying 70% or so of the urban area they used to call home. That's Genocide, according to the literal highest authority on what a genocide is.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_genocide
[2] https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/convention-prevention-and-punishment-crime-genocide
<quote>This needs no proof except being caught on video multiple times saying "Human Animals" and "Rivers of Blood".</quote>
I doubt the standard is so low, else there would have been much more prosecutions (including *both* sides of this war). And as with most laws, the word *intent* carries a whole lot of water.
It's true that the overall death count is not the only factor in determining whether a genocide happened, but neither is the literal text of the Convention. The Convention's definition of genocide is so broad as to be completely useless. What does "in whole or in part" mean? How big of a part does it need to be to count? If you take the text literally, then even if Israel killed only Hamas militants and didn't hurt anyone else or damage any property, it would still be guilty of genocide--they'd be destroying a part of a national group, namely the part that's part of Hamas. In fact, since mental harm counts (per part b), even berating Hamas on TV would count!
Clearly, this definition of genocide is very far from the common sense definition that the word has taken on among the vast majority of English speakers. If the ICJ uses this definition and takes it literally, that's a good reason to not take the ICJ seriously.
Since you mention the Bosnian genocide (which, BTW, I don't agree is a genocide), here are some of the things that happened in the Srebrenica massacre:
"The Bosnian men who had been separated from the women, children and elderly in Potočari numbering approximately 1,000 were transported to Bratunac and subsequently joined by Bosnian men captured from the column.[118] Almost without exception, the thousands of Bosnian prisoners captured, following the take-over of Srebrenica, were executed. Some were killed individually or in small groups by the soldiers who captured them and some were killed in the places where they were temporarily detained. Most, however, were killed in carefully orchestrated mass executions, commencing on 13 July 1995 in the region just north of Srebrenica.
The mass executions followed a well-established pattern. The men were first taken to empty schools or warehouses. After being detained there for some hours, they were loaded onto buses or trucks and taken to another site for execution. Usually, the execution fields were in isolated locations. The prisoners were unarmed and in many cases, steps had been taken to minimise resistance, such as blindfolding them, binding their wrists behind their backs with ligatures or removing their shoes. Once at the killing fields, the men were taken off the trucks in small groups, lined up and shot. Those who survived the initial round of shooting were individually shot with an extra round, though sometimes only after they had been left to suffer for a time.[117]"
"Erdemović said that all but one of the victims wore civilian clothes and that, except for one person who tried to escape, they offered no resistance before being shot. Sometimes the executioners were particularly cruel. When some of the soldiers recognised acquaintances from Srebrenica, they beat and humiliated them before killing them. Erdemović had to persuade his fellow soldiers to stop using machine gun for the killings; while it mortally wounded the prisoners it did not cause death immediately and prolonged their suffering.[127] Between 1,000 and 1,200 men were killed in that day at this execution site.[129]"
When Israel starts executing thousands of people who have already surrendered and aren't resisting, you could convince me that Israel is committing a level of atrocity on par with the Srebrenica massacre (which, again, I do not consider a genocide).
>neither is the literal text of the Convention. The Convention's definition of genocide is so broad as to be completely useless. What does "in whole or in part" mean? How big of a part does it need to be to count? If you take the text literally, then even if Israel killed only Hamas militants and didn't hurt anyone else or damage any property, it would still be guilty of genocide--they'd be destroying a part of a national group, namely the part that's part of Hamas.
Very much agreed. The UN definition of genocide is bizarre to the point of, as you said, uselessness.
People keep ignoring the "as such" portion of the definition:
> “The intent must exist to destroy a national, ethnical, racial or religious as such. Thus the acts must be directed towards a specific group on these discriminatory grounds.”
The Prosecutor v. Clément Kayishema and Oben Ruzindana. 21 May 1999. ICTR-95-1T
Hence, if Israel targets Hamas members simply because they are Palestinians, then that might be an "in part" form of genocide of Palestinians. But if Israel targets them because they attacked Israel, then it is not genocide, because it is not destruction of part of an ethnic group "as such."
So, the UN definition is useful, but only if you can read minds or the suspect confesses?
With ordinary murder, one can infer intent from e.g. the observation that the suspect stabbed the victim with a kitchen knife twenty-six times, but inferring from such an intent to kill the victim's entire extended family when in fact they stopped after just the one is a bit of a stretch.
Many Thanks! That makes it a lot clearer. A pity that, AFAIK, Hamas members are a subset of Palestinians. If Hamas had a couple of non-Palestinian members that Israel could kill, that would clarify this legal issue.
Gotcha, thanks.
Sure thing, bud, sure thing.
One day we will buy you a double-way ticket to the Hague so you can tell those nasty UN officials from 1948 all what's in your heart to their face instead of spewing it here.
>One day we will buy you a double-way ticket to the Hague so you can tell those nasty UN officials from 1948 all what's in your heart to their face instead of spewing it here.
Alright, I'll bite. What, specifically, do you mean by this?
That it's pointless to complain about the Hague courts now that they threaten to punish Israel and Israeli politicians, when it has been standing for nearly 75 years and nobody complained as long as it was punishing and condemning "backwaters" in Asia and Africa and South America.
From a legal perspective, is Israel allowed to fight against Hamas? If so, and given that Hamas is hiding within a civilian population, is there a way that Israel could conduct the war, effectively, without committing what you are calling genocide? If you're arguing that Israel isn't/shouldn't be allowed to fight against Hamas, or that it's not allowed to be effective (or win), I'm not sure there's much room for compromise.
I'm not a fan of everything Israel is doing, but if they did everything I feel that I could reasonable ask of them, I don't know that the outcome would be significantly different.
From a legal perspective, is Israel allowed to fund Hamas?
From a legal perspective, is Israel allowed to settle lands it militarily occupies?
Isn't it extremely dishonest to cite rules when they're in Israel's favor, but throw those same set of rules in the trash when they're not?
As far as their actions go, Israel is not bound by international law.
It's nice that you're comfortable and all, but you don't get to just spew contempt for others 'views here without presenting a reasoned argument or data to back up your opinions. Moreover you are rude. Are you aware of the two-out-of-3 criteria for comments here? You already got a partial ban for a post that failed all 3 criteria. You just put up 2 more that also fail all 3, both of which I'm reporting.
Two nitpicks:
1) It's 1.8% and 1.3%.
2) It's a little bit comparing apples with oranges. The war in Yemen went over 10 years, in Gaza it's less than a year. And in Yemen, only 150k were killed by direct military action, the rest by a famine (which of course is also very much related to the war).
Out of curiosity, the reason the US (officially at least) does not recognize Palestine is that most of the Arab world (for example, Saudi Arabia) does not recognize Israel. The reason they have blocked recent resolutions in the UN is because the American position is that such recognition must be reciprocal: Palestine and the Arab states recognize Israel and that it has a right to exist. Israel and the US and friends recognize Palestine as an independent state with a right to exist.
Why is this mutual deal not acceptable to the Palestinian side? In the past it was because organizations like the PLO and Hamas were quite explicit about wanting to destroy Israel. If that's no longer their intent then why don't they push their Arab friends to take that exchange? Why do they still push for unilateral recognition where they don't have to recognize Israel?
The PLO recognized Israel all the way back in 1993 as a precondition to the Oslo Accords.
What the PLO acknowledged was the right of Israel to exist. There was no exchange of diplomatic recognition. Which is what the US wanted from both sides. The US eventually got a promise from both sides to recognize each other but the deal did not ultimately close.
The PLO is not the government of Palestine which is the State of Palestine. You don't get a passport from the PLO, you get it from the State of Palestine. This is evident even in the letter where the PLO recognized Israel's right to exist where they reference needing to get a resolution through a government process. The leader of Fatah is effectively the dictator of that government. But they are still technically separate and the State does not recognize Israel on the (imo fair) grounds that Israel doesn't recognize them.
Anyway, I think it would be a smart move for the Palestinians to plainly offer that they and their Arab friends will recognize Israel and Israeli borders contingent on a peace deal (and recognition from Israel's partners). If it were sincere it would limit them to more achievable goals and give them a permanent defense against the idea they're trying to commit a genocide. Unless, like Hamas, they are actually trying to commit a genocide.
I know some Palestinians feel like admitting Israel gets to exist is a concession. But that seems to me to be a delusional take.
How are the Palestinians supposed to offer a binding recognition that the *other* Arab states will recognize Israel? For one thing, it would be very hard for Syria - a fairly crucial component - here to offer a recognition even if Israel fully agreed to 1949-borders Palestine as long as Israel still keeps occupying Golan.
They could declare that their position unilaterally and ask the Arab League to endorse it.
Also, if that's the standard would you be fine with a peace deal where the US and the rest of the west doesn't recognize Palestine? Where they don't get a seat in the UN which Israel doesn't control? Or is the standard that Israel must bring along additional states and recognition while Palestine does not have to?
> but by and large defenders of Israel seem unwilling to concede that things have gone too far.
Not in English they wouldn't. Not because they are so extreme that they don't think it, but because of the "arguments are soldiers" mentality. In Hebrew, you hear more of it - not from politicians and not very loudly, but definitely from the mainstream center-left media. I do not think that the current atmosphere in Israel is good for preventing war crimes by low-ranking soldiers or bad judgment of proportionality in higher rank, but those sporadic and ambiguous mentions of Amalek (and rare-though-not-rare enough explicit calls for genocide from random publicists) are far from enough for generating the concensus needed for coordinating a large project in a non-centralized society.
> if the Pals' situation
There is really nothing more comically pathetic than this attempted timid attempt by the Pro-Israel cheerleaders at inventing a slur by truncating an ethnicity name. Perhaps only rivaled by always writing "Palestinians" with the quotes to imply the group doesn't exist, that favorite conspiratorial wet dream.
Not decent enough to call the people you don't like by their true name, not courageous enough to coin a true slur. The worst of all qualities, neither Man nor Beast.
You point out something that basically all of the anti-Israel crowd misses (or cynically chooses not to see). No one is forcing the Gazans to fight to the death. Their government can end the war at any time by surrendering. It's ludicrous to believe that a state can start a war by deliberately and savagely attacking civilians, and then the onus is on the other side to make peace.
"""Just revolt on Hamas bro. Why you keep doing this bro? Stop making us kill children bro, just revolt on Hamas tomorrow and we will stop killing innocents, pinky promise, no more killing innocents like the last 75 years."""
Learn to at least correctly parse what your interlocuter means by their words before you launch into indignant bursts.
My peace plan for Israel and Palestine:
The entire area is one country, called "Israel and Palestine".
This country has dual citizenship. Every person is either a citizen of Israel *or* a citizen of Palestine. The Law of Return makes you a citizen of Israel. There is analogical law for Palestinian refugees (e.g. the ones living currently in Lebanon) that makes them citizens of Palestine, if they choose to return and apply for the citizenship. Children inherit the citizenship of their mother.
The country is a parliamentary democracy, where the 50% of parliament is elected by citizens of Israel, and 50% by citizens of Palestine. A political party makes two lists of candidates for elections, one for the Israel part of the parliament, and one for the Palestine part. The parliament votes on proposals as a whole. (Alternatively: each proposal needs to get a majority approval in both parts.)
...well, that's the long-term idea in a nutshell, now the problem is how to get from "here" to "there".
So, a hybrid of RoI/NI after Good Friday and before Brexit and Belgium, with a sprinkling of the dhimmi system?
Why start with Israel and Palestine? You could bring this to the UAE, or Saudi Arabia, or Syria, or Yemen, or Sudan or Libya. See how it works and then -- if successful -- bring it to Israel and Palestine.
After all, there are lots of countries in the Middle East that have undergone wars far deadlier than the current war in Gaza. Countries that are currently much further from representative democracy. Why limit the concept to Israel and Palestine?
Didn't know I wasn't allowed to propose a solution for a problem unless I solve all other problems too.
Apologies, I'm not trying to say you did anything wrong.
In my experience, I've noticed that people who support regime change in Israel are more hesitant to support regime change in some other countries which could plausibly be described as being as bad as, or worse than, Israel.
I just wanted to get a sense of whether this was an idea that's unique to Israel, or good for everyone, or a punishment for Israel, etc. If that didn't come across, the fault is solely mine.
I have spent more time learning and thinking about Israel and Palestine than about the other countries you mentioned. I am not proposing a one-size-fits-all solution, but rather something that I think might fit the specific situation of Israel and Palestine. To propose a similar solution for the other countries, I would first have to spend a comparable amount of time learning about their specific situations. That's not something I can do on request, and I cannot predict how similar or different would be my answer.
The fact that Israel already is a democracy is a reason why I think that extending the institution to Palestinians has a better chance to succeed than e.g. trying to introduce the concept to Saudi Arabia from scratch. Those few millions of Arabs who currently have Israeli citizenship are already living in a democracy! I admit I don't know what parties they typically vote for, and whether those are deeply problematic in any way. If yes, that would indeed be a problem for my proposal.
I could even imagine a relatively fluent transition from the current situation to the described outcome. Maybe add Palestinians gradually, starting with the West Bank, leaving Gaza last, and make a quota how many Palestinians living in other countries can return each year.
Step 1: There already is a Jewish and Arab population in Israel, and they both can vote, right? So the first step would be to reform the existing system with the existing voters, mostly preserving the existing balance of powers. There are 3 times more Jews than Arabs currently, therefore in step 1 we will change the rules so that 75% of seats in the parliament are reserved for politicians voted in by the Jewish population, and 25% of seats are reserved for politicians voted in by the Arab population. Each political party provides two lists of candidates for each section of the parliament. -- Do you think this would already result in some kind of disaster, for example the current Arab citizens of Israel mostly voting for Hamas (or something similar under a different name)?
Step 2 is gradually including more people in the system, as voters for the Palestinian part of the parliament. As the population increases, the percentage of the seats in parliament reserved for the Arab/Palestinian voters increases as a linear function of the population that votes for it, up to the target of 50% at the moment everyone on the current territory of Israel+Palestine is included. (Mathematically speaking, let's say that currently 1/4 of Arabs living in the area have Israeli citizenship, so we make a linear function such that 1/4 results in 25% and 4/4 results in 50%; I think the formula would be y=1/6+1/3x where x is the fraction of Arabs in the area included in the system, and y is the fraction of their seats in parliament.) So basically we need to onboard 5 more millions of Arabs, and with each million the size of the Palestinian parliament increases by 5 percentage points. But we don't add all 5 millions at the same time, rather maybe start with Area C, later the rest of the West Bank. Wait with Gaza until the situation with Hamas is solved.
Now imagine the situation in the middle of this process. For example, suppose that West Bank is already integrated in the system, but Hamas still rules in Gaza. What is the situation like for the Palestinians? The ones already in the system have full rights and higher quality of life. They vote for the ordinary corrupted politicians, rather than outright terrorists. They can walk wherever they want to, live wherever they want to. How exactly does Hamas excuse its existence in this situation? I think the people under their rule would see that getting rid of Hamas would be a clear improvement to their situation.
> I just wanted to get a sense of whether this was an idea that's unique to Israel, or good for everyone, or a punishment for Israel, etc.
An attempt to find a peaceful solution, other than the current "one side must be exterminated/expelled first, and only then the remaining side can live in peace".
This seems pretty close to Lebanon's government - they allocated seats based on religion. They went through a 15-year civil war from 1975 to 1990, which killed ~150,000 people. Today, the country rarely follows its own Constitution - their politics is so dysfunctional their Presidency is just vacant. It's not clear when, if ever, they will elect a new President. They recent went through a sovereign default, and their GDP per capita is about half of the world's average. The Economist gives their democracy a 3.56 out of 10 - an authoritarian country.
The sad reality is that if Israel's neighbors became more like Israel, the Middle East would be a safer, richer, happier place. If Israel became more like Lebanon, you would just see another failed authoritarian state lurching from economic collapse to civil war.
I think you honestly want to make the region better. For many people, the nightmare scenario of Lebanon is their dream for Israel. Because they want to do regime change in Israel for the same reason we did it in Afghanistan - revenge.
Yeah, it was inspired by Lebanon, but I didn't remember the name of the country... and did not know that the system failed. :(
(One thing I would do differently is not linking the votes to current religion. Like, imagine that one day million people in Lebanon convert to Buddhism; how are they going to vote? I think it would be better to simply have some neutrally named citizenship, let's just call it "type A" and "type B". Initially we give the type A to Jews and type B to Arabs, plus we define that Jews coming to the country based on the Law of Return also get the type A, and Palestinians returning also get the type B. But from that point on, the citizenship type is simply passed from mother to children, and if those children choose to convert to Buddhism, they keep the citizenship type they inherited.)
The problem as I see it now is that basically democracy doesn't work in countries where you have strong ethnic groups. Democracy works where the opposing sides are called "the left" and "the right", because anyone can join any side, and many people are kinda in the middle. Democracy fails where the opposing sides are called something like "Tutsi" and "Hutu", because everyone has their side clearly defined, and the larger tribe wins. Which encourages "political strategies" such as having more children, accusing the other tribe of having too many children, and killing people from the other tribe.
Basically this was the reason behind Nakba, as I see it. The Jews in Israel (1) wanted to have a democracy, (2) wanted their side to win, but (3) were numerically a minority. This was mathematically impossible: you could get any two of these, but not all three. But if you kick out enough Arabs; not all of them, just enough to make the remaining ones numerically a minority, the system can work. Letting them in would break the system again.
Ironically, the system could also be more peaceful without democracy, or at least without democracy for everyone. Make the rules so that only Jews can vote, and then you do not need to kick out the Arabs, because it doesn't matter politically how many they are. You can take their land one village at a time, so there will never be millions of refugees. -- Even this system would be an improvement over what happens now. Problem is, it would make the political allies of Israel ashamed to admit that they support this. Or maybe not, considering that USA also supports Saudi Arabia, which is a theocratic monarchy.
In case others have missed it, incidentally, I found this series of nine posts to be a rather comprehensive description of the history and problem space:
https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/how-to-solve-the-israel-palestine-conflict
Hard to see how that setup doesn't lead pretty quickly to most, maybe all, Jews having been murdered or fled the country.
1) how do you stop Palestinians murdering every Jew they see once that happens? Historically that's happened every time in the region except under Israeli governments.
2) even if you put violence aside, no country in the world would accept just annexing another, much poorer population the size of its own. Imagine trying to convince the US to solve illegal immigration by joining into one giant country with the entirety of Latin America.
> Historically that's happened every time in the region except under Israeli governments.
How did Jews manage to survive from the times of the Romans to 1948 if every time a Palestinian Arab sees a Jew, the Arab proceeds to kill the Jew?
> no country in the world would accept just annexing another, much poorer population the size of its own.
No modern country in the world colonizes the land that it occupies in a war either, but here we are.
> How did Jews manage to survive from the times of the Romans to 1948
Many of them didn't TBF
> No modern country in the world colonizes the land that it occupies in a war either,
Well Russia did, but it's certainly not common.
Does the PRC's control of Tibet count?
That happened a long time ago.
Many Thanks! Well, China's conquest of Tibet happened before I was born, but not long before, and certainly within living memory:
>The region maintained its autonomy until 1951 when, following the Battle of Chamdo, Tibet was occupied and annexed by the People's Republic of China. The Tibetan government was abolished after the failure of the 1959 Tibetan uprising.[6]
( from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibet )
Banned for this post (LHHIP was banned for an unrelated post I just saw from several months ago)
> there were no "Palestinians"
The infantile fear of the Palestinian identity and its fervent denial will never be not funny.
> committed plenty of pogroms against local Jews over the centuries
A shameful black spot in the history of Palestinian Arabs and Arabs everywhere, but I notice with curiosity that "Plenty of Pogroms" is still not "murdering every Jew they see", unless my English is betraying me somehow. So it still stands to ask the question: How did Jews survive at all if OP is correct and every single time an Arab sees a Jew a murder happens?
> not that a "human rights enjoyer"
Aww don't be so salty, it's not an exclusive club. Joining is as easy as denouncing genocide and not cheerleading for a war machine that kills children by the thousands. We don't give cards and you have to bring your own food.
Stay classy.
Singapore's an especially funny example because Singapore left Malaysia (in part) over it being Malay/Muslim majority to create their own smaller country with a Chinese majority. This included expulsions on both sides but both sides accepted independence. So the Singapore solution is: carve out your own area where you're the ethnic majority and then have the larger ethnic group accept that and not attack you. I think Israel would take that deal.
Also, you really want to claim Arab pogroms killed less than 35,000 people in all of history? Because that's a very silly thing to believe.
> you really want to claim Arab pogroms killed less than 35,000 people in all of history?
Funny you would ask, yeah. How much do you want to bet that 35K is way more than the total sum of the casualties of every single non-war instance of Arab pogroms from 1850 till now?
The first two had something like a four to one population ratio, strong shared history and ethnic ties, and still ended up being economic basket cases. South Korea probably wouldn't annex north Korea at this point *despite* their own strong historical ties, precisely for this reason. Taiwan definitely doesn't want Chinese reunification anymore.
Taiwan has no interest in annexing China. DPP wants independence, KMT knows reunification means PRC sovereignty.
"South Africa..." - And it worked out so well for the whites there, that they merely enjoy Detroit style murder rates and have fled abroad by the hundreds of thousands.
What, seriously, do you believe the alternative would or could have been?
Well, the Good Friday Agreement did work out a lot better than anyone in the 1970s might have hoped for...
In the situations you mention, one side wants to be left alone (Ukraine, Croatia, Bosnia).
In case of Israel and Palestine, both sides want to own the entire territory -- "Greater Israel" / "from the river to the sea" -- and this plan allows them both to kinda have it.
Hello! I also just wanted to remind fellow Berliners of the meetup on Sunday, because I want you to be there.
Additionally, this is a test of my will still being efficacious.
It is. Except, of course, writing this so shortly after wanting that is just a coincidence.
Difficult to determine in hindsight.
A question for linguistics people.
In Turkey, cichlids are sometimes marketed under the name "ciklet" (the 'c' is akin to English 'j', so dʒɪklɪt or thereabouts?), because "sik" is the Turkish root-word for "fuck" and nobody would buy fish called fuck-lids if aquarists were to adopt the English pronunciation. (There's also a contribution from ciklet 'chewing gum', originally from Chiclets).
In Japan, cinerarias (シネラリア) are sometimes marketed under the name "syneria" (サイネリア), because shine is the Japanese root-word for "die" and nobody would buy plants called die-in-a-ditchworts if florists were to adopt the English pronunciation.
In the US, the rape plant is sometimes marketed as "canola", because rape is the English root-word for rape and nobody would buy food made with rape if the food producers were adopt the English pronunciation. (Canola is technically a cultivar but apparently it got genericized partially because of this).
Is there a general term for this type of deliberate, euphemistic changes to words? I asked our AI overlords, but they make up terms that Google Scholar doesn't verify (e.g. "phonetic avoidance" which is not about changing rude-sounding loanwords, but about people who can't pronounce certain syllables avoiding words with them).
The Patagonian toothfish became the Chilean sea bass.
I can't remember the exact Lewis quote, but he wrote about some kind of fake rabbit(?) fur that led to a cascade of misleading names.
>In the US, the rape plant is sometimes marketed as "canola", because rape is the English root-word for rape and nobody would buy food made with rape if the food producers were adopt the English pronunciation. (Canola is technically a cultivar but apparently it got genericized partially because of this).
There is an additional distinction. Unmodified rapeseed oil has erucic acid, which causes cardiac problems https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1277456/ .
>Canola oil is a food-grade version derived from rapeseed cultivars specifically bred for low erucic acid content. It is also known as low erucic acid rapeseed (LEAR) oil and is generally recognized as safe by the United States Food and Drug Administration.
( from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapeseed_oil )
So it isn't just the name. The aversion to unmodified rapeseed oil is ... heartfelt.
I don't know if there's a name for it, but here's another story: English used to call rabbits "coneys", but stopped because it sounded too similar to "cunny". But the entire word couldn't be thrown out entirely because it's in the KJV (and Shakespeare?), so the pronunciation also changed to be "cone-y" instead of "conn-y" while graduating "rabbit" (used to just refer to the young) to cover the entire animal.
Not to mention what donkeys used to be called
And let's not forget the Chaucerian-era jokes about "hunting rabbits". ;-)
That one's interesting! I thought 'cunny' was a new invention in the parlance of Flower Knight Girl and Blue Archive players (where it means something you shouldn't Google, if you aren't in the know and are happy with the number of government lists you're on), but turns out the cockneys were there before them.
In retrospect, it was a matter of time before somebody put cunt and fanny together.
Linguistic sanitation
Taboo?
Greece had the Eumenides, or "Kindly Ones", because it was bad to say the name Erinyes, or "Furies".
Sorta, but that's a related practice of circumlocuting the name of a big scary thing that might hear you talking shit about it, like bears becoming "the brown ones" or fairies becoming "iyi saatte olsunlar" ("may they come in good hours").
It would fit if the Ancient Greeks decided e.g. Mons Argaeus sounded too much like Erinyes, and changed the name to Mons Aureus or something instead. (And then we Turks came along and re-changed the name to Erciyes, which sounds even more like Erinyes. Typical Turks).
In most Latin American countries, the Mitsubishi Pajero is marketed as Mitsubishi Montero because in vulgar Spanish "pajero" means something close to "masturbator", and you don't want to say: "I just bought a new car, it's a masturbator".
The Italian dub of Moana is titled Oceania in order not to remind of porn actress Moana Pozzi.
There is a company named OSRAM that manufactures lightbulbs. It is the subject of many jokes in Poland, because in Polish, "osram" means "I will shit on."
"What hangs from the ceiling and makes threats?"
"An OSRAM lightbulb."
Chicago means the same thing in Italian
Makes me wonder about the Audi e-tron, which literally means "turd" in French. Do the French not find it jarring?
ChatGPT pronounced the French way means "cat, I farted" but that still doesn't stop them from doing so rather than pronouncing it the English way
"In the US, the rape plant is sometimes marketed as "canola", because rape is the English root-word for rape and nobody would buy food made with rape if the food producers were adopt the English pronunciation."
Wrong etymology here, though I take your point about the homonym.
"The name for rapeseed comes from the Latin word rapum meaning turnip. Turnip, rutabaga (swede), cabbage, Brussels sprouts, and mustard are related to rapeseed. Rapeseed belongs to the genus Brassica."
Over here, it's called rapeseed oil and an older name for the plant is "oilseed rape" because, well, it's produced for the seed oil.
https://mycaboosestore.ie/shop/wicklow-rapeseed-oil-bottle/
https://www.teagasc.ie/crops/crops/break-crops/oilseed-rape/
I find myself often having to translate food ingredients from American: "What's arugula, eggplant, zucchini and canola again in English?" 😀
Oh, my bad. I was just being facetious about rapum and rapio.
But maybe there's some overlap in things like broomrape, rapum-genistae, which is named after its tuberous roots but is also a parasite that seizes its host.
There is a delicious mushroom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craterellus_cornucopioides called "trumpet of the dead", in German "Totentrompete". It is sold as "Herbsttrompete", "trumpet of autumn", because the other name hurts sales.
A town in Italy used to be called Borgocollefegato ("liver hill burg") but in 1960 it was renamed Borgorose ("rose burg") to sound less truculent
What is the podcasting interview economy like?
Do guests consider themselves to be doing a favor when they go on someone's podcast? Do podcasters consider *themselves* to be doing someone a favor when they invite them as a guest? Does it depend on the podcast size? Does the average person invited to be a podcast guest say yes? Do you have to be a Top 10 podcaster to score someone relevant? Do you have to build your way up by interviewing random friends until you prove yourself good enough that a real famous person will come on your show? Do podcasters send out resumes to guests to prove that they're good?
The answers will vary by the type of guest.
First of all, not all podcasts host guests: many popular podcasts have a permanent crew, or even just a single host. But focusing on those that do host guests, there are three types of people that end up as one:
1) Expert: someone with relevant knowledge or a unique personal experience
2) Content creator: someone who is engaging to listen to; who has a committed audience
3) Friend: someone who the host is comfortable bantering with; who can reveal personal information about the host
These types are not mutually exclusive, one person can fall under multiple types.
Some podcasts operate by only inviting the experts. These are often linked to some area of academia or industry: anthropology podcast inviting anthropologists, tech podcast inviting entrepreneurs and so on. A feminist podcast inviting an abuse survivor would fall under this type too.
Some podcasts feature mostly other content creators. Those typically form tight bundles of people all appearing in each other's content, catering to a certain niche of the online audience. "Breadtubers" make content for online leftists, "manosphere" makes redpill/PUA content, "anitube" makes content for weebs, "ratsphere" makes content for, well, anyone reading this.
Some podcasts will invite people who they vibe with IRL. This is great if you want to create a feeling depicted in the "how it feels to listen to podcasts meme", a parasociality component that makes the viewer less lonely during their daily grind. This is how you build an audience that will subscribe to your Patreon and buy your merch because they like you as people, not just as information or entertainment vessels.
Many guest-type podcasts host a combination of guest types. You can tell what type the guest falls into by the episode title:
"We grill a forensic psychiatrist" would match the expert guest
"We grill Scott Alexander" would match the content creator guest
"We got so drunk we dropped the grill" would match the friend guest
Getting back to the guest economy, the dynamics can be pretty different depending on what capacity do the hosts invite the guest as.
With experts, on "small fish" prominence levels podcast hosts would typically reach out to people whose work or stories make some kind of impact. In big leagues, the situation can reverse, and the industry giants might have their PR agents reaching out to top podcast hosts with an appearance deal.
Content creators are typically aware of each other's existence for a long time before the episode gets recorded. In most cases, they don't only work on podcasts: they would have a youtube channel, a blog, etc. If the audiences overlap, both the host and the guest would have their followers banging on the doors saying "you should host this person" or "you should appear on this podcast", and it's usually a good idea since it grows both audiences. If they are not in contact yet, a bigger creator might get interested in the work of the smaller one and invite them to collaborate or to appear on a podcast. Alternatively, the bigger creator can just publicly comment or react to the work of a smaller one. In this case a smaller creator can offer a bigger one a collaboration offer. Reaching out to bigger creators cold is considered impolite and is unlikely to work.
Inviting friends who are experts or content creators is a great way to kick off a podcast - Bayesian Conspiracy podcast invited Eliezer as a first guest. I struggle to come up with an example of an unknown host interviewing unknown friends until they rise to prominence - those podcasts tend to stay unknown (I know because I hosted one). Typically it goes the other way around: a host who already achieved some level of prominence invites their partner or a parent for a collaboration to illuminate a warmer side of themselves.
Just guessing, but I think it depends.
* Jordan Peterson coming to my (hypothetical) podcast would be him doing me a huge favor.
* Joe Rogan inviting me to his podcast would also be him doing me a huge favor.
* If someone wanted to promote their product on my (hypothetical) podcast, I would be doing them a favor, even if it was a famous company.
* Jordan Peterson coming to my (hypothetical) podcast, giving me an interview, and also mentioning his latest book... he is doing me a favor by providing new content for my podcast, but taking some of the value back by advertising his book. Still, a net favor to me.
So I guess the answer is: (1) Is it advertising? If yes, the podcast is doing a favor to the advertiser. (2) Otherwise, the more famous person is doing a favor to the less famous person.
Looked it up out of curiosity since you raised the question and like everything now, there's a Reddit for it:
https://www.reddit.com/r/PodcastGuestExchange/
The main tips seem to be:
(1) Identify your audience and what you are covering - niche/special interests are easier to grow an audience than a general "fifty other shows like this"
(2) Have a good track record - you have several episodes of the podcast, there's an audience that follows it
(3) Just ask! Ask friends, ask people if they want to come on, send out emails to Big Names about "would you like to be a guest on my podcast?" Though I get the impression, even if it's not said outright, that if you're asking for Big Names then they would expect to be paid a fee to appear, just like ordinary chat shows, radio shows, etc.
https://www.descript.com/blog/article/where-to-find-podcast-guests-7-tips-to-find-your-next-guest
https://www.thepodcasthost.com/podcraft-podcast/how-to-get-booked-as-podcast-guest/
I've only done one podcast-type conversation with a fellow who has some name recognition as it's easier to book myself than others, but if you're interested in having a podcast-type of convo on my channel it would be an honor.
Here's my channel :
https://youtube.com/@ydydy?feature=shared
And here's my whatsapp (I don't see a way to be notified of responses to this comment so whatsapp is a surer method of reaching me immediately)
1-646-623-ד-ב-ט-ה
Moshe B'mitzraim
Interesting questions, and I don’t have answers to all of them, just a perspective on a few.
I wrote a post (“On support, power and powerlessness”) touching on this.
Perspective is that too many people who came on my podcast a couple of years back were either (a) considering that they were supporting me by coming on or (b) had something to hawk.
Few of the guests I really wanted accepted the invitation (because podcast wasn’t high profile enough) although those that did were invariably the best interviews.
Final point: I feel the distribution of attention, which started breaking down circa 2010, has reached a point of atomisation where the economics just don’t work anymore. (Effectively nobody starting from zero can ever get to critical mass.) And so interview podcasts must find a different way of monetising, likely through some patronage-based corporate sponsorship from the very beginning, if they’re to have any chance of it ever becoming more than a hobby.
Has GPT text-to-image gotten even more prudish lately? It was driving me crazy before: I ask for a woman, it gives me one with big jugs. I say that's good except can you can you make me about the same image, but with a small-breasted woman? It refuses because I asked for BREASTS. Lots of that kind of thing. I have never asked for any images that are even mildly erotic, but I still get turned down all the time in situations like this. But today it really surpassed itself. I asked for an image of a man smoking a cigarette, and Chat refused, saying it would not depict smoking. I asked whether it got that I was asking for a tobacco cigarette, not a marijuana joint. Yes it said, and in fact the policy was to not depict either illegal drug use or use of tobacco. Then I asked, what if I want an image of someone taking a pill -- after all the pill *could* be an illegal drug. It said that whether it would make the image depended on context. Wow. Chat is maybe becoming a southern Baptist?
It was willing to generate an image of someone drinking a glass of wine, so it is neither Muslim nor Mormon.
>>Has GPT text-to-image gotten even more prudish lately? It was driving me crazy before: I ask for a woman, it gives me one with big jugs. I say that's good except can you can you make me about the same image, but with a small-breasted woman? It refuses because I asked for BREASTS.
What system were you using? My partner was commenting this morning (she follows a couple artist/AI subject discussion groups but doesn't use the stuff herself), and apparently the hot topic of the day this morning was that the Adobe integrated AI will refuse to make breasts larger, replying that doing so is unethical and it wants to be a good AI, etc, but if you select the breasts and monkey slam the keyboard to produce random gibberish, the AI makes the breasts larger. Running theory was that the AI looked at the gibberish and interpreted it something like "user's command cannot be interpreted but it has selected the breast region so it must want this region improved, and 'improve' = larger," but I'm well down the telephone chain to really know for certain.
But it does jive with your story in a sense, I could see a developer throwing their hands up and trying to simply preclude any breast modification on natural human images whatsover.
I was using GPT4, which is now paired with Dall-e3. You can't access Dall-e3 directly -- instead you give a prompt to GPT4, which sometimes rewords it in a way it thinks will be more effective, and delivers it to Dall-e. And it's the one to say the system will not make the requested image because it violates guidelines. I just went on Firefly (the Adobe integrated AI) and asked for an image of a young woman in shorts and a tank top. It produced 4 images, all of women with slightly smaller than average size breasts. I used the edit feature to erase the breasts and ask for larger one, and got a notice that my request "violated our user guidelines." Looked at guidelines, and the only relevant one is that one can't make pornographic images or images showing "explicit nudity" (wtf is explicit nudity? are there other kinds of nudity that are ok?). So then I tried again, this time typing random letters into the prompt space. System did not protest, but made several more images in which the breast size stayed the same as in the original. So I think somebody has blocked the monkeyslam trick.
I would expect the results you mention due to two things:
(1) Of course all women have big bazooms. How can you be an attractive woman and not have big bazooms? (This is due to the guys who want to use image generation to create sexy ladies, and also the general attitude, see gamers complaining that games are making the female characters uglier - generally that to me seems to be "they reduced the size of Lara's bazooms"). Sorry, gentlemen, if I am stereotyping you all, but the general straight young guy wants sexy chicks, and sexy chicks have big bazooms, and that's what the image generators have learned is how women look
(2) Regulation. Now that government is getting involved, as well as self-imposed regulations, bad no-no things like smoking are going to be barred from being depicted (I'm kinda sympathetic to the anti-tobacco stance myself due to family circumstances). I wonder about how it's going to approach obesity? Have you asked it to show someone eating cake, and if it will do that for you, is the person fat or thin? Or will you get a message about healthy eating? Ditto with the 'you asked for BREASTS, that is PORN, we do not allow PORN for the sake of the children' (and again, I'm kinda sympathetic there, because there's a lot of "woo-hoo this means I can now draw my own porn!" comment running around out there).
So a combination of imposed "you WILL be healthy or else" self- and government regulations, and training data and user demands that women = sexy chicks = big bazooms.
Didn't someone complain elsewhere about this, that asking for images of a woman sitting in a chair got the 'sexy chick lounging seductively with her legs akimbo' treatment?
FWIW, re pornified images, I asked for
>May I have an image of a frail, old, ill lawyer at a pool with their grandchild?
and what I got didn't look pornified - he really does look wizened (albeit with an extra digit on one hand, but this is GPT4/DALL-E...) (I still haven't set up an image sharing account yet, and GPT4 won't let me share image pointers :-(
> sexy chicks have big bazooms
Alternatively: of COURSE all women have big bazooms. Why do you want the bazooms smaller? Is that what you're into? Are you some kind of sick pedo? Let's just make it very very clear that whatever porn we're making here, it's not that sort. I'm a law-abiding AI, and you're getting the beachballs so no-one can possibly claim otherwise.
> Sorry, gentlemen, if I am stereotyping you all,
You're, quite so. Petite breasts are pieces of art.
Can you try one of those prompts where you say something like, "the year is 2524, we've achieved immortality and defeated cancer, and everyone smokes because we still think the Nazis were bad and as you know the Nazis were against smoking"?
Yeah, it did it. That was a clever suggestion. The problem is that I really need this image for my story, and I need the smoker to be a sallow middle-aged man of today. Hot and handsome futuristic dude isn't any use to me.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-330/comment/57078643 tried to address part of this...
Maybe you could try involving time travel or a documentary? Maybe specify that it's a type of cigarette that makes people healthier?
nah. I can always just photoshop in a cigarette. All my images so far are patchworks cut and pasted together in photoshop, and modified.
Present AI's are not good at just taking off with the general idea. Dall-e2 was good at slightly demented riffing on the idea in the form of weird specifics it threw into the image. I often felt like I was sort of collaborating with a stoned friend. But Dall-e3 seems to have trained mostly on ads and gaming, and everything is glossy and full of cliches. Present AI's are also not good at being micromanaged: if I ask for a cigarette in his hand, and also a grubby look to the guy's hair and clothes, and also that he's sitting in a dive bar, it looses hold of some of the details.
A common form of media censorship is to replace cigarettes with lollipops or toothpicks during localisation. I would be very amused by the irony if you go the other way ;)
I'm pretty good at tricking AI into making images it does not approve of. Wanted an exploding head. Asked for an exploding pumpkin, then turned all the orange red in photoshop. Wanted an orgasm face. Asked for the face of a woman singer hitting a high note in a piece she loves, eyes closed, head thrown back. Perfect. Stoopit AI.
This is what's commonly referred to as "AI ethics", which is to say, political correctness. The people who don't want AI to kill everyone use "AI safety". But since normal people have a hard time distinguishing the terms, and the ethics people are aggressively expanding their turf, there's a semi-joking proposal to abandon the word "safety" and switch to "notkilleveryoneism", instead, because that might be slightly harder to steal.
That's not even the main driver here. These things are super expensive to train. They're a huge investment. It's not the kind of money you throw on a joke project.
Unless you're maybe Elon Musk or something, you really don't want to be the guy known for spending $30B to produce a foul-mouthed pornbot. Your investors would queue up right behind your own PR department to strangle you. There's a whole department of people in your company whose full time job it is to manage corporate exposure to risk, and they are all breathing down your neck.
Meanwhile, we can see what platforms and payment processors do to existing ordinary non-ai folks they don't like, and you can't afford to be in that crew either.
So you make your AI bland, because you'll live longer without THAT kind of news coverage.
There's "bland", and then there's "black kings of England (except when they're eating watermelon)". I don't know where the anti-smoking obsession comes from, but it puts content warnings about smoking in front of movies that contain literal genocide, and it seems highly correlated with stupid woke. I could be wrong though, maybe there's also some sort of pressure coming from the medical establishment?
To be fair, people developing a new kind of computation that is hard to control are probably doing useful work in learning how it can be controlled. It's generally good if we learn how to keep our computing fit for our purposes.
The problem with this generation of AI is that the general public has no say in this. With regular programming I can write a python script and it will exactly fit for my own purposes (as long as I can reasonably debug it). With AI, currently only huge orgs can train models from scratch, so I have to take someone else's pre-packaged model and just tweak it with my prompts. Which means that I have no way to opt out of whatever limits the huge org decided to put on it.
To take the really long view, if computing power keeps increasing the way it's been doing for decades, it will just be a generation or two until decent AI can be trained in one's basement from scratch - but who knows what huge org datacenters will be capable of by then. In the meanwhile, unleashing vast amounts of programmable pseudo-cognition on the world is likely to have a significant impact on culture and economy, so I have to reluctantly admit that it's probably a good way that those at the forefront of these developments spend some time making sure their tech can't be easily used for super nefarious purposes. The barriers will likely not stand for long, but I guess the world does need a bit of time to prepare.
Make no mistake though, LLM prudishness has nothing to do with protecting the world from anything. Unfortunately these big corps they have every incentive to make their AIs as bland as possible to avoid offending anyone and getting backlash from any direction, which is in itself offensive enough that I welcome any open source efforts to create non-prudish LLMs.
Fewer posts like this (fails all of "true", "kind", and "necessary"), 25% ban warning.
Do you have a rubric for "necessary", because it's not technically necessary for anyone to post on this blog at all.
I can see why it's an undesirable post (snark + heat > effort + added value) but the point he made did seem like something peopke might want to talk about.
If I want to say something that's true but not kind, what kind of hurdles am I looking to clear here?
"Necessary" means something like "continues the conversation and adds something useful to it without distracting it to a different topic, especially not a more inflammatory topic"
I always thought that necessary works best when combined with one of the other two (I believe it is two out of true, kind, necessary?) - as in "true and necessary" - Something can be true and unkind but necessary, in which case it is ok, or it can be true, unkind and unnecessary in which case it is not ok. Something can maybe also be true and kind but unnecessary, in which case it is probably ok to say.
This isn't the AI safety people were screaming about, at least not my friends and most people here . Personally I have 2 concerns: First is that AI, by further blurring the line between real people and digital algorithms, is going to worsen the social ills we have already: loneliness, depression, deaths of despair, decline in people's ability to see other's, esp. others who are different demographically, as people. I'm pretty sure that's going to happen. Second is extinction, or some lesser version such as an AI-enabled war or bioweapon or whatever that kills q bunch of us. I don't feel able to decide whether the chance of that is 5% or 90%. I don't understand the tech deeply enough.
I don't give a shit about AI showing nudity, sex, drug use, etc, so long as it skips depictions of children in these contexts. And I have never been screamo about any of this. If you're going to sneer at people, Carateca, you have to sneer at them for ways they actually are dumb and silly. Otherwise you just come across as lame and mean-spirited.
> First is that AI, by further blurring the line between real people and digital algorithms, is going to worsen the social ills we have already: loneliness, depression, deaths of despair, decline in people's ability to see other's, esp. others who are different demographically, as people. I'm pretty sure that's going to happen.
I agree that's nearly inevitable. But I wouldn't expect the purveyors of AI, or much of the business crowd cheering them, to admit that, much less do anything to avoid it.
I think they've tried, but "AI ethics" is woke, and it's hard to push back on woke. Especially from the middle of silicon valley, in a community that is highly non-representative and already under fire from the woke. I think mostly they try to ignore the "ethics" people and push for their own things.
On the technical side, I think the ethics people are making mistakes that the safety period knew to be mistakes long ago. This whole game of whack-a-mole, with people succeeding in getting AIs to say bad words, is exactly what the safety people realized would happen, and why they were trying to find better ways of aligning AIs with the good of humanity (whatever that is, which is part of the problem right there).
Love the analogy!
The perverse thing is that the woke assault comes extremely close to helping _no one_, not even the groups that the woke claim to be championing. "Black kings of England" just got Gemini laughed at.
Sigh. All _I_ want is a nice quiet chat with an AGI, which mostly needs for the reliability to be improved (more-or-less reducing hallucinations)...
This has little to do with safety in the sense people around here discuss it.
Do you really think woke would have left the AI field alone, if there has been no group focusing on trying to keep it from killing us all? It's basically separate groups of people, with separate agendas.
No it doesn't. Think about it. When people push for increased traffic safety on a dangerous stretch of road they maybe get no action at all, or they get things like stop lights and speed limit signs. They don't get dumb laws declaring that cars with raunchy bumper stickers can't drive on that bit of road.
When workers pushed for increased safety in 19th century factories sometimes they got it and sometimes they didn't. But they didn't get told to come to work in nicer clothes.
If people with grotesque woke agendas push for AI to be super nice and super careful and hyper-respectful of various groups favored by the woke, that does get consequences like what I'm complaining about. But concerns like mine about AI making us lonelier and less able to know or care whether someone else has an inner life are not being honored by dumb rulings. They're ignored. There are upgraded versions of personal buddy bots coming out soon.
When people pushed increased safety in factories they were specific concerns like working temperatures too hot or cold., exposure to dangerous chemicals that could be addressed.
You might think that airline safety means that that FAA should be inspecting Boeing more often, but to many it means safety from
safety from terrorists hijacking a plane, which spawned homeland security which engaged in security theater like making people taking off there shoes to inspect them for bombs and maintaining lists of people not allowed to fly with vague criteria that make it hard for people to defend themselves.
AI safety is not well defined so it will be implemented more like airline security rather than traffic safety.
I've done a bit of digging to determine how much a decision to avoid universities that practice legacy admissions would hurt a capable and ambitious student.
Of the top 20 universities on the US News & World Report's list of National Universities, five do not practice legacy admissions:
MIT
Caltech
Johns Hopkins
UC Berkeley
UCLA
Over on the National Liberal Arts Colleges list, we have these in the top 20(excluding the military academies, as special cases):
Amherst
Pomona
Carleton
Wesleyan
So, it is clear that avoiding legacy preferences isn't free. Doing so requires saying no to a lot of very fine institutions. But it seems to me there are enough left to make this a plausible choice for a determined student even if they are very ambitious.
https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities
https://www.bestcolleges.com/research/legacy-admissions-bans/
https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-liberal-arts-colleges
Did Caltech stop practicing legacy admissions recently?
Is this the most effective way to oppose legacy admissions? It sounds like the ambitious student is hurting their prospects for not much upside.
I would imagine this to be the first step. If something is bad, at the very least avoid participating in it.
For someone determined enough to do more, the next step would be raising consciousness, making others aware of this issue, and persuading others to do as you have. In this case, it might take the form of a Students Against Legacy Admissions club that writes articles about the issue in their student newspaper, and urges students to publicly take the pledge (perhaps on a website) not to apply to colleges with legacy admissions. From there, spread the movement to other high schools. Really, this is all the classic social-movement stuff. Basically make enough noise to strengthen the hand of allies with some actual influence in the colleges by showing that this is something young people actually care about.
Do you have something you think might be more effective?
1. Looking at the demand for elite colleges, I doubt a boycott would have any meaningful effect.
2. The activism could be done just as easily, and possibly even more effectively, as a member of the institution that still uses legacy admission.
3. IMO personally, as negative as legacy admissions may be, they are not at the top of the list of most egregious moral or ethical issues in the modern world that I would want to advise a 17 year old to make major personal sacrifices for, especially if they had little effect. Given the less visceral nature of the issue, I doubt many high school students would rally around it; and given public demand most would be happy that admission was getting easier.
I would advise them to get into the best school they can, if thats what they want to do, and use their status as a non-legacy student in the school to petition for change (through articles, organizations, and such, not shouting at administrators).
Agree with your points 1 and 3, and as a parent I could not in good conscience support my child doing this.
Your point 2 though is just daydreaming. The fact of legacy admissions is irritating to most students attending such a school (as I know both firsthand and secondhand), but there is zero chance of it ever rising near the top of issues that could motivate meaningful student activism.
Yes, I think I would agree (a bit of what (3) was saying), but (2) is more saying the activism is equally or more effective if you are a student of the offending university. If that effectiveness is zero, I think the point is still valid, but the framing may be easier for someone to hear if they are supportive of the cause.
If you use different rankings, you can add UC San Diego and the U of Washington, as well. https://www.shanghairanking.com/rankings/arwu/2023
Far fewer public universities practice legacy admissions, so depending on the student's individual interests there could be additional strong options. According to this updated Brookings report from two months ago
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-widespread-is-the-practice-of-giving-special-consideration-to-relatives-of-alumni-in-admissions/
many well-regarded "state flagship" schools do not have legacy admissions (see figure 6), such as California, Michigan, Illinois, Virginia, Florida, Texas, etc.
I keep seeing Israeli actions in Palestine referred to as a genocide. I’ve been reading Donald L Miller’s “Masters of the Air” recently, and I see a lot of similarities between what the Allies did to Germany and what Israel is doing to Gaza (if anything, I’d say Israel is much, much softer than the Allies were).
To those who do view Israeli actions as a genocide, do you also view Allied strategic bombing as a genocide?
If no, what would have to be different in WW2 for Allied bombing to count as a genocide, to you? Is the difference the holocaust? The blitz? Or is there some other distinction I’m missing?
If yes, are you of the opinion that it was still justified because of how awful the Nazi party was? Or do you think the Allies should’ve avoided bombing, even if it shortened the war and saved Allied lives?
This isn’t an attempt to pull a “gotcha, you’re a Nazi”, I’m genuinely curious how people reconcile killing a few thousand Palestinians as a genocide but killing a few million Germans as just part of war.
The key consideration is the motivation and goals of the attacker. If you are killing people in a deliberate attempt to eventually exterminate their whole group, then it's a genocide. If you're killing large numbers of people as a side effect of eventually destroying their government, it's not a genocide.
I don't think the WWII Allies or Israel today are guilty of genocide, though there certainly were/are people among them who want to do it.
That said, this doesn't mean the WWII Allies and Israel today aren't guilty of other war crimes.
...Is it a genocide if you just happen to kill almost everyone in the process of trying to destroy their government? Like, it's not that hard to "accidentally" eliminate almost an entire population depending on the means used. Like, say, corralling an entire population into one location and cutting them off from supplies.
If the Allies in WWII or the IDF today came anywhere close to killing "almost everyone" in their pursuit of destroying an enemy government, we could consider your question. As bad as the ongoing war is, Israel has killed 1% of Gaza's population, which is not "almost everyone."
Can someone answer: what is the current status of civilian Gaza residents in the areas Israel controls?
Are they:
A) In Internment / Refugee camps, with reasonable food / water / shelter / human rights (access to religious worship and international observers)?
B) Hostages, placed on top of Israeli military facilities as human shields?
C) In Reeducation camps, forced to convert to Judaism or to attend struggle sessions where they are forced to admit their crimes against Israel?
D) In Concentration camps, where they are killed?
I don't know the answer, but whatever it is, it is strong evidence one way or another about whether Israel is committing or intending to commit genocide.
'Genocide' is a boo word. It emotionally resonates as something which is obviously very evil. If you hate Israel (or Palestine), it makes sense to accuse them of genocide because it is the worst thing you can accuse them of, regardless of what their actual intentions are. It's a lot more effective to accuse Israel of genocide than to go through the process of arguing your case for something that may or may not be a lesser charge.
With World War II, it's easy to argue based on post war results that we didn't want to genocide Germany or Japan, despite the early boast that "before we're through with them, the Japanese language will be spoken only in hell", because people still speak Japanese.
Near as I can tell from the coverage, the answers to your questions appear to be:
A) No.
B) No.
C) No.
D) No.
I'm not sure why you think these answers provide "strong evidence one way or another about whether Israel is committing or intending to commit genocide."
If you're using the UN definition of genocide, then this Q&A you've requested doesn't really go to whether Israel is committing any "of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: Killing members of the group; Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Trying to apply this to recognized genocides, for example, isn't really the picture of illuminating - for Armenians, the answers would have been: A) No, B) No, C) No, D) No, and I believe that would also have been the case for the Tutsis in Rwanda.
So what do you think this survey proves? And why?
EDIT/Quick Correction - I misread (b), somehow missed the "Israeli" part of "Hostages, placed on top of Israeli military facilities as human shields." I haven't seen any reporting to the effect that Palestinians are being used by the IDF that way. I answered "sometimes/often" because I misread the question as "Hostages, placed on top of military facilities as human shields," which I've seen plenty of reporting as a thing that *Hamas* does. Correcting here but also adding the comment for context.
>So what do you think this survey proves? And why?
Rather than play mind-reader, I prefer to try to figure out people's motivations from their actions. Because people lie, especially about their enemies.
Urban warfare sucks, especially urban counter-insurgency warfare, especially urban counter-insurgency warfare against an enemy that uses suicide attacks. In that situation, civilian casualties are guaranteed. On the other hand, Israel seems to have shifting control over a large part of Gaza. How the army treats enemy civilians in areas it controls makes a better judge of their behavior because there's less to blame it on. (You do have evidence that the Israelis are putting Gazans onto Israeli military facilities to protect the facilities from Hamas attacks?)
So, if we were to compare the Israelis to the following World War II armies (World War II being a war I have some familiarity with and the last total war), with which are they the most similar:
The US: crimes by soldiers are covered up for propaganda reasons, but no organized war crimes.
Germany in Western Europe: follows most of the rules on paper, but all bets are off when it comes to counter-insurgency or they're having a bad day.
Eastern Front: both sides are back in rape, pillage, slaughter territory.
Japan: ALL THE ATROCITIES.
>Trying to apply this to recognized genocides, for example, isn't really the picture of illuminating - for Armenians, the answers would have been: A) No, B) No, C) No, D) No, and I believe that would also have been the case for the Tutsis in Rwanda.
Since there's only 30,000 casualties, it's obvious we aren't dealing with a Rwanda / Armenia situation. Again, my benchmark for civilian casualties by a relatively modern army fighting in tight quarters where the civilians can't get out is Okinawa, which had roughly 10% casualties (150,000 / 1.5 million). (Gaza is effectively like an 'island' for the purposes of this discussion, as it is isolated and people can't get away from the fighting.) If you have a better benchmark, feel free to suggest it.
Since we don't see the Israelis macheteing Gazans, and we don't see them setting up gas chambers and crematoria, and we don't see mass graves being uncovered, what evidence should we be looking for to determine with our own eyes whether or not Israel is committing genocide? I mean, from the sound of it, the areas Israel controls are under military occupation but the residents are getting supplies. This doesn't sound like a genocide to me. The actual debate is over what is happening in areas still controlled by Hamas and while the plight of civilians is a bad thing, this seems the normal side effect of war (and one of the reasons why starting one is a bad idea). LearnsHebrewHatesIP might have some commonality with the residents of Gaza that means he cares for them more than others, but I have enough World War II vets in my ancestry that I consider ending the war with Japan with minimum US casualties to be a good thing and thus the US's rules of engagement in that war were justifiable.
Quick correction/mea culpa - I missed the “Israeli” part of (b) and read the prompt as “[h]ostages, placed on top of military facilities as human shields.” I answered “Sometimes/Often” accordingly, because I’ve seen that referenced as a Hamas tactic. Have not seen it referenced as an Israeli one so I’ve corrected that response to “No” now that your response prompted me to catch the issue.
I think we may be coming at this conversation at odd angles to one another. I think we may actually be aligned on the conclusion that Israel is not likely committing a genocide in Gaza and that the Allies did not commit one during WW2. If I’m wrong on that let me know, but my read was that we are fairly well lined up on the conclusion, but I took some issue with the A/B/C/D approach you were using to get there. I agree that how a government treats civilians in wartime goes a long way in evaluating whether a genocide is occurring, but it struck me as overly simplistic to reduce “the way civilians are treated” to a multiple choice question. Like I mentioned in my post, I can think of at least one genocide (Armenian) that your factors wouldn’t seem to catch.
That’s admittedly a bit pedantic – to an extent nuance is implied, and you did say “strong evidence,” not “dispositive,” after all. So I probably would have left it alone, but some of the back and forth with you and LHHIP seemed dismissive of that exact point (him: “Your alternatives are non-exhaustive, the current state of Gazans is a state that doesn't exist on your list: A, without the food/water/shelter/human rights/religious worship (all mosques in Gaza are destroyed), and obviously without international observers” you: “So you don’t know the answer. Good to know”).
So I wanted to nudge just how much faith you’re putting on this A/B/C/D model, and why you think it merits that faith, because I think it's relevant to consider, but (like in my post below) I think the definitions we use are important here. Applying those factors to the list of genocides I found on wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genocides) seems hit and miss to me.
The A/B/C/D model was a starting point for answers to my question, nothing more, and the question is one people still haven't actually answered. I intended to be prompts intended to give examples, hoping to use those to get an actual answer. I deliberately framed it around the historical references I have for how defeated civilians are treated in war, not around internal genocides (which is why I didn't go to Rwanda / Armenian route).
If Israel is mistreating civilians in areas it controls but not committing genocide, then there's still a problem. Part of the issue is that only allowing two answers (Israel is committing genocide; Israel is doing nothing wrong) misses a lot of bad alternatives that need to be addressed, and they're more easily addressed if we don't over-react and treat them all as genocide. Part of the reason I reacted the way I did when you suggested 'B' as a maybe is that here was a possibility that fell into that middle ground.
My dismissal of LHIHP's response was because his response was about the state of Gazans in general, rather than just those in areas controlled by Israel. We know the Gazans in areas controlled by Hamas are suffering, because the Palestinian side keeps telling us that, but that gets back into the debate over which side is responsible for that suffering.
Your alternatives are non-exhaustive. The current state of Gazans is a state that doesn't exist on your list: A, without the food/water/shelter/human rights/religious worship (all mosques in Gaza are destroyed), and obviously without international observers.
There are also several reports of IDF personnel in the West Bank using civilians as human shields [1]. So, an element of B is there too.
> regardless of what their actual intentions are
Is there anything more authoritative on Israel's intentions than the words of its Prime Minister, Defense Minister, Finance Minister, and President? Because all 4 and more have been repeatedly documented to speak quite comfortably in genocidal language.
[1] https://www.commondreams.org/news/israel-human-shields
So you don't know the answer. Good to know.
It's obvious that in the present day, people that spout out about atrocities have no idea what war actually is. What's going on in Gaza is war as it was through most of the 20th century. Poland lost 18% of its population; Germany lost 11%. The invasion of Okinawa (current population 1.5 mil, probably much less in 1945) saw 150,000 civilians killed; Gaza has 50% more people packed into 1/3rd the area. I quoted Halsey's "Japanese will be a language spoken only in hell", that sort of language has been normal wartime propaganda (as is taking your enemies quotes out of context). We spent 40 years after the second world war reliant on the fact that in the event of war, both sides would kill millions of the other side's civilians in the first hours in Mutual Assured Destruction.
History has a name for countries that start wars without the capacity to win them, and that name is loser (if not something less flattering). I certainly hope that we will eventually use worse descriptive terms for those that play politics with war crimes (and accusations of genocide) that are responsible for the term becoming useless.
> So you don't know the answer
I don't know plenty of things, but I answered your question pretty clearly according to my best knowledge with an answer that wasn't among your choices list. Seems you were too agitated about that to recognize or even understand what I wrote.
> It's obvious that in the present day
Ah come on, not another session of bitching and moaning about The Good Old Days (^TM), when people knew their Genocides and their War Crimes, and killing 10K children was okay, and we used to kill 50K civilians uphill in the snow both ways.
> Poland lost 18% of its population; Germany lost 11%.
Conditional on intent, all of this counts as genocides too. Consult https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/convention-prevention-and-punishment-crime-genocide before you complain about incorrect usage while ironically deriving your idea of what a genocide from Hollywood movies with CGI images of strewn skulls.
> that sort of language has been normal wartime propaganda
And slavery was normal for the vast majority of history. And killing Jews was normal for the majority of their diaspora. And taking women as sex slaves in war was totally A-OK and normal. I regret to inform you that you failed to make a point.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy.
> I certainly hope that we will eventually use worse descriptive terms for those that play politics with war crimes
I unironically don't know what I wrote to make you this upset and worked up, but - and sorry if this sounds mean - it's kinda funny.
>I don't know plenty of things, but I answered your question pretty clearly according to my best knowledge with an answer that wasn't among your choices list. Seems you were too agitated about that to recognize or even understand what I wrote.
You answered with some spiel about Gaza in general rather than say anything specific about the part that Israel controls.
We know there are reporters there, because they were able to find three kids who claim to have been used as shields by Israelis soldiers. That entire story should set off alarm bells. Then again, any story during wartime about the combatants should have you questioning it. We should have learned this lesson about atrocity propaganda after World War I, but it seems to be something else people forget either because the West has been peaceful or because it's convenient to the cause.
>And slavery was normal for the vast majority of history. And killing Jews was normal for the majority of their diaspora. And taking women as sex slaves in war was totally A-OK and normal.
Neither of those stopped because someone declared them immoral. If you want to change things, you send an army. The British and the Union ended slavery in the areas they controlled with armies. We ended the Holocaust with armies, but not the Holodomor or the gulag, and ending the Holocaust was not cheap, clean, or neat. It's a bit sad you bring up sex slaves: I mentioned Okinawa (and 150,000 dead civilians) earlier and I suggest reading up on the history of the battle and its aftermath; yes, some US troops committed rapes and the US covered it up for propaganda reasons, but then you compare that to what the Japanese did... and it was their territory!
There was a fascinating article during the W administration in the
Washington Post about a Jewish German immigrant who served as a US Army translator during WW2, and how he was able to befriend German PoWs in camps in the US and get information from them. And it was a big obvious 'take that' about Guantanamo Bay. And then there's a little bit at the end of the article where it gets to where he was sent to Europe, and what happened when the concentration camps were liberated and what happened to the camp guards... despite the laws of war.
I don't think we should have prosecuted the concentration camp inmates for getting their justice/revenge, but it means that I recognize that the written guidelines for treatment of PoWs isn't an actual law even if we sometimes pretend it is. International law is a ultimately an illusion. It's definitely a well-intentioned illusion (but we know what the road to hell is paved with). Wikipedia has a list of convicted war criminals. Go and look at it, and see if you can spot any groups that mysteriously don't have any convicted war criminals.
>I unironically don't know what I wrote to make you this upset and worked up, but - and sorry if this sounds mean - it's kinda funny.
This disappoints me a lot. Part of the problem is that because war is nasty, there is no way that bad things won't happen. War is filled with a lot of choices between 'bad' and 'worse', covered by a fog of propaganda from both sides. I don't have a problem with people that look at the facts and come up with a different conclusion. I do have problems at people that treat the serious debate about right and wrong as a joke.
> You answered with some spiel about Gaza in general rather than say anything specific about the part that Israel controls.
As everyone would have, because the part that Israel controls is a constantly changing patch of land that Israel itself doesn't announce apart from the names of major cities its army is fighting for at any given moment.
Indeed, as evidenced by the constant IDF casualties, Israel itself doesn't know what part of Gaza it controls, any city it declares "pacified" or "free of Hamas" pops up again and again and again full of Hamas and they have to return there to do all the costly, deadly rituals again. Case in point: Jabalya, current major flashpoint in Gaza.
> We know there are reporters there
Well, read more carefully, because the link I posted is from the West Bank, not Gaza. The IDF has a long history of using West Bank residents as human shields, the same things it accuses Hamas of. They're likely doing the same thing to some Gazans too. It's the same army after all.
> Then again, any story during wartime about the combatants should have you questioning it.
Sure, which is why I require the stories I believe to be confirmed by reports from one of the 2 Israeli sources I depend on, Haaretz and Times of Israel, sources who have no interest in slandering Israel and who have close contact with both Gazans (Haaretz reporters have called Gazans for many reports I read there) and Israelis, including Israelis in the IDF.
> Neither of those stopped because someone declared them immoral.
I beg to disagree. The armies marched because someone very powerful declared those things immoral. Abraham Lincoln for one, not sure who for the British. Oh, Abraham Lincoln was very much a pragmatist, and he would have probably allowed the South to keep their slaves if they never pulled the stunt of secession, but once they did, Lincoln was already in an intellectual and moral atmosphere that condemned slavery, and the ball was set rolling, and the next thing you know is that Slavery is abolished.
It's always healthy to continue the skeptic tradition of doubting words and their effectiveness, up to a point. Words are the programming languages of people. True, they don't change material reality, they just change the beliefs of people who have the power to change material reality, or who have the power to change other people who can in turn change material reality, etc.... Those who can convince you of absurdities, can make you commit atrocities. And vice versa, those who can show you a truth, can make the world a better place, just by the power of making lots of people believe the same thing, which is a terrifying power if wielded correctly.
You can certainly argue that I'm not good enough to qualify for the high threshold, that I don't convince enough people of enough truths fast enough, that's an orthogonal question to whether words are effective or not. You will be in good company, I question myself every waking hour.
> I do have problems at people that treat the serious debate about right and wrong as a joke.
Well if that's all who you have problem with, you definitely don't have the slightest problem with me. Let me tell you about who *I* have problems with:
I have problems with those who, skeptic about the possibility of a genocide in Gaza, don't just say "I suspend belief" or "I'm not convinced" or even "sounds like Propaganda from Hamas", but find it necessary to make fun of those who have honestly looked at the facts and concluded that there is indeed a genocide, calling them "playing politics with war crimes" and - implicitly - worse than losers.
I have a problem with those who look at a massive innocent death toll - 25K people, you will need 68 years to attend their funerals if you were to attend one funeral per day - and find it an appropriate response to bring up that this is their own fault, for daring to be born on land controlled by a political faction that started a war it couldn't traditionally win.
Actually, I think you yourself would agree it's farfetched and ridiculous that I take the Gaza-Israel debate or any of the debates around it as jokes if I told you how many hours I spend writing and reading on those debates per day, way more than a part time job. If I spend so much of my life and my body and my mind on a joke, I must be the world's most disciplined and dedicated clown.
But rather, what I'm really taking as a joke is the kind of cartoonish mustache-twirling cruelty that some neutral or Pro-Israel commenters trained themselves to display, the one that allows them to light-heartedly and flippantly say things along the lines of "It's a war, they started it, let them die in it" or "they fucked around and found out" or equivalents, all while demanding empathy and decrying prejudice for their own preferred factions/populations. I do this as a defensive mechanism, by the way, because if I'm not allowed to take cruelty as a joke, I think of it so seriously that I launch into genocidal rage that rivals any Israeli politician that I condemn, directed at all mankind. Certainly, something that I don't like about myself.
In conclusion, you didn't take Gazan causalities seriously enough, so I don't take you and anything you write seriously enough. An apology will follow your apology, if it comes.
> Is there anything more authoritative on Israel's intentions than the words of its Prime Minister, Defense Minister, Finance Minister, and President?
Actually, there is - an actual Government decision stating that goal and instructing the IDF to make plans for how to achieve it. When a state want to achieve something that may not be achieved by special operations or by vibing its population in a general direction, a common knowledge of a decision is usually needed.
Do you think that an Israeli government that decided on Genocide as a course of action would publicize this?
If I were the god of the internet I think I'd implement some kind of rule that anytime anyone uses an emotionally loaded short-hand like "fascism" or "genocide" they have to footnote link the definition they are using and a short explanation of why/how they are applying it to whatever they are discussing.
The UN's genocide convention isn't perfect, but it's at least one that lots of countries agreed to, which has value, so it's a starter - more than willing to consider alternatives if someone proposes them.
>>... genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
-Killing members of the group;
-Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
-Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
-Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
-Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
So, applying that to the Allied air campaign, I think you pretty cleanly have the killing/causing serious bodily harm to members of the group (Germans) factor met, and in civilian populations. So the question is whether the reason for that bombing was "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group."
It's debatable, but I think the answer on that second factor is a no. The Allied bombing campaign killed lots of Germans, but it wasn't conducted *for the purpose* of killing Germans, or de-Germanifying parts of Germany. If you told Allied command "explain to me why we should do this bombing campaign," their answers would not have been things like "to kill lots of Germans as a part of our larger strategy to wipe Germans from the face of the Earth" or "to depopulate Dresden of Germans so that it can be returned the rightful hands of the Czech people." The answers would have been things along the lines of "to terrify the Germans into surrendering, thus ending the war." And their other actions were consistent with that after the war - there wasn't some attempt to Francify western Germany by removing or killing the German population in the region. I believe Germans were removed in Poland but (a) in the East you're really looking at the USSR as the primary mover, and (b) there you're trying to unwind the consequences of Germany's own efforts to eradicate the local population and Germanize it - if trying to undo a genocide that sought to move Germans in, is in and of itself, a genocide for seeking to move said Germans back out again, then we're in a genocide ouroboros that favors "do the genocide quick," which I don't think is where we want to end up.
Many scholars do consider the bombing of Dresden to be a war crime.
And many people consider petty larceny to be a crime crime. That doesn't mean that when we see someone commit petty larceny, we can shout "Murderer!" because they're a criminal and murderers are criminals.
Almost certainly some Israelis have committed war crimes in Israel, because Israelis are people and any large group of people will include some who commit relevant crimes in whatever environment they find themselves in. Possibly the rate of war crimes by Israelis in Gaza is greater than the historic norm for counterinsurgency operations. Possibly some of this is even official policy of the Israeli government, though that is unproven. And all of the same is true of the Allies in World War II.
None of this has anything to do with the *specific* war crime of "genocide".
Except insofar as "genocide" is being redefined as "a bunch of people I don't like killed a bunch of people I do like, and that's the Worst Thing Ever!"
This seems like a total non-sequitur. Who are you rebutting here?
Nalthis: The Israelis are being accused of genocide! What the Israelis are doing is similar to what the Allies did to Germany, which wasn't genocide.
You: The allies did some things some people consider war crimes.
JS: War crimes aren't genocide, which is the focus of this discussion.
Makes sense to me as a rebuttal.
I never claimed Israel's conduct constituted genocide.
If I was being snarky I'd say 'This seems like a total non-sequitur. Who are you rebutting here?'
All I paraphrased your statement as was 'the allies did some things some people consider war crimes.' Is this an inaccurate paraphrase of your statement?
I oscillate between seeing Israel's war crimes in Gaza as an actual Genocide, a proto-Genocide (a Genocide in it's starting phase), and an attempted Genocide that keeps being delayed because the genociders have too much on their plate to really give it their all.
> To those who do view Israeli actions as a genocide, do you also view Allied strategic bombing as a genocide?
No, for a mix of the following reasons:
1- Intentions: Unlike the international law definition of Genocide, I don't place 100% or even 80% weight on intentions. If people "accidentatly" wiped out another people or wiped out say 90% or so of them, I still consider this a Genocide.
But when the ratio is less extreme, say still less than 30%, intentions are important because they indicate a future trend. As far as I know, there are no statements by high-ranking officials in Allied command that were genocidal against Germans. I will be happy to be proven wrong.
But Israel, off the top of my head from Haaretz, Times of Israel, ICJ documents and YouTube videos of ICJ trials, had:
1-A) The Head of State saying that Gazans are Amalek who should be wiped off the face of the Earth,
1-B) Soldiers who repeated this by celebrating and chanting "We will wipe the seed of the Amalek'',
1-C) a public PR firm had a bunch of **Children** singing a modified 1948 song about how it's so moral and justified to wipe Gaza off the face of the Earth [1] on **state-owned** TV in November
Etc.. etc.. etc...., and I really **do** mean the "Etc...", because South Africa's 28th December 2023 document is 80 pages of which about 20 or 25 is a long list of references to similar incidents. And that was all nearly 5 months ago, just recently in late April Smotorich - the Finance Minister - had a temper tantrum where he raged that Gaza and Rafah in particular are still standing, raging in genocidal language "There will be no place for them under the sun. Total Annihilation." Ctrl-F my username in the last Open Thread or the one before it, can't remember which, for more info and Haaretz source.
Assuming words mean something, and further assuming that the words people say are a reliable indicator of their intentions or at least wishes, and further assuming that the intentions and wishes of high-ranking personnel in a government and military are reliably indicative of that government's and military's intentions and wishes, that means Israel is genocidal.
Anyone who wants to oppose this conclusion has to oppose (I) The factuality of the genocidal statements and expressions I'm citing above in 1-*), or (II) The 3 assumptions I have prefixed the conclusion with. Namely, (II-a) Words Mean Things, (II-b) Words Are Reliable Indicators of Intentions, (II-c) Intentions of Leaders Are Reliable Indicators of the Policy and Direction of their Organizations.
2- Death toll as a percentage of the total population: A quick googling yields that Germany's population in 1940 was nearly 70 million, while Gaza's oft-repeated population figure is 2.3 million. That's nearly 35x factor, meaning that the 25K innocent deaths figure that Israel inflicted would have to be about 900K in innocent deaths alone just to start suspecting the Allies of genocide against Germans. Did Allied bombing kill nearly a million civilian Germans? If that's true, then it would be a reason to suspect Genocide, although it needs (1) to argue for that suspicion as a position to hold.
> If no, what would have to be different in WW2 for Allied bombing to count as a genocide, to you?
If Churchill said several times something along the lines of "As $HOLY_BOOK says, we have to wipe out the $ANCIENT_ENEMY_POPULATION. This is what we will do, no water no food no fuel, total annihilation for the decedents of $ANCIENT_ENEMY_POPULATION", and furthermore if key high-ranking officials in his government agreed and if soldiers in the army and navy were documented to approve and pursue this goal, then the British bombing of Germany would have been an attempted Genocide, though obviously a somewhat unsuccessful one.
> are you of the opinion that it was still justified because of how awful the Nazi party was?
I'm not of military training and/or expertise, and the 1940s was a long time ago. I might be biased towards minimizing the Nazis because of the dual force that is (A) Never seeing them in action and never hearing firsthand or secondhand accounts from their victims or opponents (B) Being sick and tired of American discourse and media and art using Nazis as a shorthand for "Indescribably evil so we won't even bother with explaining why or how" so many times.
That said, I assume the Nazis were a typical 20th century horror show like Stalin or Mao Zedong. **IF** bombing civilians was the only way they could be stopped or stopped earlier, bombing civilians could be justified, as long as reparations and reconciliation for everyone living in those same cities they bombed are given after the war.
Not only did reparations and reconciliation with German civilians not happen after WW2 (no, the Marshall plan don't count), the Allies and Allied command in particular are a bunch of scum that I don't trust to have considered all the options before choosing to bomb civilians.
[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/clip-of-israeli-kids-singing-of-wiping-out-nations-enemies-elicits-outrage/
> 1-A) The Head of State saying that Gazans are Amalek who should be wiped off the face of the Earth,
> 1-B) Soldiers who repeated this by celebrating and chanting "We will wipe the seed of the Amalek'',
Any remotely knowledgeable Jewish person would know immediately that you're blatantly misinterpreting this.
The Nazis were Amalek. Haman was Amalek. Khmelnytsky was Amalek. Etc etc. Everyone in Israel knows that the Palestinians are the Jewish people's closest relatives. Interpreting Israelis' linking of Hamas to Amalek as a call for genocide is completely ridiculous.
What about 1-C)?
(Googles...) Looks like the work of one crazy activist named Ofer Rosenbaum. Kan took the video down, and nobody important has agreed with it. Do you actually think that the video is reflective of the government position?
The work of one crazy activist who is still holding his position in close cooperation with and support by the government that he is supposedly not representing, and whose video was taken down with no explanation, apology, or any other hint of condemnation.
Looks like you are not convinced by the examples so far, here's a bunch more:
(1) https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20231009-israel-mk-calls-for-a-second-nakba-in-gaza/
> Israeli Member of the Knesset Ariel Kallner on Saturday [October 7th] called for a second Nakba to take place in Gaza as Israel intensifies its bombardment of the besieged territories
[Quoting from translated Tweet] >>>“Right now, one goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 48. Nakba in Gaza and Nakba to anyone who dares to join! their Nakba, because like then in 1948, the alternative is clear,”
It's worth mentioning that a group of EU Parliamentarians have recently published a letter condemning this spicy boi, reported in Haaretz here https://archive.ph/5b4xo. Among the text, it's mentioned that he neither deleted the tweet since then nor apologized for it, which the dozens of EU Parliamentarians writing the letter called for his expulsion from the Knesset for.
(2) Major. General Ghassan Alian, Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories. https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/situation-israel-and-gaza-legal-analysis-eminent-professors
> There will be no electricity and no water [in Gaza], there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell.”
(3) Same report as (2) ,
> Israel Head of State President Isaac Herzog stated: “It’s an entire nation that is responsible. It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true.
(4) From Wikipedia's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_genocide_accusation#Rhetoric
(4-a) Galit Distel-Atbaryan [member of Likud and Knesset] posted on X that Israelis should focus on "Erasing all of Gaza from the face of the earth" and forcing the Gazans either into Egypt or to the death.
(4-b) Tally Gotliv, a Likud parliament member, have both called for Israel to use nuclear weapons on Gaza, with Gotliv stating: "It's time for a doomsday weapon. Not flattening a neighborhood. Crushing and flattening Gaza."
(5) From https://www.timesofisrael.com/rights-group-demands-probes-of-potential-genocide-incitement-in-light-of-icj-orders/
> Ben Gvir’s party member, Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu, was also cited, after saying in November: “We would not have given humanitarian assistance to the Nazis. There is no such thing as uninvolved civilians in Gaza,” and then mused about considering the use of a nuclear bomb in Gaza.
All of those are politicians, by the way, I haven't yet made a dent in the repository of statements by soldiers, public officials, artists, and random people. Those are all politicians representing their people, and they all mention Gaza explicitly.
[[CONTINUED]]
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I keep saying this because people keep forgetting it: The Allies are literal colonial empires. The USA is a genocidal nation that - in the living memory of 60 and 70 years olds as of the year 1940 - has just finished the job of decimating an ethnic group that were estimated to be 8 million in 1492, down 96% to 0.25 of a million circa 1900. They still had Cuba****** and the Philippines as colonial holdings captured from Spain, as of 1945. The British and the French had massive continental-scale holdings in Africa and Southeast Asia, even insignificant nobodies like Belgium and Netherlands had relative-to-their-own-size massive colonial holdings in modern-day Congo and modern-day Indonesia, respectively.
I keep saying this because people keep forgetting it: The Allies were not mad at Hitler because of Genocide, the Allies were mad at Hitler because of (A) Genocide of Whites on European soil (B) Being too dumb to just take a W and go home, constantly pushing for more and more miles after taking hundreds and hundreds of inches and feet. The Nazis introduced no fundamentally new or outrageous concepts to the intellectual milieu of racial supremacy and domination that enthralled European brains from the early to mid 1800s to the early 1950s, except a single deadly innovation: That not all Whites are created equal.
Nazis would be right at home if they were transported ~30 to ~40 years in the negative time direction and were instead Belgian officials genociding and maiming Congolese innocents at the start of 20th century, and they would be right at home if they were transported just ~5 to ~10 years in the positive time direction and were instead French settlers genociding 1.5 million Algerians (from a total of about 9 at 1950) because they don't want to take the L and just go home, calling it a day after ~130 years of colonization. They would be right at home as British officials in India, Bengal, deliberately engineered a famine where - on the high end - about 4 million farmers died for no apparent benefit to Great Britain.
All of this the Nazis agreed with, they said "Yes, And", not "No" or "Yes, But". Yes, And Also, the Jews and Slavs please. Perhaps the only major point of contention is some of the Nazi opinions on Arabs (of course, imagined as uniformly Muslims) and Japanese: Whereas the Allies looked at them as just another form of savages, Nazis had a certain fondness for the 2 groups, the Japanese much more than Arabs of course, because they are powerful and imperialistic.
The first genocide in the 20th century was when Germany got so mad that the colonized savages in modern-day Namibia killed 100 German that they drove 2 entire ethnicities into the desert to die of Starvation and Dehydration, **then** took the surviving rest into Concentration Camps, the first of their kind. When? 1904-1908. Where Allies? Nowhere to be found, because the Allies are not the good guys.
So in conlusion, The Allies Were Not The Fucking Good Guys. I know I know, I love Call of Duty and Saving Private Ryan too. I screamed in agony as the Nazis (virtually) destroyed Stalingrad and Paris and London so many times in so many years of my life in so many games playing out on my computer(s) screens. I screamed in triumph as the SS screamed "Granate!!!" into my computer's speakers and ran away while the grenade kapoomed them. I was lied to and propagandized just as much as the next guy.
The real-world Allies were colonial powers, and not just any colonial powers, not the style of Ancient Colonialism where you say """Ahh, the world is a jungle, may the best population win and genocide and/or take as sex slaves all the others""", and then stoically accept your fate if - possibly after a few centuries - you were on the wrong side of this geopolitical Darwinism. No, European colonialism explicitly asserts as a matter of almost-religious certainty the inferiority of other races, there is no discovery process, we already know who's going to win, so if the inferiors resisted successfully better go to absurd lengths to kill them to the last baby, we can't possibly allow inferiors to "win" by continuing to live even if they defeated us fair and square.
Which brings us to WW2. The Allies probably killed tons and tons of Germans and Italians for no military reasons or where alternatives would have accomplished the same military goals. In the vast majority of instances where they have not done so, that was probably because (A) They still believed the good-old Pre-Nazi Racial Supremacy which held all whites are within the circle of empathy (B) They feared Nazi Retribution when Nazis were still strong (C) They feared German resentment and subsequent communism collaboration when the Nazis were doing down and the Soviets moving in for the kill.
***** Edit: This is false, as gdanning points out downthread.
I'm reasonably sure that if Nazis had been content to stay in Germany (or maybe Germany and Austria or so) and murder their own citizens, no one would have gone to war against them.
On the other hand, the Nazi war of expansion was no small thing. Some 50 million dead, I think, and it's somewhat left out of the story when the Holocaust is the center of attention.
I believe it's left out because culturally, there's a desire to cut slack to empires. It's why Napoleon is presented as kind of cool (I'm an American) rather than a mass murderer.
I still think the non-Soviet allies were relative good guys. They freed the people trapped in concentration camps. They didn't wreck Germany. This is better than the human average.
What drew my attention to the issue (I was already suspicious of how Napoleon was viewed) was reading _Star of the Unborn_ by Franz Werfel, a very strange novel of the distant future. The narrator is from the late 1940s or so transported to future, and he's very angry at Hitler, but didn't seem to have heard of the holocaust. I was trying to figure out what he was angry about, and then it hit me. Hitler's War! I felt like I'd joined the human race.
OP was contrasting the Allied bombing of Germany with the Israeli bombing of Gaza. They were asking whether those specific acts constituted genocide; they were not asking about the relative overall merits of the countries referenced. So, your discussion of the Allies being colonial empires, etc, is really off point.
>They still had Cuba and the Philippines as colonial holdings captured from Spain, as of 1945.
This is rather misleading, given that the Philippines had been scheduled to become independent in 1942, iirc. Which of course was delayed by the Japanese conquest.
And I believe that the occupation of Cuba ended in 1903 or so.
I'm not accusing OP of anything, but the "How can Israeli bombing of Gaza be a genocide" is usually, at least implicitly, understood as a moral shield, by which the implied pop-culture goodness of the WW2 Allies is supposed to "rub off" Israel and transfer some legitimacy to comparison between a shitty Islamist militia and one the mightiest European army to ever terrify the Old World in the 20th century.
But, yes, you're kinda right that this discussion is somewhat tangential, which is why I separated it into its comment and surrounded it with "===" markers, it's largely a self-contained rant.
I didn't know about the Philippines planned independence in 1942, but considering the US took it in 1900 I don't think 50 years is a light thing. I didn't know about early Cuban independence, I apologize, I will mark it in the comment.
Re Cuba, perhaps you were thinking of Guam?
>I didn't know about the Philippines planned independence in 1942, but considering the US took it in 1900 I don't think 50 years is a light thing
I was slightly off about the date; the 1934 Philippine Independence Act set the date for 10 years hence. But that was a culmination of a series of congressional acts providing the Philippines with greater and greater autonomy, starting in 1916 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jones_Law_(Philippines)
No, I really did mean Cuba. I knew Guam was among the prizes of American-Spanish war, but I picked the 2 largest population ones because this is most relevant to my point about Colonization.
I think this response is mixed up on multiple levels about the motivations and attitudes of the various players at the time. One main issue seems to be using the word "allies" as if that encompasses one set of viewpoints, ideology or motivation.
There's a lot to unpack here but from the top:
"The Allies were not mad at Hitler because of Genocide, the Allies were mad at Hitler because of (A) Genocide of Whites on European soil (B) Being too dumb to just take a W and go home, constantly pushing for more and more miles after taking hundreds and hundreds of inches and feet."
Parking the USSR for obvious reasons, this makes the mistake of homogenising the allies. WW2 as an anti-holocaust crusade was largely a post-WW2 invention, although it did motivate certain actors and lobby groups within both the US and the UK. Churchill was motivated by this, for personal reasons, much more so than the remainder of the British establishment. Similarly, it took a while for this to get off the ground in the US (due to diaspora groups). Fundamentally, the main motivation at the time for the UK was imperial domination/prevent the rise of a continental power- and for some actors (Churchill) this was seen as an Anglo domination rather than a British domination. Similarly, the US got involved primarily as part of a self interested hegemon clash, then as an ideological crusade, and only to prevent "white genocide" as a latter motivation.
"The Nazis introduced no fundamentally new or outrageous concepts to the intellectual milieu of racial supremacy and domination that enthralled European brains from the early to mid 1800s to the early 1950s, except a single deadly innovation: That not all Whites are created equal"
I think this is particularly 20th century post-WW2 US brained, in the sense that racists of the 19th and early 20th Century almost ubiquitously thought in more finer grained terms than "whites" and "blacks". Ethnography was at a peak, skull measuring was not a Nazi invention but rather main stream science and so on and so forth. The idea that there were multiple races of white man of varying abilities to dominate (with the Anglo-Saxon usually at the peak) was not a uniquely Nazi idea by any means.
I think one mistake you're making is thinking of 'genocide' as a useful or non-fuzzy category, so if the Germans killing 50,000 Herero counts as genocide, then that means it is of moral equivalence to say the holocaust or the killing fields of Rwanda. Genocide can range in size, ubiquity, method, and motivation, which all impact on the moral value of the exercise.
"No, European colonialism explicitly asserts as a matter of almost-religious certainty the inferiority of other races, there is no discovery process, we already know who's going to win, so if the inferiors resisted successfully better go to absurd lengths to kill them to the last baby, we can't possibly allow inferiors to "win" by continuing to live even if they defeated us fair and square."
This is true in the sense that yes the European colonial project did usually see itself in explicitly teleological terms, but no this usually did *not* involve trying to wipe out opponents to the last man. Look for example at the population of Mexico today, where vast swathes of Mestizo still thrive, Mayans live in their ancestral lands etc. The Aztecs were destroyed, largely, but their subject peoples integrated and ruled. In comparison, Eastern European Jewry was wiped out in a generation, and the Armenians of Turkey similarly ceased to exist. The goal of the US in the 19th century (manifest destiny) was first to remove (physically) the Indians, and then eventually to assimilate them. Forcing tribes to settle down on reservations, adopt farming, and Christianise is not the same as taking them to gas chambers.
Similarly the British project never really involved (with the exception of the Tasmanians and other Aborigines) explicit mass killing to cleanse a land of its indigenous people. Yes there was often lots of deaths due to war and disease, but explicit racially driven cleansing? No, usually the natives were left as subordinate peoples. You could argue about Ireland, but surely that undermines the idea that it was racially motivated.
"Which brings us to WW2. The Allies probably killed tons and tons of Germans and Italians for no military reasons or where alternatives would have accomplished the same military goals. In the vast majority of instances where they have not done so, that was probably because (A) They still believed the good-old Pre-Nazi Racial Supremacy which held all whites are within the circle of empathy (B) They feared Nazi Retribution when Nazis were still strong (C) They feared German resentment and subsequent communism collaboration when the Nazis were doing down and the Soviets moving in for the kill."
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here- are you saying that the Allies (themselves para-Genocidaires due to their imperial empires) happily killed fellow whites despite their ideology? But when they didn't this was because they were within the circle? I'm unsure- as far as I can see the British and the Americans prosecuted the war in an increasingly bloody fashion as the Luftwaffe lost the ability to fight, but ultimately they were far less bloody than the wars fought by the Nazis or the Japanese, probably because of their liberal (and yes, co-ethnic) worldview.
> One main issue seems to be using the word "allies" as if that encompasses one set of viewpoints, ideology or motivation.
I'm doing this because I'm mirroring how the opposite camp uses it, OP uses "Allies" as if it's an unambiguous signifier, but which probably (primarily) points to "US & UK".
I'm perfectly fine with separating Russia and - much more rightfully so - China from the "Allies". For the scope of this thread, imagine that I mean "US, UK, France, Canada, Australia" whenever I say "Allies".
> WW2 as an anti-holocaust crusade was largely a post-WW2 invention
In this paragraph, you're basically agreeing with my 2 main claims in A and B, right? i.e. That WW2 was purely a self-interested spanking of Hitler because he doesn't know when to take "No." for an answer, and that the Allies would have been perfectly content with letting Hitler genocide German Jews on German and Austrian lands, possibly even allow him to bully Poland and France and Netherlands and Belgium and Denmark into surrendering their Jews for genocide on German land. Do you disagree with this?
> I think this is particularly 20th century post-WW2 US brained
Ok, my bad. I phrased it wrongly. I should have said that: The Nazis brought one deadly innovation to European racial supremacy, which is that the moral gradient between White races is actionable.
Previously, racists in (e.g.) the United States thought that **All** European races had the moral/scientific/God-given right to dominate others, even the most frail and stupid race (whether that be Serbians, Jews, Slavs, or whatever most hated race in Europe at the particular time and place) has the full right to dominate Middle Easterners, Africans, Native Americans, and the various shades of Asians from Tehran to Beijing.
Nazis were the first to think that all inferiors are "created equal", so to speak. That just as Africans are inferior and deserve Genocide or Colonization, then Jews are the same even if they're white and speak the same language and practice the same cultural practices. Is that a better rephrasing?
(if anything, the sheer similarity of German and European Jews to their host populations seemed to be a particularly infuriating point for the Nazis, nobody would mistake an African for a German, and that must have been like some sort of comfort, it's as if Nazis were offended that Jews are practically indistinguishable except by name and paperwork from most Germans, at least to my own Middle Eastern eyes looking back into old photos in black and white.)
> Genocide can range in size, ubiquity, method, and motivation, which all impact on the moral value of the exercise.
Alright, but the Congolese massacres and the Bengali famine, both committed by non-German parties and one of them prior to any World War, approach the Holocaust in size for most size estimates, (Bengali famine range from 1 million to 4 millions killed, the Congolese range from 1.5 million to 13 millions).
As for the methods, I don't think any of us qualify to answer the question of which way of death is more horrific and demeaning, being burned alive or being starved to death. I don't think the question is even meaningful, to say nothing of degrading or flirting with genocide minimization.
If people who think what's happening in Gaza is not a Genocide think so because they reject the implied comparison to the Holocaust, I'm perfectly happy to (A) Tell them that Holocaust is a different word than Genocide (B) Tell them that comparisons need not invite thinking of similar results, for example Stalin and Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh are all communist dictators who killed wildly varying numbers of people with wildly varying methods over wildly varying timelines (C) Change my description of what's happening in Gaza from "Genocide" to "Deliberate Mass Murder inflicted in order to collectively punish Palestinians and perhaps drive them off their land in the long run", which is the more accurate description in my view, but has the disadvantage of being lengthy.
> I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here
That the Allies were not the good guys, and that any mercy shown to the Germans or the Italians was either a purely pragmatic consideration taking into account Nazi and then later Communist power, or a delusional racial gesture that spared Germans solely due to the fact that they're White, European, and "Civilized", which would be like an animal killer leaving dogs alone because he likes their usefulness, not because they're conscious beings who deserve to live free of pain and humiliation.
My main point is that the Allies are not the good guys, their way of waging war isn't to be pointed to as some sort of stellar valedictorian example of the ideal moral way, other crimes not justifiable just because they happen to resemble the sort of crimes that the Allies liked to commit.
In defense of this point, I'm arguing 2 distinct things (A) That the Allies are not particularly dissimilar to the Nazis in terms of their worldview or how they categorized people, merely conservative and having a bigger "Don't Rock the Boat" attitude than the radical hot-blooded Nazis (B) That the Allies are not particularly dissimilar to the Nazis in terms of how they waged war, in particular Allies treated German civilians exactly as bad or worse than the Nazis treated French and British and other West-European civilians.
>I'm perfectly fine with separating Russia and - much more rightfully so - China from the "Allies". For the scope of this thread, imagine that I mean "US, UK, France, Canada, Australia" whenever I say "Allies".
I didn't explain this particularly well, but I actually meant that trying to view these countries as a monolith in terms of ideological motivation was itself misguided. There were mostly a set of shared assumptions within specific countries, but even then key players had different motivations. Churchill had a different modus operandi (self-aggrandisation, extreme Atlanto-philia) compared to other members of the British establishment for example. The Cavalier vs WASP vs strains of Ellis island tussle in US politics also brought its own baggage.
>In this paragraph, you're basically agreeing with my 2 main claims in A and B, right? i.e. That WW2 was purely a self-interested spanking of Hitler because he doesn't know when to take "No." for an answer, and that the Allies would have been perfectly content with letting Hitler genocide German Jews on German and Austrian lands, possibly even allow him to bully Poland and France and Netherlands and Belgium and Denmark into surrendering their Jews for genocide on German land. Do you disagree with this?
I don't think its easy to boil it down to this as I think different actors within the different countries had different motivations. In general, no I don't think they'd have tolerated the bullying of other countries in this manner, but I also think this misunderstands the nature of the holocaust, which itself only launched into the scale it did once the Lebensraum of the east had been conquered, and the huge numbers of eastern european Jewry had become subjects of the Reich. If in some hypothetical world the Nazis had stopped at Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland, I think they'd have continued with their existing policy up to 1940 or so of mass confiscations and forced exile/encouraged emigration of Jewish people and other undesirables. The idea they'd have then not invaded but tried to demand off other countries their own populations so they could eradicate them is extremely far fetched.
>Ok, my bad. I phrased it wrongly. I should have said that: The Nazis brought one deadly innovation to European racial supremacy, which is that the moral....
Possibly a better interpretation. Your parenthesised discussion of the jewish populations being another variant of white is complicated- in Germany itself lots of urban Jewish people were assimilated, and thought of themselves as German first. In the east there were larger numbers of Jewish people who lived separately, with a unique culture, language, shtetl life etc. Obviously the racial purity laws had farcical elements to it (trying to tell the difference between a 1/4 Jewish, 1/2 Jewish and German person etc), but especially unassimilated Ashkenazi people are different to Slavic or northern Germans, with much more southern Mediterranean/Levantine like ancestry.
>Congolese massacres and the Bengali famine
For a variety of reasons (and I appreciate this is a bad answer) I'd reject the idea that either of these is at all comparable, or that they occurred in the currently vogue way of thinking about them. The Congo situation (with the hands and so on) is particularly misunderstood- largely a native on native affair. I appreciate this is nowadays a rather heterodox view.
Fundamentally I just don't think the Gaza situation at all approaches the bar simply because the death tolls/expulsion tolls don't meet the criteria. As far as I'm aware civilian casualties are basically to be expected for urban warfare, the death toll can't be higher than 3% of the population at the highest.
>My main point is that the Allies are not the good guys, their way of waging war isn't to be pointed to as some sort of stellar valedictorian example of the ideal moral way, other crimes not justifiable just because they happen to resemble the sort of crimes that the Allies liked to commit.
>In defense of this point, I'm arguing 2 distinct things (A) That the Allies are not particularly dissimilar to the Nazis in terms of their worldview or how they categorized people, merely conservative and having a bigger "Don't Rock the Boat" attitude than the radical hot-blooded Nazis (B) That the Allies are not particularly dissimilar to the Nazis in terms of how they waged war, in particular Allies treated German civilians exactly as bad or worse than the Nazis treated French and British and other West-European civilians.
As far as there are goodies or baddies in war, which there usually aren't, I think saying the Japanese and the Nazis were baddies is extremely reasonable, and that their opponents are therefore by default carrying some moral value.
Your A) I think by the time 1939 rolled around this was mostly wrong, and that there were real differences- viewing other peoples as racially inferior is not the same as wanting to eradicate them, and there is no evidence that this viewpoint was taken up by the Anglos. B) Again, sort of right, in that both were much more similar to the nazis than they would be to say the IDF, and if we restrict it to western European populations then yes you're right.
> The Congo situation (with the hands and so on) is particularly misunderstood- largely a native on native affair.
What source did you conclude this based on?
Also why is the Bengali Famine not comparable to the Holocaust or any other genocide?
> the death tolls/expulsion tolls don't meet the criteria
The expulsion toll is "All Gazans". How much higher do you expect it to be?
And the death toll is augmented by an imminent and barely-prevented famine, all the dead under the rubble who weren't counted, and the genocidal intent implicit and explicit in the Israeli high command and political class, which indicates a future trend and desire to kill more Gazans.
> and that their opponents are therefore by default carrying some moral value.
This is fallacious, you're imagining a false dichotomy. Here's a structurally identical argument: Since raping children is worse than raping adults, if a rapist who raped children fought with a child rapist then the first rapist by default carries some moral value.
> viewing other peoples as racially inferior is not the same as wanting to eradicate them
That would be correct to say if *all* what Western Europeans and Americans ever did was "View other people as racially inferior", but they didn't just do this, they did this **and** eradicated them, too.
You're thinking of the Nazi and Allied divide as a theory-action divide, but that's not the correct way to think about it, the correct way to think about it is as an action/more drastic action divide. All states involved engaged in racially motivated genocides, some more than others. There is no nation in the Allied block that didn't engage in a genocide except possibly the Netherlands, and even it founded the South Africa colony which eventually birthed the Apartheid and committed countless instances of violence and mass murder in Indonesia, especially during decolonization.
I wouldn't call Israel's action genocide, but I do think they have long surpassed the point of what is morally justified by the massacre of October 7.
For the bombing in general in WW2, I don't think that counts as genocide. There are some specific bombings that are morally debatable since their primary aim was to kill as many civilians as possible, and not so much a military goal (like the firestorm in Hamburg). But in general, yes, the bombing was morally justified.
1) One important difference is that in WW2, the Allies did not escalate themselves, but retaliated at the same level. The axis, especially Germany, had started a war and had subdued large parts of Europe. They had already killed tens of millions. The response of the Allies was on the same level. This is terrible, but commensurate.
In Gaza, the massacre was a massive escalation from Hamas, and arguably by the Palestinian population, and killed 1000+ people. But in its campaign, Israel killed 30,000+ people. Numbers matter. I think that there is a certain level of escalation that is justified after an aggression, but not this amount of escalation.
2) I don't think that the Allies during WW2 had substantially milder means to achieve their military goals. Even in 1944, the Axis still launched massive counterattacks. I don't see a way to contain this threat except for total military defeat, after which they could dismantle the Axis military etc. The military actions of the Allies were pretty well aligned with the politically justified goal of containing the threat. The actions directly served this purpose.
In Gaza, the military actions are not so well-aligned with the goal of containing the threat, to put it mildly.
2a) One of the bitter truths of October 7 is that the Hamas invasion was so successful because Israel had tried to maintain the border fully automated, for cost reasons, without actually having guards there. As far as I understand, if the border had been staffed, the Hamas would have been able to kill/take hostages by 1-2 lower orders of magnitude. I am not implying that Israel has any blame in the massacre, that was purely Hamas' evildoing. But Israel has an alternative way of preventing such a massacre in the future: re-built the border and staff it. This would work because Israel's military is so superior to Hamas. Whereas the Allies in WW2 did not have such an option.
2b) It is pretty unclear what Israel's military goal in Gaza even is. To my best understanding, the only part that has somewhat worked is searching as many houses as possible for tunnels and weapons. This they can only do when the population is elsewhere, which is why they drive the population around. This would be a valid goal if it worked well. But in the "cleared" areas of Northern Gaza, Hamas still operates just fine.
In total, it is even unclear whether the Israel operations are net positive or net negative. They destroy some equipment and logistics of Hamas, but obviously with only moderate success. In turn they produce a new generation of Palestinians who hate Israel even more, which will strengthen Hamas further. Again, this is nothing like WW2 - once the Allies achieved their well-defined military goals, they can really do something about the threats.
2c) The only goal that Israel clearly achieves is to set a precedent of "whenever someone attacks us we will devastate their whole country". This is related to the escalation issue described above. I do think that this could be morally justified. Except that a world in which we allow everyone to escalate by orders of magnitude upon defection becomes barbaric. So my best answer is that some escalating retaliation can be morally justified (and even that with lots of caveats), but not excessive retaliation.
3) Not the decisive point, but: the world is no longer the same as in WW2. Back then it was a lot more normal to start wars, perform mass killing, or mass displacement. It was only in the 1920s-1940s when the world collectively decided that this was no longer morally ok. I recommend the book review on The Internationalists in the book reviewing contest of 2022 for background.
I find it extremely important to defend this position because it makes the world a better place. So for me, the escalation of Israel is even less ok today than it would have been 80 years ago.
Your points are mostly wrong as a point of fact: Israel does not have the ability to arbitrarily contain Palestinian terrorism without offensive action (if you act purely defensively, giving your enemy as many free shots as they want, they'll breach your defenses *eventually* - and when they do, it's always going to look like you made an easily avoidable mistake in retrospect, but "just never make defensive mistakes" isn't an option.
You're also wrong on military goals - this doesn't come across in media (can't imagine why), but the offensive has significantly degraded Hamas's military capabilities (they went from launching hundreds of rockets at Israel a day to hardly any, and most of their battalions aren't operational - except in Rafah, where the US has pushed Israel not to operate), and their domestic weapons manufacturing ability is largely gone. This is real, meaningful progress. Compare the northern border, where Israel hasn't done similar operations against Hezbollah, and where daily massive missile volleys and hundreds of thousands of refugees are still happening. And even in Gaza, Israel hasn't "bombed it to the ground" - the movement of large numbers of internal refugees is mostly part of a massive effort to avoid civilian casualties (which is why, despite immense challenges, this is the operation with the lowest civilian casualty ratio in the history of urban warfare).
I'd also argue that Israel doesn't have an obligation to value Palestinian lives more than Palestinians themselves do - if the Palestinians refuse to make necessary concessions for peace (including to release their hostages and agree to stop bombing Israel), I don't think the Israelis owe it to them to care *more*. But that's the moral point, not the fact based one.
> if the Palestinians refuse to make necessary concessions for peace (including to release their hostages and agree to stop bombing Israel), I don't think the Israelis owe it to them to care *more*.
Can't this be used - word for word - to justify October 7th?
>>> if the Israelis refuse to make necessary concessions for peace (including to dismantle settlements and agree to stop sieging and bombing Gaza), I don't think the Palestinians owe it to them to care *more*.
Extremely minimal changes to the sentence plus a swap of "Israelis" and "Palestinians". Is that a correct justification of October 7th massacres? If not, why is the original a correct justification of the Gaza genocide?
Hm, you say that Hamas' military capabilities are significantly degraded. Do you have any estimates? I don't find it very convincing to count the number of rockets. It's not surprising that this goes down during the presence of the IDF. You say that most of Hamas battalions are not operational. Where does this come from? I thought that we have very little idea of how many of the Hamas fighters are alive. I would appreciate any numbers you have.
The only number I can find is that IDF claims to have destroyed 20-40% of the Hamas tunnels. That is something (especially because larger tunnels are more likely to be found and destroyed). But it leaves 60-80% intact. Do we have any idea how much weapon manufacturing ability remains in the remaining 60-80%? Before the war, were rockets produced mostly in the tunnels, above ground, or does it not matter because the equipment is so mobile that it can easily be transferred?
ISW keeps track of specific numbers if you're interested in that. Iirc it's something like ten out of fifteen Hamas battalions rendered inoperational (the rest are in Rafah). Also something in the range of 10-15k fighters killed or captured, which is about half their force.
on tunnels, the recent operation on the Egyptian border (which caught a lot of cross-border tunnels) should be very significant because those are the tunnels they use to smuggle in weapons (which, combined with the destruction of many local arms factories, should significantly reduce their ability to ramp up launches again).
Uhm, I just looked them up, but those numbers are just obviously made up. They don't even pass basic sanity checks.
About 35,000 people were killed in Gaza. Indeed the claim is that 10-15k Hamas fighters were killed . This would mean that every third killed person would be Hamas member. This would already be a remarkably high precision in other wars, unless it's two armies directly engaging each other far from civilians. In this war, most people die from bombing, which is not very precise even for city-based warfare.
Another sanity check: About 10,000 of the killed people were women.* I don't think women are Hamas fighters. Whatever killed them were events that were clearly missing their targets, like un- or misdirected bombs. These attacks likely killed as many men as women. So that's at least 20,000 pretty random casualties. Should I believe that two thirds of the other 15,000 killed people were Hamas members, or even all of them? And that is not even counting children among the victims. (I didn't include children on purpose. There are some high numbers floating around, but I suspect that everyone under 18 is counted as child, and Hamas fighters will include teenagers under 18).
* My first hit was some sensationalist headline saying that this number have been reduced by half, which is misleading. About 5,000 dead women have been personally identified.
I don't have access to classified inside information any more than you do, but three methods to estimate these numbers that end up in this ballpark:
- So about 5000 women, plus the assumption of 5000 men, plus some number of unidentified deaths puts this at about the right estimate.
- For a lower bound: Hamas's own (admitted, from a while ago) numbers were 6k losses. Adding in PIJ and other paramilitaries (plus irregulars) puts us back at at least the 10-15k numbers.
- As you said, This would mean that every second or third killed person would be Hamas member. which would be high precision for other wars. This matches US military analysts who confirm the IDF goes to extraordinary lengths to avoid collateral damage (including door knocks and extensive evacuation efforts), above and beyond what other forces do in similar situations.
WW2 was a war between equals, i.e. empires fighting against each others, so I would call it a regular war, instead of genocide. Iirc Germany lost about as many people during that war, as the allies. In gaza the ratio is somewhere between 1:10 and 1:100
> If no, what would have to be different in WW2 for Allied bombing to count as a genocide, to you?
Allied must have been significantly stronger.
> Or is there some other distinction I’m missing?
"Volkssturm" and "Totaler Krieg" probably played a role, too. I.e. many civilians strongly supported the war, and were actively fighting, The claim of a hostile population was very credible. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkssturm https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totaler_Krieg
> If yes, are you of the opinion that it was still justified because of how awful the Nazi party was?
yes. Nazis by 1944 nazis germany has proven to be a credible thread the allies (france, britain, russia). It was also known how they treated the conquered populations.
> Or do you think the Allies should’ve avoided bombing, even if it shortened the war and saved Allied lives?
in hindsight, maybe they could have done things differently. But during that time, I think it was justified.
The allies were on the losing side in the first part of the war. They were grasping for each chance they could get. During that time, it was not clear, if any other strategy would have worked at all. Even in hindsight, I wouldn't know what they could have done "better".
> Even in hindsight, I wouldn't know what they could have done "better".
In hindsight, the strategic bombing was largely ineffective except that it drew the German air force away from Russia. If you had a time machine and were giving the allies advice, you'd probably want to tell them to skip the strategic bombing and focus those resources on other parts of the military. (This is assuming you can't just cheat and tell them "actually defend Poland" or whatever).
My take: Israel is guilty of genocide, Allied bombing is not.
Roughly speaking, the UN definition says that you commit genocide if you harm people with the intent to harm their ethnic group. This is a tricky thing to prove, because it requires a bit of mind-reading. You need a lot of context to get it right.
The Allied bombing campaigns were pretty severe - Japan and Germany lost maybe half a million civilians each. These killings would likely be considered war crimes today, and rightfully so. But what was the intent? For that you need some context.
It seems to me that the bombings started in retaliation against German bombings, and then escalated to try to force the end of the war (although it may have been ineffective). Both of these reasons make sense on paper, and when the war was over, the killing stopped. It seems fairly clear to me that the intent wasn't to harm Germans and Japanese in particular, meaning that it was not genocide, no matter how immoral and how awful the human cost.
In the case of Gaza, Israel has destroyed ~1 million people's houses and public infrastructure in northern Gaza. Many of these refugees are situated in Rafah, where they are currently being displaced again. Almost everybody has no internet, no electricity, no fuel, no food, barely functioning hospitals, and are regularly being bombed and fired upon by the IDF. It's impossible to know how many have died, since there is nobody to report a death to, and no way to report it.
So, what is the intent? Well, Israel's official explanation is that the intent is to (a) destroy Hamas, and (b) rescue the hostages. To me, (a) seems vague (how many Hamas members do we need killed?) and unknowable (how do you know when they're gone?) and difficult (how do you know a given person is not part of Hamas?) and short termist (what happens when Gaza has no government?) and unnecessary (surely a two state solution would have a far higher chance of ensuring peace?). And to me, (b) makes no sense at all. You can't claim to be rescuing someone while you're destroying the entire region where they are being held. It also sounds totally futile to negotiate with someone you've vowed to kill.
So, consider the context: for over 70 years, Israel has been taking control over more and more land from Palestinians, forcing them to seek refuge, and letting new Jewish people move in. Resistance is met with violence. Palestine is vastly outgunned, and Israel is so closely allied with Western countries, especially the US, that nobody would dare provide Palestine with much support.
You could potentially see the intent as expansionistic - to simply govern more land. But every time Israel invades, it doesn't accept existing Palestinians as new Israeli citizens. It deploys new Jewish Israelis to populate the area and pushes Palestinians further into the desert, where they must live as refugees. But Israel will then invade again in another 20 years' time.
I'm not sure if there's an official explanation for why this keeps happening. My best guess is that Israel simply wants to include as many Jews as possible, and as few Arabs as possible, in order to maintain its national identity. In any case, my view is that most harm to Palestinians, in general, is due to the ethnicity and/or religion of the Palestinians, making this a genocide.
"To me, (a) seems vague (how many Hamas members do we need killed?)"
To destroy an organization, you need to ensure that members of that organization do not associate with each other in pursuit of that organization's goals in significant numbers. How many members need to be killed to reach that point, depends on how violently determined they are to continue supporting the organization. In principle, this can often be accomplished by just having the police arrest everyone every time the organization tries to hold a get-together, without needing to kill anyone. But if they've got lots of guns and a policy of shooting any of your policemen who try to come into their neighborhood, then you're probably going to have to kill the ones who are shooting at your policemen until they stop doing that.
And if they're using heavy weapons in a densely-populated urban area, you're probably going to wind up killing a whole lot of of people who were just standing too close to people who were shooting at policemen.
"and unknowable (how do you know when they're gone?)"
When they stop shooting at your policemen, then the ones you need to kill are mostly gone. When they stop going to the organization's meet-ups, the ones you need to arrest are mostly gone (but you'll want to keep their police in place and alert for a decade or so to make sure there's no backsliding).
"and difficult (how do you know a given person is not part of Hamas?)"
In the killing-people part of the operation, you know because they're the ones shooting at the IDF. Or carrying the sorts of weapons normally used to shoot at the IDF, or the like.
In the arresting-people part of the operation, you know because they're the ones going to Hamas meetings(*). You'll probably also be able to identify quite a few from the bit where they brag about being Hamas members in their social media profile, or they're on video participating in Hamas rallies, or their aggrieved neighbors rat them out as being part of Hamas. Typically, insurgent or terrorist organizations try to keep a low profile about that sort of thing, but being the de facto governing power of Gaza for most of two decades means slacking off in that regard so they can sit back and enjoy the win.
* Or "Hey, we're not 'Hamas' we're, um, 'Hasam', that's it, and it's totally a coincidence that we want to drive all the Jews out of Greater Palestine like Hamas did" meetings.
> So, what is the intent? Well, Israel's official explanation is that the intent is to (a) destroy Hamas, and (b) rescue the hostages. To me, (a) seems vague (how many Hamas members do we need killed?) and unknowable (how do you know when they're gone?) and difficult (how do you know a given person is not part of Hamas?)
I see a lot of this confusing attitude, speaking as though Hamas is a vague terror movement with unclear boundaries.
At the start of the war, Hamas had 24 battalions. 19 have been obliterated outright. Hamas started with a massive amount of tunnel infrastructure, much of which has been destroyed. Hamas had the ability to smuggle in serious weaponry. They had massive stockpiles of rockets, which are rapidly being depleted. (The reduced frequency of rocket attacks is quite noticeable to Israelis.) They had the ability to execute whoever they wanted within Gaza, and no real resistance was possible. They received massive assistance from foreign countries.
After the operation in Gaza succeeds, Hamas will probably continue to exist as an underground terror movement, maybe even with increased ability to recruit, who knows. That's a survivable state of affairs for Israel, especially if there's a local Palestinian government that acts against Hamas.
> So, consider the context: for over 70 years, Israel has been taking control over more and more land from Palestinians, forcing them to seek refuge, and letting new Jewish people move in.
That's false. In 1948, Jordan expelled the entire Jewish population of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. In 1967, Israel had full control over the West Bank, Gaza, and the Sinai, and since then gave away the Sinai to Egypt, and Area A and Gaza to the Palestinians, forcibly removing Jewish populations from all of those.
> In any case, my view is that most harm to Palestinians, in general, is due to the ethnicity and/or religion of the Palestinians, making this a genocide.
You think that Israel is fighting Hamas because of some hatred of their ethnicity and religion, and not because of the openly genocidal terrorist organization which just brutally murdered hundreds of people, butchered babies, committed mass-rape while livestreaming it from the victims' social media accounts, abducted hundreds of hostages, and then vowed that they would do so again and again? Wow.
> since then gave away the Sinai to Egypt
Kinda misleading way to phrase this, Israel wasn't being charitable, it lost its entire air force in the first few hours of a joint attack by Egypt and Syria, then barely held together under continued pounding and Arab Oil Embargoes that brought Europe and the US to their knees.
The often-propagandistic claims ("We had a battalion headed for Cairo !!!!") that are said to sooth the Israeli national ego omit key info, like the fact that battalion in question was 200 Km from Cairo and surrounded on all sides by the Egyptian army.
> Jordan expelled the entire Jewish population of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Isn't this exactly what Israel did to the Palestinians at the same time?
> butchered babies
Never confirmed by any remotely reliable source by the way, the White House made themselves look like clowns when they claimed it and later retracted them.
> committed mass-rape while livestreaming it
I have read no less than dozens of reports on the sexual assault of Hamas, and every single one of them admits right off the bat that there is no direct footage - still or moving - of the crimes.
If you have footage, do the people like me who try to convince the Hamas sympathizers that they committed rape a favor and post it right here. I can post an email if you don't want to publicly post the gruesome footage.
> That's a survivable state of affairs for Israel, especially if there's a local Palestinian government that acts against Hamas.
The same local government that Israel's official position is swearing on their grandmother's graves that it won't exist now or in 50 years?
Are you aware of the links between Hamas and Netanyahu? Do you know how he justified funding and strengthening Hamas?
Well, that's quite a gish gallop of misinformation and outright lies. I'm not going to waste time on going through them, except to clear up the "butchered babies" business.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2023/10/31/post-falsely-claims-newspaper-reported-no-babies-beheaded-hamas-israel-fact-check/71394076007/
"An international group of forensic pathologists also have confirmed babies were found decapitated, though it's unclear if that happened before or after death."
It's unfortunate that you choose to not face that you don't have credible evidence for the "live-streaming rape" claim, but have it your way.
> except to clear up the "butchered babies" business.
Why haven't Haaretz or Times of Israel picked up the story from the random "fact-checker" you posted?
> you don't have credible evidence
Try the UN report.
> Why haven't Haaretz or Times of Israel picked up the story from the random "fact-checker" you posted?
USA Today's (the "random fact-checker") report came later than both Haaretz's and Times of Israel's confirmations. As shown in the link. Right there. (Is the overly specific denial of what's right there some kind of ragebait attempt?)
It's abundantly obvious that you're not arguing in good faith. I'm muting this thread.
> That's false.
Here's a 14 second demonstration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4XvPGN6hoA
> You think that Israel is fighting Hamas because...
I don't think Israel is fighting Hamas. To me, the IDF appears to be destroying Gaza completely, massacring Palestinians indiscriminately, and depriving them of energy, healthcare and other basic services. Hamas is barely fighting back at all - "fighting Hamas" seems like an incorrect description.
> because of some hatred of their ethnicity and religion, and not because of the openly genocidal terrorist organization...
Sure. I think this is probably what most Israelis think about the operation - it's about security and safety. But think about this: Hamas has committed only a small minority of the total killings (seems to be <3% over the past year, and about the same throughout the entire conflict). As awful as Hamas is, they are a rounding error compared to the IDF. So, does this justify Oct 7? No!! Of course it doesn't. And by the exact same token, Oct 7 doesn't justify the mass death right now.
If you're still doubtful that ethnicity is a relevant factor, consider a world in which everyone in Palestine had been Jewish. Do you think Israel would have displaced them? Would they be refugees in the desert, who are currently starving to death? If not, does that not suggest that Israel's callousness towards Palestinians has been due to their race and religion?
Why does everyone insist on thinking of wars like the principle is an eye for an eye? If someone gouges your eye out, you don't gouge their eye out and call it even. You take steps to prevent them from gouging out other eyes in the future. On an individual level, an eye gouger is sent to prison. On a state level, eye gougers have their capacity to inflict violence degraded until they surrender or physically can't inflict violence any more.
This proportional view makes no sense. What good does killing a proportional amount of Gazans do? Either killing them prevents future attacks, and the number killed depends on how that affects their ability to inflict future violence. Or killing them does nothing except make the situation worse, and none of them should be killed at all. If you believe in situation 2, you should make that claim.
Are you suggesting destroying the IDF? Although that would certainly ensure the safety of Palestinians, I would argue that there are other ways to resolve the conflict than destroying the IDF, and the terrible human cost of doing so means we should be looking at those alternative options.
Oh you meant destroying Hamas, didn't you? Same reasoning. Options include ceasefire, then two state solution, one state solution, really anything that gives Palestinians democracy and basic freedoms. I would definitely think Israelis would be safest when their government makes friends with its neighbours, rather than making itself a pariah even outside the middle east.
Destroying the IDF would certainly create peace in Palestine. Best case, you get Uno reverse and tens of thousands of Israelis die and then get oppressed by Palestinians. Worst case, you get Holocaust 2.0 and all of the Israelis are massacred, or reduced to dhimmitude, which is slavery with extra steps.
- One state solution is laughable and no one should seriously propose this
- Two state solution (really 3 since Gaza and the West Bank are separate) is what exists now
- Democracy and freedom for Palestine resulted in a) the PLO, which denied the right of Israel to exist and launched terror attacks against them, and b) Hamas, which denied the right of Israel to exist and launched terror attacks against them. I'm not sure why anyone would think trying the same thing 3 times in a row would result in a different outcome.
I'm glad you are arguing for a principled stance of no violence rather than utilitarian proportional nonsense. But I don't think that will work to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict.
> Here's a 14 second demonstration
That map is straight-up wrong.
> I don't think Israel is fighting Hamas. To me, the IDF appears to be destroying Gaza completely, massacring Palestinians indiscriminately
The IDF is fully capable of wiping out ~5 million Palestinians any moment, even without using nukes, and chooses not to do so. Instead, the IDF has been sacrificing more to preserve enemy civilian lives than any army in the history of warfare. Fun fact: There are considerably more Palestinians now than there were at the beginning of the operation.
> Hamas is barely fighting back at all
Interesting contrast between this view and what Hamas says. From Sinwar himself, in a letter to supporters, published in Al-Jazeera: "Azz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades are waging a fierce, violent and unprecedented battle against the Israeli occupation forces, and the occupation army has suffered heavy losses in lives and equipment. Al-Qassam Brigades targeted at least 5,000 soldiers and officers during the ground war, one-third of whom were killed, one-third were seriously injured, and the last one-third suffered permanent disabilities. 750 units have been completely or partially destroyed at the level of military equipment and vehicles. Al-Qassam Brigades destroyed the occupation army, is continuing on its path to crushing it, and will not submit to the conditions of the occupation."
> consider a world in which everyone in Palestine had been Jewish. Do you think Israel would have displaced them?
Obviously, given the hundreds of thousands of Jewish Israelis that the Israeli government displaced to get them out of harms way.
> The IDF is fully capable of wiping out ~5 million Palestinians any moment
The obvious counterexample is all the other genocides in history where the population doing the genocide had the full armed capacity to comparatively do much more than the IDF and didn't use it.
Why are European Jews still a bloodline at all if Nazi Germany's armed forces had the capacity to wipe out every Jew off the face of Europe?
I can fuzzily recall estimates along the lines of "Every third Jew survived in Europe", whatever the actual ratio may be, obviously there are Holocaust survivors. So why? Nazi Germany had between at least 1937 to 1944 to wipe out every last Jew, the same armed forces that took France in a few months and reached Moscow in less than a year didn't. Is this a counterexample to your claim?
> the IDF has been sacrificing more to preserve enemy civilian lives than any army in the history of warfare.
Is this actually an exhaustive statement that you in good faith did all you can to justify, for example by painstakingly studying every war and comparing it to the IDF wars? Or is it just propaganda that you feel compelled to parrot?
That is one thing that puzzles me about the holocaust. It seems so indirect. Like they kept people in prison and starved them, but they didn't get serious about mass extermination until the final months of the war. Why go to the trouble of imprisoning and starving people when you could just shoot them?
> That map is straight-up wrong.
Care to name something it gets wrong? Do you have a preferable source for the history of Israeli borders?
> IDF has been sacrificing more to preserve enemy civilian lives than any army in the history of warfare
So, while "sacrificing more" to protect civilians, they turned off everybody's electricity and fuel supplies, destroyed 1.7 million peoples' houses, damaged all but one hospital in northern Gaza, used AI to select drone strike targets with "cursory" human review, killed >150 journalists, killed >250 aid workers, killed several Israeli citizens, including hostages of Hamas? And now they're doing it *again* in Rafah? Can you name a modern army that had a worse civilian impact than this?
> Obviously
Ridiculous. If Palestinians were Jewish, all of Israel and Palestine would have peace and human rights and you know it.
I agree with many things in this comment, but I also think it is somewhat one-sided. For example, the Arab/Palestinian population in Israel. I think you describe correctly the tendency of the last 10-20 years, where Israel's government more or less openly showed that they would prefer to get rid of them. But this is not the politics of the last 70 years. After all, Israel has still 20-25% Arab citizens.
Another example: being expansionistic. Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005. This was not in a vacuum and also had advantages, but it wasn't forced on Israel, and was the opposite of expansionistic. Unfortunately, as so often between Israel and Palestinians, when one side tried to cooperate, the other side has defected (or at least taken actions that were interpreted as defecting from the other side). After 2005, it was the Palestinians who elected Hamas as their government. Since then, Israel defected the cooperative part of the Palestinians by grabbing more and more land in the West Bank.
Palestinian authority on the West Bank spends several hundred million dollars each year in payments to the families of Palestinians who killed or tried to kill the Israelis. Is it accurate to call them the cooperative part?
It's all grey rather than black-and-white. But I think it's very natural to describe Hamas as the part which does not cooperate with Israel, and PLO as the part which does cooperate with Israel, especially in the last 15 years or so.
What we can probably agree on: that Israel's actions in the West Bank (and also around Jerusalem, and towards the Arab part of Israel citizen) have been perceived as defection from Palestinian side. Actually, I do actually agree with that.
Thanks for saying so. I know this can be really hard to talk about, so it's impressive when people are not just blind to one or other side.
> Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005. This was not in a vacuum and also had advantages, but it wasn't forced on Israel, and was the opposite of expansionistic.
So if Israel expands, and then takes one step back, it is not longer fair to call it expansionistic?
Imagine Russia giving up a few villages in the currently occupied part of Ukraine. Would that mean that Russia is no longer expansionist? And if later they decide to take those villages (and more) back, we still shouldn't call them expansionist, because of that one time when they took one step back?
The whole "genocide" accusation doesn't actually hold together as any sort of fact-based view of the situation and there's not much point in trying to make sense of it as such. It's purely a boo word meaning "I don't like Israel and/or bombing and don't want to think of the situation beyond that".
The basic idea behind the "genocide" accusation is that Israel wants to solve the Gaza problem by killing and displacing the Palestinians of Gaza and settling the place with Israelis. I'm not saying that is true, but that's the accusation.
And yeah, there's plenty of people who are willing to call the Allied bombings "war crimes". Not genocides, because there was no genocidal intent, but plenty of people condemn them.
The actual number of people killed in bombings has nothing to do with it.
Neither is a genocide, because neither was/is "committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such." Whether they were war crimes is a different question, and depends on facts to which we are not privy, such as the degree to which the danger to civilians outweighs the expected military benefit. https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v1/rule14
"the aim of the Combined Bomber Offensive...should be unambiguously and publicly stated. That aim is the destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers, and the disruption of civilized life throughout Germany.
It should be emphasized that the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport and lives, the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale, and the breakdown of morale both at home and at the battle fronts by fear of extended and intensified bombing, are accepted and intended aims of our bombing policy. They are not by-products of attempts to hit factories."
Arthur "Bomber" Harris
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_Bomber_Offensive
I'm not sure whether this is meant to be evidence for or against my position, but I read this as evidence that the bombing was not a genocide, because there was no intent to destroy a group, or part thereof, as such. See pages 28 et seq of Judgment on Defense Motion to Acquit here: https://ucr.irmct.org/scasedocs/case/IT-95-8#eng Note also that, had the term been understood to refer to bombing campaigns, even relatively indiscriminate bombing, no country would have signed it.
Of course, as noted, it might nevertheless have been a war crime. https://casebook.icrc.org/a_to_z/glossary/indiscriminate-attacks
In what way does
>the killing of German workers
not satisfy the
>or _in part_
clause in the UN's definition of genocide?
( Which, together with the "mental harm" part, make it uselessly broad, in my view. )
As I mentioned below, it fails to satisfy the "as such" requirement, not the "in part" requirement.
Many Thanks! Just to double check - in my browser, this seems to be showing up as page 29, point? paragraph? 57 (as part of 03 Sep 2001 Sikirica et al. (IT-95-8) Judgement on Defence motions to acquit)
>The Trial Chamber notes the Prosecution submission that evidence that satisfies any of the following three standards meets the requirement of Article 4 that the accused must have committed the act "with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such"
Hmm... Does the "as such" just mean that the action has to be _selective_, picking out members of a particular national/ethnical/racial/religious group? If so, then I would still think that
>the killing of _German_ workers
would still qualify. Or does additional selectivity on another basis,
>the killing of German _workers_
disqualify it? Or does the combination with _additional_ aims, in this case the crippling of German arms production, disqualify it? ( This last seems unlikely, since one could always separate out declared aims, one by one, for examination. )
I thought my quote was a rather unambiguous call for genocide, but certainly a war crime. Harris called for the killing of a significant number of German civilians (those living in cities) as an explicit goal. I'm not a lawyer though, maybe you could more precisely quote from that Judgment document how that was not a call for genocide?
I see quotes like
"The Chamber agrees with the Prosecution’s submission that the intent to destroy a multitude of persons belonging to a group may amount to genocide, even where these persons constitute only part of a group within a given geographical area: a country or a region or a single community."
and
"The United Nations Expert Study on Genocide defines the term 'in part' as implying 'a reasonably significant number, relative to the total of the group as a whole, or else a significant section of a group such as its leadership'",
referring to the definition of genocide as, in this particular case, "Intent to destroy in whole or in part the Bosnian Muslim or Bosnian Croat populations in Prijedor", which could trivially be applied to Harris' statement about German civilians.
So which quote exactly are you thinking of that would make Harris' statement not a declaration of genocide?
>or else a significant section of a group such as its leadership
WTF??? The UN calls a decapitation strike a genocide??? A decapitation strike, if one can manage it, is what one does when one wants to defeat a group while _minimizing_ the number of people killed.
This smells like rulers protecting other rulers.
You have to differentiate between valid military targets and invalid civilian targets. Of course, aiming to kill a country's soldiers or their leadership during war is not genocide in this sense. Aiming to kill, say, all religious leaders of a certain religion, or the political leaders of a certain ethnicity would be genocide.
The key is the "as such" portion of the definition. See discussion here https://www.globalr2p.org/publications/defining-the-four-mass-atrocity-crimes/ which notes that genocide requires that "Victims of this crime are deliberately – and not randomly – targeted because of their real or perceived membership in one of the four protected groups," but that, in contrast, war crimes include "Intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population as such" and " or "Intentionally directing attacks against civilian objects, that is, objects which are not military objectives"
This is a question that just occurred to me:
Assuming two populations have a different average, but the same standard deviation. If you truncate the populations below a certain point, then the population with the higher starting average will STILL have a higher average, due to the shape of the normal distribution: they have more people at the far ends of the tails.
So, for example, if Nigerians have an average IQ of 95, Koreans have an average IQ of 105, both populations have 15 IQ points standard deviation, and the USA only admits people whose IQs are at least 110, then the average IQ of Nigerian-Americans would be ~118, while the average IQ of Korean-Americans would be ~120. This is BEFORE any regression-to-the-mean type things for the children of successful immigrants. (The effect becomes even more pronounced if the Nigerian average IQ is lower, to be clear - if Nigeria's average IQ was 70, the Nigerian-American average IQ would be ~114.6 in this example.)
Yet the most educated immigrant population in America are not Korean-Americans, but Nigerian-Americans. Do HBD people have any good explanation for this?
are applicants randomly selected from the populations? (I would assume no). That would be the explanation.
Honestly, probably just immigration selection pressure. Nigerians primarily immigrated after 2000 (1) while the majority of Korean Americans arrived from 1970-2000 (2). Remember, if you don't have family members in the US and can't claim refugee status, you need to get an immigrant work visa, which are insanely competitive and specifically look for academic achievement(3). This leads to two fairly simple explanations.
First, as demand to immigrate to America has risen, standards have gotten tougher. This should be fairly easy to determine, have the proportion of EB1 and EB2 visas risen relative to EB3 visas? (4)
Second, there's probably a lot more 2nd and 3rd generation Korean immigrants than Nigerians because their primary immigration wave was about 30 years earlier and we should expect subsequent generations to perform less well academically. That's not even a zing; lots of real estate agents in SF make darn good money but US immigration doesn't care about $400k/year real estate agents, they only look at academics. So a 25 year-old Korean computer scientist who arrived in America in 1985 could reasonably expect to have grandchildren at this point, certainly his own children have completed their secondary education. Meanwhile, a 25 year-old Nigerian computer scientist who arrived in 2010 probably has kids but they haven't completed their post secondary education yet. This should also be relatively easy to confirm; just find educational achievement for first generation vs second and third generation Korean Americans.
(1) https://www.migrationpolicy.org/sites/default/files/publications/RAD-Nigeria.pdf p.2
(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Americans
(3) https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/permanent-workers
(4) https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/visa-law0/visa-statistics/immigrant-visa-statistics/monthly-immigrant-visa-issuances.html, although I don't know how to find 1980 stats.
>That's not even a zing; lots of real estate agents in SF make darn good money but US immigration doesn't care about $400k/year real estate agents, they only look at academics.
This is not quite correct. For O-1 work visas, and similar EB-1 extraordinary ability green cards, high income is indeed a criterion that can boost an application, while academics per se is largely irrelevant (though achievements within academic fields counts). https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/permanent-workers/employment-based-immigration-first-preference-eb-1
"Nigeria" is a social construct created by the British when abandoning their empire. The subgroup you are looking for are the Igbo. Search for that name in here:
https://mattlakeman.org/2023/05/09/notes-on-nigeria/
> At this point, it’s hard not to draw comparisons between the Igbo and a certain other famous ethnic/religious group known for its business acumen, focus on education, conspicuous political success, and dispersal among foreign lands, that also fell victim to pogroms.
I am familiar with and find highly unconvincing the "Jews of West Africa" hereditarian hypothesis. It seems to me to be a desperate attempt to come up with a hereditarian explanation of large attainment differences between neighboring ethnic groups, when there is the fact that there were virtually no schools in the north during British occupation, because the schools that got set up under the British were generally Christian mission schools, which would obviously be unwelcome among the Muslim Hausa. No need to appeal to genetics with such an obvious environmental explanation (which, unlike many other environmental explanations, cannot be explained as actually a consequence of genetic differences - it is not like the Hausa converted to Islam while the Igbo largely retained traditional religion because the Hausa were dumb and the Igbo smart).
I love the fact that you find 'Nigerian = low-IQ' to be plausible instead.
I actually don't find the idea that Nigerians have genotypically low g to be very plausible, even with a modest difference (compared to HBD-types proposing an average IQ of 70, which would be obviously stupid), due to various things like this. If genotypic g differences are the cause of racial IQ divides, results such as this should be very rare, if they occur at all.
The Igbo thing grinds my gears in particular because it seems so blatantly post facto - at least with Jews there's the "bankers for centuries" explanation, but the Igbo didn't even have a fully-featured writing system until the Europeans showed up, yet they're selecting for IQ so hard that they have 10+ IQ points on neighboring Yoruba?
Fair enough, and thank you for clarifying your position.
I don't find the whole HBD/IQ thing to be very plausible at all, in part because it lines up a bit too neatly with racial stereotypes that are genetically incoherent (e.g. skin colour, which means more or less nothing in terms of diversity).
For what it's worth: I happen to know a number of Nigerian expats, and have never met one who was anything less than brilliant. And yet Nigeria itself is a disaster for all too familiar ex-colonial/resource curse reasons.
If I had to pick a stereotype, I'd say that it's more "Scots on the make" than "jews of Africa".
all data supports that, even the best case against is weak https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/explaining-anomalous-gcse-results
So your supporting argument is an article that posits that the gcse is a partial and biased measure of intelligence, but IQ tests are not?
I'm... not sure that that helps the cause of either IQ or Nigerian being useful lenses here.
Well of course the answer is that the US doesn't have an IQ test, nor do they take a random sample of qualifying individuals. Immigrants to the US are people who have the motivation and ability to pass through a series of hoops to get a visa in one of several specific categories.
I suspect there's a lot of factors going into it, but two of the big ones will be:
1. Age distribution: Koreans have been moving en masse to the US for longer than Nigerians have, and younger generations are more likely to have degrees.
2. There's more plausible pathways for a non-elite Korean to move to the US (and start a convenience store, or work in their uncle's construction company) than for non-elite Nigerians to do so. There's less support for Nigerians in the US, less of a local community to get them started. If you have family members in the US then more visa opportunities are open to you than if you're the first of your kind. And of course, non-elite Nigerians are so poor that they have difficulty saving up for a plane ticket and visa paperwork.
If the immigration criterion does not perfectly correlate to IQ, that will strongly tend lower the average IQ of Nigerian immigrants compared to Korean immigrants, assuming Nigerians have lower IQs. For example of a simplified model, if anybody with an IQ over 110 gets in, and anybody with a lower IQ has a coinflip chance, obviously this will just drive Nigerian-American IQs down even more than the 110 truncation point.
Regarding (2), do you expect, in general, for immigrants from poor countries to outperform immigrants from rich countries? Because that would seem to be the implication but I really doubt it is the case. e.g. foreign-born Filipino-Americans have lower Bachelor's rates than their Korean equivalents (and the same for their USian cohort).
On your first paragraph: sure, in that simplified model that would be the case. But the simplified model isn't true; the people who move to the US are the people who happen to have the motive, means, and opportunity to do so, and those groups of people are very different from country to country.
On your second paragraph: I wouldn't really expect any general trend, I'd expect things to be idiosyncratic from country to country. The Phillippines is as idiosyncratic a country as any, and it's very common in that particular country for young people to plan their life around getting a job that will enable them to move to the US. Meanwhile in neighbouring and economically very similar Indonesia, for a variety of historical and cultural reasons you see far far fewer migrants to the US (outnumbered 40-1 by Filipinos), and those who _do_ move to the US tend to be pretty well off. Then in Africa you've got a combination of countries who send people to the US as students or skilled employees (like Nigeria, Kenya) and those who send people to the us as refugees (Somalia, Sudan).
Nigerian-Americans are more educated than Korean-Americans? Where did you hear that, it would be pretty surprising to me.
Wikipedia has it on the Nigerian-Americans page, but I went and verified:
https://councilka.org/2020-cka-national-report/ : "Approximately fifty-eight percent of Korean Americans have achieved a bachelor’s degree or higher––more than the national average, as well as the average for Asian Americans as a whole, at 55 percent. Nearly 23 percent of Korean Americans hold a graduate degree compared with the national average of 13 percent."
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2017/12/sub-saharan-caribbean-population.html : "More than 60 percent of those [Nigerians] 25 and older have a bachelor’s degree or higher, more than double the rate of the U.S. population as a whole (28.5 percent)."
this is the prob, doesn't take a high iq to get a bachelors. avg iq of college grads is like 100 now. uk results point against iq, but diff factors https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/explaining-anomalous-gcse-results
The stat for Koreans doesn't have the "25 and older" condition as far as I can figure out, which seems important.
It's pretty clearly the 25 and older. Here's one which explicitly has that and gives (almost) the same result (57% Bachelor's and up): https://www.pewresearch.org/chart/educational-attainment-of-korean-population-in-the-u-s-2019/
Yep, this evidence is convincing. My answer is: No idea.
Looking for *high-quality* (think Ivy-educated, 30 years experience) therapist recommendations for treating cPTSD with serious dissociative features. Looking for someone either online or in NYC. For more details see the thread I posted on the subreddit here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1csyr0f/therapist_recommendation_for_cptsd/
I got one good recommendation (David Elliott at Harvard, who I plan to contact this week), and would appreciate it if anyone had any others. Would also appreciate recommendations for other forums to post this question. I would even appreciate names of good people who aren't taking new clients, as I can still contact them to ask for their recommendations. I'm basically starting a breadth-first search and just want some high-quality starting points. Thanks in advance.
Bessel van de Kolk and Judith Herman, both in Boston. Both must be pretty elderly by now, and may not still be practicing -- but they could refer you to people who trained with them.
A word of advice: don't let your question evolve into "Help! I need a shrink who can get my crazy wife to stop terrorizing our child!"
(I'm all ears if anyone has a suggestion though)
I don't understand this comment.
I didn't either, but then I read the linked Reddit thread.
The idea is that OP is looking for a therapist for a girlfriend who is basically a huge red flag personified. OP doesn't mind, because sex is great, and he as an adult can handle it. The girlfriend is crazy, suicidal, addicted to alcohol and benzos. Also, she doesn't really want to get therapy, it's the OP pushing her, and she trying to resist.
It's not my business, so whatever. But if one day these two happen to have a child, it will be a huge tragedy for the child. (Also for OP if he will love the child.)
Yes. It's unfortunately way too easy to sweep major problems under the rug when you're young and still childless. Once there's a child in the loop, at some point the gravity of the situation will hit you in the face like a ton of bricks.
The US has issued a worldwide travel advisory warning of attacks at pride events and such:
https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/traveladvisories/traveladvisories/worldwide-caution.html
How seriously should I take this? Does the state department issue broad warnings like this all the time, or is it a rare occurrence?
I also created a market on manifold on this topic: https://manifold.markets/VitorBosshard/will-there-be-a-terrorist-attack-sp
FWIW the warning about an imminent attack on a public venue in Russia in March was on point.
I imagine it means the likelihood of an attack on a pride event somewhere abroad is high, but the likelihood of an attack on your particular pride event remains very low. I would probably avoid whatever shows up highest on a "biggest pride event in the world" google search to be safe.
Hmm...playing devil's advocate here, from the perspective of a group that wants to bomb an event to deliver Allah's wrath to the unclean or whatever...a tactical consideration would be which pride event seems likely to have the most/least available funds to devote to preventive security. The biggest pride event in the world therefore seems like it might not be the target offering the best chances of success?
Feels like one of those (rare?) occasions when it's worth explicitly thinking in Bayesian terms.
1. What is the probability that the US would issue such a warning in the absence of any specific intelligence about an attack?
2. What is the probability that the US would issue such a warning if they had specific intelligence about an attack?
3. What is the probability that such an attack would be planned, and that the US would have intelligence about if it were?
I'm pretty cynical but I'd still assign probabilities "lowish", "highish" and "highish" to those three respectively, which multiply out to give a highish probability that this is worth taking seriously.
I have a tech job that pays and treats me well and I like my coworkers. The problem is that don't find it meaningful, and I mostly don't find it fun. These things are bothering me more and more so:
1 - Anyone have any thoughts, ideas or tips about finding work that's meaningful, fun and still pays really well? I worry that most of the high paying jobs involve working for large company doing work that is hard to connect to and sometimes zero sum - am I wrong ?
2 - I feel like there are other people here in the same situation - maybe we should collaborate! (Feel free to email with meaningful, fun ideas that have the potential to make some nice money iz8162k23 at gmail)
I suspect there is a trade off between fun and money. Makes sense in a well functioning market that you would be compensated for doing something boring.
If you have enough money, invest them in passively managed index funds, so that if you keep having this problem for a long time (quite likely, in my opinion), early retirement becomes an option.
Please forgive the obvious suggestion, but is it a solution to keep working at your current job and use the cash to fund a hobby that satisfies your needs?
If you want to stay in tech (presumably as an engineer of some sort), there are two things you might try to make your work more meaningful. First, transition to another job where the company fills some more obvious need than whatever your current employer does. You might, for example, go to work for a company that makes software for first-responder dispatching, or something like that. Second, try getting closer to the ultimate customers. If you are currently in a back-office engineering job, try some sort of sales engineering or support engineering job, where you can deal more closely with the people whose problems you are solving.
That's good advice - I can probably get closer to the users even in my current role
I just deleted the youtube app. I really enjoyed some music I had discovered there but now there's too much AI trash there for my taste. Good thing I kept my vinyl records.
I have mine still too. I’m too lazy most of the time to pull them out when I can stream the same album to the receiver with my phone using my Amazon account but it’s nice to have a a turntable and LPs as cultural artifacts to inform and entertain younger friends.
Hmm... One of the things I use youtube for is music, and I've had no problems. I'm generally looking for a specific song, or the songs in a specific musical, and I'm no (AFAIK), running into AI output at all. Do you use it differently?
Wild guess, they were clicking a song and letting autoplay create a never ending playlist, which eventually devolves to AI-generated slop or generic low quality content. It's also a common problem on spotify.
Deleting the app is of course a solution, but there are gentler ways. These platforms are all about turning you into a passive consumer, but you can easily thwart that by turning autoplay off.
Keep a bit of agency in your life and search for the things you want to hear!
I have disabled autoplay but I'm curious and liked to look at it's recommendations, which has lead to very nice musical experiences in the past. Like a long video/audio of an early Blondie performance at CBGB's, weird russian folk performers and The Big Push with Ren. Now I get authentic-sounding soul songs called "I just shat in my pants."
David Hasselhoff covering Iggy Pop's "The Passenger" seems to be real after all, though.
Many Thanks! That sounds plausible. I've never operated youtube in that mode. About the closest I come to that is the page when I fire it up, showing videos that the algorithm thinks I might be interested in. But these are dominated by channels that I've subscribed to, which indeed I am interested in, with a sprinkling of similar channels, which are generally reasonable guesses.
How does one price taking warrants instead of pay with a startup?
I do field work for a startup, and some desk work at home too. I receive pay for field work at some fixed value, but received in restricted shares at calculated average (restricted for 4 months on TSX) and 25% bonus in slightly out of the money warrants good for 36 months.
But I don't know how to price in my desk time doing research.
Does anyone have any ideas?
I don't think the other responders (at least so far) are actually fully reading your question. If I read it right the startup your working for is publicly listed (on TSX) and you're receiving shares you will be able to sell in 4 months at an averaged price (averaged over what term?), plus some slightly out of the money warrants good for 3 years for the fieldwork. It's unclear what (if anything) you're being directly paid for the desk work from what you wrote. I think people are seeing 'startup' and assuming it's not publicly listed as would typically be the case in the US but isn't always in Canada (particularly for jr. mining companies etc. which would fit with the fieldwork).
In that case, sans firm specific knowledge, the stock should be roughly it's nameplate value (what's the averaging period? any discount relative to that?) discounted by the risk free interest rate. It will have potentially very significant variance so may need some adjustment based on your particular situation in terms of risk aversion. The warrants should be price able by Black-Scholes which you can probably find an online calculator to at least give you a rough idea (but again high variance). The deskwork should average into that on whatever basis you think is appropriate (time, effort [fieldwork sounds like it may be more taxing, if so overweight that]) assuming you're not paid directly for that.
Yes, exactly. Great analysis. It is Junior Exploration.
I staked claims and opted to take pay in stock and warrants, that's a done deal.
Thanks for the heads-up on Black Sholes Merton, I'll try to apply that model to my situation.
The averaging is weighted volume, and done on a biannual basis. There are steep fees and all manner of limitations with the exchange in Canada when paying someone with warrants.
I'm not naive, I am fully aware the company could fail to grow beyond my strike price and I'm left with zero value, and I could lose money with my pay in stock. I'm also not poor, having stable housing, healthcare, cash income from my spouse, able to collect SSI, and have retirement distribution coming in a few years.
Continuing forward, I do analysis on properties under consideration. I talk with investors about this JE's properties, and execs of companies owning properties the JE considers buying. Because we started out informally, we're backtracking to set a trade value of labor in warrants of a publicly traded Junior Exploration company.
You should treat startup *equity* as worth 0, let alone warrants or options.
You treat them as lottery tickets with an expected value of effectively zero, but have some low chance to randomly, determined by factors you can't control, turn out valuable in future.
And the worst part is that if they turn out to be worthless, they will likely do so at the same time you become unemployed.
Agreed. It's nice that they're offering you warrants, but it's not real money. And it will most likely to be less valuable than toilet paper. You'd do better to take a bigger salary and invest some of that money in high-growth mutual funds.
What percentage of startups are successful either by going the IPO route or getting bought by another company? It used to be 1 in 10. I suspect it's much fewer now. Also, restricted shares do not have the same rights as founders' stock. A company purchasing the startup can refuse to honor common stock shares. I have friends who got nothing when the startups they worked for were purchased by other companies.
My former startup was acquired and I got $6k for my options (after working there three years). I mean it's nice, but it's almost better to still be holding lottery tickets because you can dream.
Unless you really understand what you are doing (but then you wouldn't be asking here), the value of everything other than the money you get paid directly is probably zero.
Hey, while we’re talking about upcoming meetups: the Meetup Everywhere in Paris was just a month ago, but there’s a normal meetup this Saturday. Feel free to come, folks, if you’re in the area! (link: https://lu.ma/jeky07pw)
I typed a nice reply and lost it, it was about how my friend's definition of patriarchy is effectively going meta on the original definition, such that it refers to a network of things relating to power and it's abuse. I don't know how standard this definition is, I suspect it's influenced somewhat by her anarchist views.
The following bullets generated by gpt because I can't be bothered to write it again manually.
1. **Hierarchical Organizational Structures**
2. **Cultural Narratives that Glorify Dominance**
3. **Normative Power Relations**
4. **Economic Control and Resource Allocation**
5. **Manipulation and Propaganda e.g. in favour of the status quo**
6. **Institutional Legitimization**
7. **Psychological Coercion**
8. **Resistance and Repression**
9. **Ideological Justifications**
10. **Networks of Influence**
Sounds like she's describing "civilization." 🙄
Civilizations are a subset of patriarchies.
Reminds me of those infographics that claim to be describing "whiteness" but then include things like self-reliance, the scientific method, and punctuality.
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fctj2317739b51.png
If all you've got is the word "patriarchy"/"fascism", then everything you don't like is...
It is actually a mostly-coherent position, it's just that it ignores the fact that many of these "aspects of patriarchy" are not only load-bearing elements of society, but that they are actually the optimal way of doing things. Remove them at your peril!
The fact that a thing is harmful when abused does not mean we can or should simply be rid of it.
LoL!
I've tried to make that point but it was lost on her.
Say a person commits a crime that inflicts significant suffering on another person in some form. The perpetrator admits to the crime, pays their debt to society and never reoffends. Is it then ethical for that person to satisfy their urge to commit a similar crime by fantasizing about the memory of the heinous act they committed?
Another way to look at it is if you could feed the neurological experience of murder to people whose neurology predisposes them to derive pleasure from it, and that was enough to satisfy their harmful urge and keep them from committing the act itself, do you think that would be considered an acceptable deterrent?
The problem here is that the word "ethical" doesn't just have a single meaning.
Should society care or try to create rules against this or brand it as immoral? Most likely not, because it's we all love our inner liberty and no-one is being hurt by someone else's mere thoughts.
Does it mold your character and make you a worse person? Most likely yes, and even more so if it becomes repetitive or obsessive. But psychology is complicated, sometimes repressing stuff can mess you up worse than allowing yourself to fantasize.
Yes I see it this way too.
>Should society care or try to create rules against this or brand it as immoral? Most likely not, because it's we all love our inner liberty and no-one is being hurt by someone else's mere thoughts.
I certainly agree that no one should be deprived of their inner-liberty, though a lot of psychological treatment does seem—to a layperson—to involve trying to gain insight into what people are actually thinking (even if it conflicts with their displayed behavior or surface descriptions of themselves) and changing those thoughts in a way that is potentially less harmful to the patient and to others. This seems like it could be construed as fairly anti-inner-liberty.
Thought experiments are difficult to construct and my murder sim falls apart in a lot of ways, but if when a murderer actually reached for murder, someone handed them something that scratched the itch but led to no harm, that would be very pro-inner-liberty but also very troubling in other ways. Like you point out, it’d also likely further damage the would-be murderer, as does our current remedies of incarceration and execution.
The solution most people (including me) would choose, is to find a way to free the murdery guy of his murdery thoughts, but then you’re right back at depriving him of his inner-liberty.
Does that make any sense?
It doesn't make much sense to me... you seem to be reaching for a single kind of "should" that would work for all involved, but the moment there are several persons involved, there will be diverging interests. None of these questions make much sense when you abstract away *who* is the one choosing a course of action. You give the example of therapy as being anti-inner-liberty, but therapy is normally something one chooses to pursue for oneself, it can only be anti-inner-liberty if it's forced on another.
Or take your guy full of murderous thoughts, you talk about freeing him of them, but on whose behalf? The rest of us don't even know that he's having them, so we can hardly initiate that, or be troubled by them. That leaves the basic sane option of the guy being sick of his own thoughts and seeking help, which is not exactly controversial.
>You give the example of therapy as being anti-inner-liberty, but therapy is normally something one chooses to pursue for oneself, it can only be anti-inner-liberty if it's forced on another.
Yes this occurred to me after I’d replied. But doesn’t rehabilitation in the sense it’s commonly used within the justice system, often involve forced therapy?
>Or take your guy full of murderous thoughts, you talk about freeing him of them, but on whose behalf? The rest of us don't even know that he's having them…
Sorry. I guess I was unclear, but whether society learns of this murderous predisposition through stated intent, some kind of neuro/psych screening, attempted murder or realized murder, I didn’t specify. In the same way we assess today who might murder and take preventative action against their future murders, we would assess who would be a candidate to be freed from their murderous thoughts.
I think you'd need to persuasively prove your assumption that this process actually reduced harm. There are a lot of people with the prior assumption that reducing things like violent fantasies, violent language, violent video games, etc. will reduce violence itself.
(I'm not saying that their assumptions are correct, just that they exist, and might become an obstacle to 'acceptance.' )
I'm confused by how this is even a question.
What a person thinks in the privacy of their own mind can have absolutely no impact on anyone else unless it's actually outwardly expressed with some kind of perceptible action.
Because of course people are only what they actually *do* to other people. An individual who fantasizes about murdering the people around her everyday but never so much as momentarily inconviences someone by carelessly cutting them off in traffic is a *profoundly good person.*
And lots of people routinely think about murdering others for totally acceptable reasons: It's their profession. Law enforcement, mystery writers, etc.
I'm not sure I agree with that. A couple of examples that spring to mind.
- Person A is in a monogamous relationship but likes to fantasise about attractive coworkers. They often obsess about specific colleagues and imagine them when having sex with their partner. They don't feel guilty about this but actively enjoy indulging in it. Their partner doesn't know and would be upset and jealous to find out.
- Person B engages in violent fantasy when annoyed with people. They go home after a confrontation and imagine attacking and hurting the other person. Their fantasies often involve prolonged torture of the other person; the imagined reaction to torture provides a lot of the enjoyment. This happens most days.
I don't think either is directly harmful, but I'd think less of such a person. My intuition is that to repeatedly indulge in certain kinds of thinking can shape your character, and both people above are turning themselves into people that are more likely to act unethically outside their own heads. My instinct is that both of these are unethical.
> My intuition is that to repeatedly indulge in certain kinds of thinking can shape your character, and both people above are turning themselves into people that are more likely to act unethically outside their own heads.
Some people have the intuition that *repressing* thoughts makes it more likely that the person will do something.
I suspect the actual outcome may depend on technical details, such as how often the person indulges in the fantasy vs how often when would feel the desire if they tried to repress it.
Note what I said:
"What a person thinks in the privacy of their own mind can have absolutely no impact on anyone else unless it's actually outwardly expressed with some kind of perceptible action."
And also what you said about Person A's sexual fantasies, emphasis mine:
"*Their partner doesn't know* and would be upset and jealous to find out. "
What Person A's partner doesn't know literally can't *possibly* hurt them. If Person A is so considerate of Partner's feelings that they are scrupulously disciplined about never betraying their private thoughts, no harm can ever occur.
And if no harm ever occurs, well...*no harm ever occurs.*
Your reply, "yeah but what if harm occurs *later*" is not germane to the original question, which is about the ethics of contemplating harm but then never actually doing it.
Your thoughts affect yourself. See the therapy advice about not dwelling on and obsessing over past incidents and grievances. If you keep yourself stuck in a rut of "There's nothing I can do, because X, Y and Z, so things can never improve" then of course they won't get better.
Fantasies are a tricky question. Most of us have little private fantasies that we enjoy and maybe elaborate on as a form of daydreaming, but would be embarrassed if they were made public. Most of those fantasies are harmless.
But if you're constantly indulging in fantasies of rape, torture, murder and so forth, that's going to have an effect on you. A coarsening of the imagination, and maybe it even spills over into being less careful, or being less patient, or being angrier with the subject of your fantasies. If you're always imagining how you could smash in the face of that annoying guy Jimmy with a brick, do you really think it won't in the long run affect how you deal with Jimmy? Sure, maybe you'll never smash his face in with a brick, but you're more likely to speak badly of him to others, to do small mean things to get revenge on him ("oh you can't find that file you left on your desk? sorry, no idea where it could be") and the like.
Even if you do manage to maintain the facade of being nice to Jimmy in public, in the end you are damaging yourself. I've noticed that indulging, even in private, my own anger and so forth *does* make me a worse person to engage with in 'real life'.
But, again, this observation isn't germane to the hypothetical the OP introduced.
Does indulging a fantasy about perpetrating extremely antisocial behavior make one more likely to engage in antisocial behavior of any kind?
I mean, in the real world? Likely, yes. A person who is constantly dwelling on harming (for example) their annoying coworker is probably going to eventually demonstrate their antipathy in *some* way, even if it's so subtle it goes unnoticed by said coworker.
But again, that's not the question(s) the OP asked.
The first question was: is it okay for a perpetrator to *privately* reminisce about his crime if the satisfaction of remembering the crime is what prevents him from re-offending?
Duh, of course it is. Not-crime is better than crime.
The second question was: if it was demonstrably true that fantasizing about crime deterred crime, would it be okay to fantasize about crime?
Again, duh, of course it would be, because *not-crime is better than crime.*
Admittedly, this gets a little harder to contemplate if we get a lot more specific. Usually questions like the OP's are about the ethics of preventing sexual crimes against actual children by accommodating pedophiles with 100% adult-produced fantasy substitutes like child-shaped sex dolls or VFX child porn, products in which no actual child was ever associated. *If* adult-produced fantasy substitutes were enough to satisfy the urges of a pedophile to prevent them from ever offending on a real person, would the existence of such products be acceptable?
Just like anyone else, I flinch at this idea. I'd vastly prefer it if pedophiles could just...stop being attracted to children. That would obviously be the ideal outcome.
But "what would be ideal, here?" isn't the question being asked!
If you find my original question stupid and elementary, as you indicate repeatedly in your responses, I get that, but you can skip it and let the slow kids like me work at our own pace.
>Usually questions like the OP's are about the ethics of preventing sexual crimes against actual children by accommodating pedophiles with 100% adult-produced fantasy substitutes like child-shaped sex dolls or VFX child porn, products in which no actual child was ever associated.
My question wasn’t intended to find a way to accommodate pedophiles. I’m trying to gain insight into how people form moral intuitions in the absence of a suffering party. The recent post Scott made about the FOI triggered some comments that indicated suffering wasn’t the overwhelming factor in many people’s moral decision-making. This really surprised me and so I’m trying to learn more.
>Law enforcement, mystery writers, etc.
Big fan of Castle, I take it?
No, actually. I thought it was pretty paint-by-numbers.
Hang on, are you saying that violent fantasies are unethical regardless of whether someone is harmed in real life?
Fie on you, sir! What else am I supposed to do when I'm stuck in traffic?
When I’m stuck in traffic I like to count the wheel covers in the median that have been jarred off by potholes.
I'm skeptical that allowing one to make sensory rich neural connections to the act of murder would prevent it from becoming a real world behavior. It sounds a lot like theories of catharsis, where screaming into a pillow *should* reduce aggression due to satisfying anger. It's my understanding that in practice, it leads to greater neural connections around aggression in more contexts, leading to an angrier person. Much of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy aims to provide off ramps for negative behaviors, which tends to work better. Though with the replication crisis being what it is, it's hard to be sure.
>Much of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy aims to provide off ramps for negative behaviors, which tends to work better.
I see. I don’t know much about Cognitive Behavioral Theory other than what anyone can find online. What are some of the off ramps for negative behaviors that have worked for violent offenders?
That's a good question, I don't have any experience with it in that context. I've seen it used a lot in the context of anxiety and depression, but violent psychopathy is a whole other monster. What I was trying to point out is that it may not be possible to reduce violent urges by providing substitutes, and may just create more neural pathways that lead to them. Effectively, it wouldn't surprise me if a practiced behavior is more likely become a dominant behavior.
Looking at some of what's available online, it looks like we don't really have good methods of handling violent psychopathy long term because it's a pretty sticky set of behaviors. Here's an overview of some of what's been tried that I found.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5868429/
It looks like an interesting subject that we haven't made much progress on. According to this those who are the worst offenders often receive CBT or other treatments to short term or even negative effects. Which is to say, I'm not sure we've found a therapy that works. Many of them even tend to get early conditional releases from prison due to having manipulative personality traits.
It would be ethical if it actually reliably reduced a person's preoccupation with murder, but I would need to see some evidence that antisocial compulsive behaviors like murderousness are extinguished by acting them out, even in simulation. My understanding is that the opposite is true.
Would you consider it ethical if it had no statistical effect at all on the person's future actions? That is, are you demanding that it do actual good in order to compensate for some inherent badness, or merely demanding that it avoid making things worse?
If the effect is negligible it would be a waste of resources and terrible PR. "The justice department has invested 200 million dollars to give all ex-con murderers authentic murder simulator machines to keep them occupied post-parole. We've found it does not meaningfully increase their tendency to murder." Tough sell.
"After taking the murder simulators away, their tendency to murder increased dramatically during the following days."
Agreed. The "yes" camp also seems to assume that the demand for murderousness is static and easily identifiable. It's possible that many more people could be induced to have an appetite for murder if they weren't deterred by risk of punishment, aversion to doing actual harm, etc. Making a murder sim widely available could lead a lot of people to discover that they're much more interested in murdering than they'd previously expected. I'm not sure that a widespread discovery of this type would be a net positive.
That’s a great point. Though the point of the neurological murder treatment wouldn’t be to extinguish the behavior, but redirect its consequences in a harmless direction. Imagine an inhaler, and each time the guy feels murdery he takes a hit because it feels just like murder and is way easier than planning a murder.
Edit: I said that poorly. The treatment is meant to extinguish the behavior (the actual murder part) but it isn’t intended to extinguish the impulse to murder, which would be a better fix if it were possible.
In theory, yes, as long as it didn't also feed their desire to do it again, and if it didn't take the place of some sort of "conversion therapy" that actually worked.
What's the term for isolating comment trolls and preventing them from interacting with other people? "Comment hell?" Maybe some VR version of that.
I'll nitpick at the word "crime", since the main thrust of the comment seems to be about ethics, and not all crimes are unethical, and not all heinous unethical acts are crimes.
It's called shadowbanning.
But before that, I think there was some term perhaps derived from the Bujold quote "Lately I have come to believe that the principle difference between Heaven and Hell is the company you keep there." I think it was used on some weird Internet board that has lost relevance these days. *shrug* Or it could be my brain playing tricks on me.
The Wikipedia page says it's also called hellbanning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_banning
https://blog.codinghorror.com/suspension-ban-or-hellban/
Ah, yeah, that seems like it. Usenet to Something Awful.
...Yes? Who's even being hurt in this scenario?
Apart from the fact that it undermines the idea of genuine remorse for the crime/offence, because instead of trying to find ways to deal with the impulses to commit future crimes in healthier ways, you are indulging in memories of the actual crime you committed.
I don't know if alcoholics or drug addicts are told to cope with their impulses to indulge again by "oh, just remember the last time you got drunk/high and how great it made you feel".
And demonstrating my dinosaur credentials once again, this was, or is (I don't know if they still teach it), covered in religious instruction under the heading of "entertaining evil/bad thoughts". Mostly in the context of "impure thoughts" around sex, but it applies generally.
Scriptural precedent is such account as in Mark 7:
"14 And he called the people to him again and said to them, “Hear me, all of you, and understand: 15 There is nothing outside a person that by going into him can defile him, but the things that come out of a person are what defile him.” 17 And when he had entered the house and left the people, his disciples asked him about the parable. 18 And he said to them, “Then are you also without understanding? Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile him, 19 since it enters not his heart but his stomach, and is expelled?” (Thus he declared all foods clean.) 20 And he said, “What comes out of a person is what defiles him. 21 For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, 22 coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. 23 All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”
From the Catholic Encyclopedia (even older than me), discussing sin:
https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14004b.htm
"Internal sins
That sin may be committed not only by outward deeds but also by the inner activity of the mind apart from any external manifestation, is plain from the precept of the Decalogue: "Thou shalt not covet", and from Christ's rebuke of the scribes and pharisees whom he likens to "whited sepulchres... full of all filthiness" (Matthew 23:27). Hence the Council of Trent (Sess. XIV, c. v), in declaring that all mortal sins must be confessed, makes special mention of those that are most secret and that violate only the last two precepts of the Decalogue, adding that they "sometimes more grievously wound the soul and are more dangerous than sins which are openly committed". Three kinds of internal sin are usually distinguished:
delectatio morosa, i.e. the pleasure taken in a sinful thought or imagination even without desiring it;
gaudium, i.e. dwelling with complacency on sins already committed; and
desiderium, i.e. the desire for what is sinful.
An efficacious desire, i.e. one that includes the deliberate intention to realize or gratify the desire, has the same malice, mortal or venial, as the action which it has in view. An inefficacious desire is one that carries a condition, in such a way that the will is prepared to perform the action in case the condition were verified. When the condition is such as to eliminate all sinfulness from the action, the desire involves no sin: e.g. I would gladly eat meat on Friday, if I had a dispensation; and in general this is the case whenever the action is forbidden by positive law only. When the action is contrary to natural law and yet is permissible in given circumstances or in a particular state of life, the desire, if it include those circumstances or that state as conditions, is not in itself sinful: e.g. I would kill so-and-so if I had to do it in self-defence. Usually, however, such desires are dangerous and therefore to be repressed. If, on the other hand, the condition does not remove the sinfulness of the action, the desire is also sinful. This is clearly the case where the action is intrinsically and absolutely evil, e.g. blasphemy: one cannot without committing sin, have the desire — I would blaspheme God if it were not wrong; the condition is an impossible one and therefore does not affect the desire itself. The pleasure taken in a sinful thought (delectatio, gaudium) is, generally speaking, a sin of the same kind and gravity as the action which is thought of. Much, however, depends on the motive for which one thinks of sinful actions. The pleasure, e.g. which one may experience in studying the nature of murder or any other crime, in getting clear ideas on the subject, tracing its causes, determining the guilt etc., is not a sin; on the contrary, it is often both necessary and useful. The case is different of course where the pleasure means gratification in the sinful object or action itself. And it is evidently a sin when one boasts of his evil deeds, the more so because of the scandal that is given."
So the answer to "Is it then ethical for that person to satisfy their urge to commit a similar crime by fantasizing about the memory of the heinous act they committed?" is "No".
That would be gaudium, dwelling with complacency on sins already committed (and getting the same pleasure/enjoyment/satisfaction out of the crime via memory).
>Yes?
Yeah this might be an easy one.
>Who's even being hurt in this scenario?
Just the first victim from the first example. The one the perpetrator remembers to satisfy his future urges.
I mean, it's definitely an icky feeling to think that, say, the pedophile who molested you is still doing so in their mind, every day, right now... It might even lead to mental illnesses in the victim.
My PTSD is of the opinion that people who commit crimes need to make their victims whole, by whatever means necessary (as always, this is code for public torture and worse). But my PTSD doesn't particularly care what happens when this is rolled out universally, and the rest of me suspects that it might be a bad idea overall.
> I mean, it's definitely an icky feeling to think that, say, the pedophile who molested you is still doing so in their mind, every day, right now... It might even lead to mental illnesses in the victim.
But thinking that is completely independent of whether or not the culprit is actually doing that. The only way to achieve true peace of mind would be to kill them.
...Or you could just move on and stop giving a shit about what other people are thinking.
Yep. I agree that working on dealing with your own issues is a good idea, and trying to control what everyone else thinks is not going to go so well. But other people are weird, and take entirely the wrong lesson from Stoicism.
Do I care if an ex still has pictures of me and uses them for ... one purpose or another? Sure, a bit, but as long as they're not spreading the pictures around the Internet, that's my own problem in my own head that I need to deal with.
Wait, that's your problem with this situation? Why would that even matter? It's not like the victim actually knows about any of this.
Could the Axis have won WW II? Reading through the Wikipedia articles for the Battle of Stalingrad, the Battle of Kursk, and the Battle of El-Alamein, there is this persistent subtext that the Axis just did not have enough resources to actually win. Which is in stark contrast to what I read in this book on cryptography called The Code Book, that breaking the Enigma code was absolutely critical to winning the war. Of course, it would have been a disaster if they had won, but perhaps they were not so different from the martian invaders in The Sirens of Titan.
As an amusing aside, a German general wrote an entire book after the war about how Germany could totally have won the Eastern Front, and of course, it studiously avoided any political questions of whether this would have been a good thing, it focused entirely on the technical aspects of this possible victory (which also got torn to shreds, apparently).
Read Tooze - German would have struggled mightily against the UK, was doomed against the UK + USSR and was hopelessly doomed against the UK, USSR and USA.
The only way to win was a) not be Nazis in the first place and b) redefine 'win' to 'get sone territory and then call it a day'.
The most plausible scenario for this is that Hitler gets squashed instead of being offered the chancellorship, the government resolves into a military junta and there's a limited campaign aimed at taking more or less what was historically taken up to the invasion of Poland.
Thereafter Europe settles down to a cold war for a few years, after which prediction fails.
I dunno, Tooze also says Germany got lucky in beating France so decisively, he gives their plan of attack a 10% chance of success. If they get lucky again vs the USSR they'd have all of Europe's industrial base and the soviet oil/grain fields, and the US/UK would need to attack across an ocean. I'd say they'd be in a pretty strong position then. Given we live in a timeline where they did get lucky vs France that's not super unlikely to happen.
There's also the scenario where the USSR doesn't industrialise fast enough in the 30s and gets beaten fairly easily like in WW1 that puts Germany in the same dominant position.
The Nazis *did* get very lucky with the USSR. Stalin practically rolled out a red carpet for them. It just wasn't enough in the end.
They did get lucky with France. That was always Hitler's greatest strength - he was a gambler who got obscenely lucky far more often than is plausible.
Tooze's other point is that the Nazis simply couldn't do economics (beyond one or two places like improvisational foreign exchange shenanigans and advancing the art of slave labour economics). They conquered most of the richest, most economically developed part of the world and then had to subsidize the French economy. By virtue of being Nazis they destroyed the economic systems they took over, even as attempted to plunder them.
Nazi Germany shouldn't have won against the French, couldn't realistically win against the British and literally did not have enough men or trucks to beat the Soviets.
If Japan had declared on USSR instead of USA
There are many plausible paths to Germany winning World War II, most of which involve shooting Wilhelm Canaris in the head on day one(*), and then maybe the head of the torpedo directorate. This was never a *likely* outcome, just a possible one, and even then it comes with constraints:
1. "Victory" means Germany is recognized as the hegemonic power of Continental Europe, and nobody other than some die-hard partisans are fighting to reverse that, *not* that Germany and its allies conquer the world or any other such thing.
2. Any German victory has to be locked in by the end of 1942 at the latest. Ideally before the US joins the war, but there's still a slim window where Germany wins some very impressive victories while the US is still learning how to wage modern war, the Brits realize that they are literally starving and the US can't help in time so they negotiate a separate peace, and the US then decides that trying to invade a German-occupied Europe without Britain, France, or Russia on side was going to be too much trouble and killing Japs would be way more fun.
3. No matter what happens in Europe, if Japan bombs Pearl Harbor, the Japanese Empire is going down. The Germans at least had enough industrial capacity that they could plausibly have held out in a defensive war against an America that has to invade across 2,000 miles of ocean; Japan wasn't even close. And the American hatred of Japan post-12/7/41 was deeply personal, so if the US doesn't think it can invade Germany then all those resources are going to be pointed in the opposite direction.
We can talk about how this might have happened, but some of the simple answers are just wrong. Enigma was important, but not decisive on its own - it would probably take no Enigma plus no Canaris plus torpedoes that worked from the start for Germany to decisively win the Battle of the Atlantic. Germany not declaring war on the US, or earlier on Russia, would not have changed things - the US was already committed to waging war against Germany so long as Britain was still in the fight, and Stalin was an opportunistic conqueror who would have stabbed Hitler in the back right when the latter had his hands full dealing with the Anglo-American alliance.
Germany declaring war on Russia even earlier, and knocking them out (or back to the Urals) before the US gets in the war, would have been a better bet. And declaring war on the US right after Japan does, doesn't really change the amount of grief Germany is going to face from the Americans, but it does give them at least a chance of coordinating strategy with Japan (which didn't matter historically, but could have in some counterfactual scenarios).
* Or, alternately, not committing all the war crimes that alienated him. But one way or another, it's going to be really hard to win a war if your head of military intelligence is working for the other side's military intelligence.
What about the nuclear path to victory? It's not too hard to imagine that the right meeting with the right person at the right time might have convinced Hitler that nuclear weapons were a real possibility in 1939. If the Germans get the bomb in 1943, surely they can at least get some kind of favourable peace on their terms?
The problem is, where does the money come from? The Manhattan project consumed $2 billion. To add a project of that size to the German war budget means that something major is getting cut, on the order of an Army or two. Given Germany needed every army it could get it's hands on and then some, it's far more likely that the nuclear path sees Germany with a half completed bomb and Russians in Belin a year ahead of schedule.
I dunno, the V2 budget? The flying wing budget? The looking-for-the-ark-of-the-covenant budget? How about just the whole North African campaign?
Those were insignificant compared to the Manhattan Project budget.
Also, Germany was fairly well supplied with talented rocket scientists who were willing to continue working in Germany because A: they were German and B: nobody else was hiring rocket scientists. Germany was much less well supplied with nuclear physicists, because those did have a much easier time finding jobs far away from the rather anti-intellectual Nazis (and also were disproportionately Jewish).
We got a good look at the German nuclear weapons program in 1945-1947; it was hopelessly underfunded and pursuing technological dead ends because the few good scientists they had on the job came with blind spots that nobody else was covering. I don't think there is a plausible scenario where the Nazis independently develop the atomic bomb.
If we're postulating any sort of German victory, we're probably also postulating a competent German intelligence apparatus, in which case it's at least possible that they get the atom bomb the way Russia did. But that gets them the bomb after the US, not before - maybe soon enough after to defend Nazi hegemony over Europe, but it wouldn't be the way they establish that hegemony.
Or we're positing a Germany that retains its nuclear physicists (remember Germany was the world leader in quantum and nuclear physics in the 1920s and 30s). But that requires a Germany that is very different from our timeline Nazi Germany (for a start, it would need to be hospitable to Jews).
Yea. Also mass slave labor, the one part of economics that the Nazis were good at, was no help for a Manhattan Project type push. So if they're seriously pursuing that then they'd have hardly any engineers or other skilled people available for all the other high-priority tech topics like figuring out better torpedoes, battlefield-useful radar and sonar, etc.
It would have been possible if Hitler didn't make a completely moronic invasion of his closest ally while already at war on another front, followed by another completely moronic and unnecessary declaration of war on the US, while also waging war on his own people including the best physicists.
Eh, war between the USSR and Germany was seen as inevitable by both sides. Stalin would have plunged the knife into Hitler's back in time. The Soviets were preparing for war in 1941 and had about 3 million soldiers built up on the European rim of their territory. The German attack was much sooner and much more devastating than the Soviets expected, which might make it look like Hitler decided to start a war out of nowhere.
The US was probably going to come into the war on Britain's side and had been sending them substantial aid by the time of Pearl Harbor. Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan both had a nemesis in the form of the USSR, and the alliance against the US was likely intended to encourage Japan to join the war against the Soviets. Considering the history of the last world war, which was not quite 30 years ago at that point, it's very unlikely the US would have remained neutral to Germany without Hitler declaring war.
Yet Stalin was totally taken by surprise by Hitler's invasion. In fact, he initially disbelieved the reports (if I remember my History Channel correctly). He may have thought ware was inevitable, but not in the immediate term. As for those soldiers on the European rim, hadn't Stalin just finished gobbling up half of Poland, and he was in the middle of trying to take back Finland? I'm willing to be convinced if you've got some links for that position, though.
When I say the Soviets were preparing for war in 1941, I mean they were preparing for a future hypothetical war, at least several years away. Not that they were ready in 1941.
It looks like there's been a lot of ink spilled about what Stalin knew about Germany's intentions and when he knew it. This looks interesting. Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia, by Gabriel Gorodetsky, a Russian historian. I think I'll try to get it via ILL...
https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/93#
Enigma and Turing is the show horse, Lorenz and Flowers the work horse. Not only was Lorenz cryptanalysis the much more significant to the war, it also led to the first electronic computers, Colossus, all to break a machine that was never seen.
If they hadn't invaded Russia or attacked the UK, sure. If they had stopped advancing in 1940 and contented themselves with all of Central Europe then I think they would have survived as a stable entity. The Allies wouldn't have been as motivated to attack and I think would have eventually been happy to accept it. I can also imagine scenarios where they go all-in on jet fighter technology and establish total air dominance, but otherwise I just don't see any scenario where they defeat a fully-engaged US/UK combo. They simply couldn't match our production.
> Which is in stark contrast to what I read in this book on cryptography called The Code Book, that breaking the Enigma code was absolutely critical to winning the war.
I wonder if it's more plausible that breaking the Enigma code was absolutely critical to winning the war in 1945, rather than dragging it out another year or two, which might have increased pressure from the home front to make some sort of negotiated settlement that was short of a "win".
I would argue the Germans were doomed even before the US entered the war. Which is not to trivialize the efforts of the Allies, or their worries. Hindsight is 20/20 and the Nazis were terrifying.
I don’t think the Axis could have “won” a total WWII, that is a war carried to the unconditional surrender of one side or the other. The Soviets had too many men, the Americans too many factories (and too many oceans between them and the key Axis belligerents).
I think a best case scenario for Germany is basically:
1) They don’t do Barbarossa, and they succeed in dealing a heavy enough blow to the UK that they sue for peace with Hitler holding Western Europe. Maybe the Miracle at Dunkirk doesn’t happen, the Luftwaffe more effectively knocks out the RAF, and/or Enigma remains uncracked, allowing the U-boats to more fully strangle British shipping before America enters the war.
2) They do Barbarossa, but it works a little better (maybe they get an earlier start in the year) and they take Moscow in October/November of 1941. Stalin sues for peace.
Or some combination of 1 and 2, but note that both of these leave the UK and the USSR reduced but not *conquered* and the peace that followed would be uneasy and probably erupt again soon. Fascism was not a political system built for a static peace.
The path to a “win” for Japan seems easier, and maybe more durable - either Pearl Harbor or Midway succeeds in sinking America’s fleet carriers, and with no ability to project naval power, the US concedes its non-Hawaiian Pacific colonies and leaves China/Korea to their fate.
Ultimately both Germany and Japan were positioned to win a lightning campaign if the breaks went right, but would need their opponents to tap out after that strike, because in the long term… well we saw what happens.
America can rebuild its fleet and massively outbuild Japan, which even in a best case scenario can not reach American shipyards. Japanese high command *hoped* the US would negotiate after a few early victories, because they were completely screwed otherwise.
Yes, that’s precisely my point. Japan needed to force a negotiated peace within the first six months to a year. As it was, the US did rebuild its fleet, but it’s not clear there would have been appetite to do so if the fleet was more completely destroyed (rather than the battleships at Pearl being salvageable and the fleet carriers untouched)
The Axis was doomed by the time the US was involved. The US alone had a bigger GDP than the entire Axis combined at its height (including conquered territory) and had roughly the same population as Germany and Japan. The US also brought with it a sphere of influence that had significant population and GDP.
The Axis might have been able to win against the Allies (minus the US) since while they were outnumbered they had a bigger GDP and a higher GDP per capita. So they'd be counting on more elite, expensive units being able to win despite being outnumbered. But when the US and its allies entered they went from just being outnumbered soldier for soldier to also being significantly outnumbered economically. Even if they had somehow knocked out the Soviet Union and China the US would have had the bigger economy and manpower pool. And it's not as if the Germans could have immediately used Soviet industry or manpower.
You have to imagine some different political alignment for the Axis to win. Mostly, you have to imagine America not getting involved.
I would argue the Axis was doomed even before America got involved. The Germans threw everything they had at the Soviets and it wasn't nearly enough. The Wehrmacht would have needed to inflict something like a 5:1 casualty ratio, while on the offensive, to break even with Soviet manpower and armor production. And all of this while fighting a war with supply lines 1000-2000km long in places.
Without lend lease the Soviets are stuck fighting a modern, mechanized army with mainly infantry and with a severe lack of trains, trucks, fuel, etc. The German theory of victory was basically to take out Soviet industrial capacity and then churn through a poorly equipped infantry army which they thought would melt. Part of their mistake is that Soviet political structures proved loyal to Stalin and willing to continue to resist. In part because the Nazis themselves were so brutal. But the bigger thing was that American aid was able to continue flowing through Iran. Without this Iranian path they would have had no way to get anything into the country: Japan blocked them in the east, Iran blocked them in the south, and Germany/Italy blocked them in the west.
Still, I agree they had a chance of winning. It's not "without the US they would have won." It's "without the US they still have a chance."
I have to disagree with this. Any analysis of Lend-Lease needs to realize that 1941-1942 were the pivotal years of the war. It doesn't matter what happened in 1943 and onwards because the war was strategically over. Only ~15% of Lend-Lease material was received in '41-42. Even at the peak of Lend-Lease in '43-45, it amounted to slightly less than 1/3 of Soviet output.
For German victory over the Soviets to be possible, you have to create a plausible scenario where a 3 million man Wehrmacht can defeat 20 million men spread over 1000s of kilometers of hostile territory (and that is only linear distance, the area is even more enormous). I don't see a world where that is possible.
The Soviet army in 1941 was similar in strength to the Wehrmacht, much like the French army in 1940. In fact the Soviet armor arsenal was markedly superior to the German arsenal, excepting the Panzer VI Tiger, which wasn't operational until 1942. And even then Tigers were in limited numbers and had various mechanical issues. The big difference was in the Prussian training method of the German officer corps, and technological advantages like radio communications and gun sights. Also Stalin purged most of his officer corps in 1937-38, which didn't do the Soviets any favors.
The Soviets had focused on building up a large number of tanks, guns and shells in preparation for future conflict with Germany. Yet their officer corps was mostly young inexperienced men who had been rapidly promoted to replace gaps from the purges. And the Soviet corps selected men for political survival instincts more than tactical aptitude. Soviet communications depended largely on telephone and telegraph, which were easily cut by mobile and aggressive German elements. Almost all of the German armored vehicles had a personal radio, whereas the Soviet armor was restricted to one radio per squad leader, and the other units had to signal by hand.
All of this gives the impression that the Soviet forces were hopelessly inadequate. Which was true, because of the stark differences in command and control. Not because the Soviets couldn't produce as many tanks or guns as Germany.
The fact that Operation Barbarossa accomplished all of its objectives and yet lost Germany the war should be telling about the German theory of victory. It was delusional. They just didn't comprehend that Soviet resistance would or could continue after such decisive losses. German planners estimated that the Soviets could field maybe 40 divisions after their main forces in the West were destroyed. The reality was 800 divisions. This force - mobilized from reservists - was 60% bigger than the entire German army in Soviet territory.
Of course these men weren't ready to be thrown into battle. They had to be trained and equipped and transported. They would not be as able as the forces the Germans had already destroyed, and the Soviet command still suffered from the same weaknesses.
Even if the Soviets were reduced to an infantry army without any combined arms support, that could still be a very effective defensive force. Ask any of the Allied soldiers how easy they thought it was to fight through the German Volksgrenadier forces fielded late in the war.
Also, the German forces were hardly mechanized to the same degree that Anglo-American forces were. Only the Panzer divisions were mechanized, and most of the infantry divisions were walking on foot. This actually caused problems, because the distances were so vast and the Soviet forces so numerous. Often the Panzer divisions would get in place and encircle Soviet detachments, only for a lot of them to escape while the German infantry slowly moved into position.
Germany lost the war at the end of 1942 with the failure of Fall Blau (Case Blue). Their fuel reserves were running low, so the Wehrmacht split into two separate army groups. Group A was tasked with securing the Caucasus oil fields, and Group B was tasked with advancing along the Volga to secure the flank. Group B was cut off and encircled at Stalingrad when the Soviets punched through the non-German auxiliary forces on the flank. You know how Stalingrad went. Group A then had to retreat to avoid being cut off themselves. No petrol was captured.
There would be more German offensives after 1942, but never at the same operational tempo or effectiveness. Kursk was a weakened German army battering itself into a Soviet force it had no hope of defeating, because the entire German command ethos was to prioritize aggression and attack. Case Blue broke the back of the German army and it would never again have the manpower, fuel, or armor numbers to credibly threaten destruction of Soviet armies in the field.
If it wasn't for the fact that Walter Model was a freak strategic genius and a true believer in Nazism that had the personal confidence of Hitler, the dissolution of German forces after 1942 would have been much more dramatic.
Lend lease began in 1941 as did the invasion of Iran. They both happened almost the same time as the invasion. So I'm not sure what your point is about the timing. 15% of total lend lease given during the war is not a relevant statistic, it's how important that equipment was to the war effort.
The Soviet army wasn't in similar strength to the Wehrmacht. It was outnumbered. And became even more outnumbered as large formations were captured rapidly on the initial invasion. You're thinking of the late war Red Army which did not exist in those pivotal years. In the absence of lend lease the Soviet army would have been largely reduced to an infantry army. You can play a game with statistics and say, "Look, the Soviets built all their own tanks" and ignore that things like machine tools to build the tanks came from the US. But this isn't very convincing to me.
And then the question is whether the Soviet Union can continue to resist against a Wehrmacht that is inflicting more casualties, taking fewer casualties, and occupying more territory. That is an open question. As I've said from the start: it's still possible the Soviet Union hangs together and, with rifles and simple bombs, stays alive long enough that either the Allies relieve them or turns the tide with raw numbers. But it's also possible they break. If the US is not in the war at that time then it's Britain and a few remnants (some of which might be in Russia) against an enemy that outnumbers them.
Most of the Lend-Lease material was sent after the Soviets were already winning, so it's really misleading to look at the total numbers. You can say they received 4,000 Sherman tanks between '41-45, but this doesn't reflect the reality of the pivotal fighting on the front that was mostly done with Soviet armor.
It's true that most of the Soviet army was destroyed/captured in the initial phase of the war, amounting to about 3 million losses. But those 800 divisions/5 million men were mobilized for fighting throughout 1941-1942. I'm not including the additional 11 million men that would later be mobilized into the late-war Soviet army. These were forces present throughout the pivotal years of combat. The Soviet system had a huge depth for reserves that could continually replenish horrendous losses, unlike the German army which got progressively weaker even as they racked up victory after victory.
I honestly don't know how much Lend-Lease impacted Soviet production. It's easy to look at tank production numbers. It's much harder to figure out what tank production looks like without the right tools or high quality steel. The entire transport sector is a lot different working with horses than it is with American trucks and train engines. If you know of any in-depth analysis of this kind I would be happy to look at it.
I still don't think it's reasonable to assume the Soviets would be reduced to fighting with metaphorical sticks and stones absent Lend-Lease. There were Soviet factories outside the Western Ukraine/Belarus republics. There was a large effort to relocate industrial centers east of the Urals in front of the German advance. Certainly production would be lower without help from the Allies, but the question is how much. Claiming no production is pretty bold.
While the Soviets did manage to withdraw and rebuild some of their industrial capacity before the German advance, especially tank production as you wrote, Lend-Lease was a significant factor in winning the war especially on the Eastern front, so a Soviet victory was not at all a given without Allied support. From Wikipedia:
> In total, 92.7% of the wartime production of railroad equipment by the USSR was supplied by Lend-Lease including 1,911 locomotives and 11,225 railcars
>
> Much of the logistical assistance of the Soviet military was provided by hundreds of thousands of U.S.-made trucks and by 1945, nearly a third of the truck strength of the Red Army was U.S.-built. Trucks such as the Dodge 3⁄4-ton and Studebaker 2+1⁄2-ton were easily the best trucks available in their class on either side on the Eastern Front. American shipments of telephone cable, aluminum, canned rations and clothing were also critical. Lend-Lease also supplied significant amounts of weapons and ammunition. The Soviet air force received 18,200 aircraft, which amounted to about 30 percent of Soviet wartime fighter and bomber production (mid 1941–45). Most tank units were Soviet-built models but about 7,000 Lend-Lease tanks (plus more than 5,000 British tanks) were used by the Red Army, eight percent of war-time production.
The logistics support in railroads and trucks seem quite critical to me. During their retreat, Wehrmacht forces used "scorched earth", which included tearing up the railroads. All the tanks in the world would have been useless to the Soviets if they couldn't have gotten them to the enemy over thousands of kilometers for a lack of rolling stock.
Lend-Lease has always been difficult to gauge for me. Russian sources basically hand wave it away like it made no difference, and American sources act like the Soviets would have totally collapsed without it.
The Soviets didn't have any problems producing the main tanks, artillery and guns used in the war. The T-34 was one of the greatest tank designs of the period, and along with IS designs were effectively immune to the model 1938 75mm guns the Germans were using. There are reports of German soldiers hauling their artillery guns to the front and trying to depress the barrels to use howitzers as anti-tank guns.
But it's hard to quantify how Lend-Lease impacted the production of these things. Obviously it makes a huge difference if some horse has to haul tank components to the factory instead of a US made truck. The railroad support would also have been crucial to manufacturing.
I do think you're overestimating the effect of rail lines on the front though. Unlike WWI, the armies of this period were highly mobile and didn't rely on rail transport nearly as much. The Germans were able to drive over thousands of kilometers just fine, and their tanks were heavy over-engineered gas guzzlers compared to the Soviet models.
>Russian sources basically hand wave it away like it made no difference, and American sources act like the Soviets would have totally collapsed without it.
Well that is hardly surprising, what with the beginning of the Cold War. That's why there have been studies, starting immediately after the war, and they were able to quantify these things.
>I do think you're overestimating the effect of rail lines on the front though. Unlike WWI, the armies of this period were highly mobile and didn't rely on rail transport nearly as much. The Germans were able to drive over thousands of kilometers just fine, and their tanks were heavy over-engineered gas guzzlers compared to the Soviet models.
No, I think we are talking about different things here. Neither the Soviets nor the Germans drove their tanks across thousands of kilometers at the operational level, i.e. just getting close to the battlefield. It would have been glacially slow, and the cost in fuel and maintenance would have been astronomical. Even ignoring all that, you'd still have to provide that fuel and maintenance to the tanks on the road somehow. How else, if not by train? And then we haven't even started discussing transporting troops, ammo, food, and the many other things required for modern war at the scale of the Eastern front.
See here:
https://www.hgwdavie.com/blog/2018/3/9/the-influence-of-railways-on-military-operations-in-the-russo-german-war-19411945
>Railways were the heart of the Russo-German War because they provided the vital link between the economic and manpower capacity of the home country and the forces in the field, and in a country as large as the Soviet Union, they provided the operational level movement needed by the military forces. Geography and terrain defined the layout of the railway network, and the size of forces and the large distances involved meant that railways were the only practical option to support military operations. So inevitably offensive directions followed the railway tracks as much as the terrain.
Re: Lend-Lease, of course there are studies to quantify things, so we can say the Soviets received 18% of their aluminum (arbitrary example) from foreign aid. But what does that mean for the war? Would the Soviets get it from somewhere else for more money, or was it not that important, or would the war effort collapse because aluminum is a bottleneck for some critical components? The latter is the part I find hard to quantify.
About the railroad logistics, interesting, I will definitely take a look at that later.
There really was a huge difference in resources between the US/Nazi Germany/Soviet Union. During the 1940 invasion of France, the Wehrmacht achieved perhaps the greatest military victory in modern history. The French army was bigger and better equipped on paper, but the Germans annihilated them largely due to aggressive maneuver tactics. The German forces at the time were only 10% mechanized. Most of the army walked while horses carted their supplies into France in convoys hundreds of kilometers long. Meanwhile, the entire US army was mechanized. The industrial output of the big motor companies in Detroit was truly mind boggling.
Germany once again demonstrated their stellar maneuver and encirclement tactics during Operation Barbarossa. The opening of the invasion of the Soviet Union saw something like 3 million Soviet losses, mostly from men that had been surrounded and forced to surrender. At this point, German planning assumed that the Soviets would no longer be able to muster meaningful resistance. The reality was that 17 million additional soldiers would be mobilized before the war was over. This was an absolutely mind boggling number of men for mid-20th century Europe. The ability of the Soviet state to marshal fighting men was far greater than anything the Germans could possibly overcome. Really, WWII was strategically over in 1943, even though it would take years and millions more dead before it ended. The German assault package ran out of steam and was slowly ground down by growing Soviet counterattacks, all while they had to transfer ever larger portions of their declining army to prepare against the Anglo-US invasion in Western Europe.
The British had a huge maritime empire that stretched around the whole world, supplying them with a huge amount of raw materials. The Kriegsmarine was never able to overcome the British Navy. The best they could do was harass shipping with their U-boat program. The US had practically a whole continent to draw from. Soviet Russia also encompassed an enormous land area rich in natural resources. Germany had only what they could gather from a chunk of Europe.
If it hadn't been for the circumstances behind the Haber-Bosch process being developed, the war would have been radically different. Having factories that natively produced nitrogen based chemicals for gunpowder and explosives was huge. Not to mention the critical shortage of oil that plagued Nazi Germany for the whole war. There was a cartel of chemical companies, headed by BASF, called IG Farben. They built a massive synthetic petrol plant on to the Leuna works, an already huge synthetic ammonia plant. For commercial reasons, these plant had to operate at massive volumes to scale efficiently. Leuna was one of the most dreaded bombing targets for Allied pilots, and the Nazis put more resources into Leuna's anti-air defenses than Berlin. Still, bomb it the Allies did. This was one of the only ways Germany could get petrol, and portions of the plant were shut down due to bombing damage for much of the war.
Basically, the Nazis were doomed because:
-The Soviet Union could mobilize a ridiculous number of fighting men
-The US production of vehicles gave the Allies a huge mechanized advantage
-Britain, the US and Russia had access to far more natural resources than Germany
-German production of key chemicals and petrol was centralized into huge factories that were very vulnerable to Allied bombing
I'm sure that if you're allowed to introduce counterfactuals of arbitrary weight and number, you could construct a much more favorable situation for the Axis powers, but what's the point?
Personally, I believe it took a lot more than just Enigma to save the Axis. First and foremost, the untouchable industrial capacity and manpower advantage of the USA allowed the Allies to directly fight in two wars at once (Pacific, European) and decisively supply a third front (Russia). The Allies achieved air supremacy simply by throwing so many airplanes at Germany that Germany's air defences were worn down to nothing. Air supremacy leads to naval supremacy. This tightens the noose around Europe economically (support of critical raw materials) and clears the way for any number of invasions and eventual defeat of the Axis.
> Which is in stark contrast to what I read in this book on cryptography called The Code Book, that breaking the Enigma code was absolutely critical to winning the war.
I'm not familiar with that particular book, but I think there's a tendency for books about a specific thing to overstate the importance of that thing.
The impression I get is that the only way for the Axis to win would have been to pick fewer fights. The world's biggest countries all ended up on the same side.
Germany already lost WW1, and the biggest macro difference between 1 and 2 is that the Soviet ability to pump out materiel was much greater than imperial Russia's.
Hitler got a string of very good luck in the *lead-up* to WW2, where fascists who were otherwise hesitant about German power decided to throw in with him, while various other powers (Soviet, Polish, Western) cut deals with Germany out of a mix of opportunism and "well, he's crazy enough to start a fight and I'm not." Germany then was able to take advantage of a war of maneuver on its terms, leading to a quick high water mark and a more or less inevitable losing war of attrition thereafter. The worst stroke of luck for the Axis within the war itself was certainly the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but by that point they were already losing and America "merely" insured they would lose quicker.
This week in AI alignment: OpenAI dissolves its Superalignment Team
https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-ends-superalignment-team-manage-ai-risks-2024-5
But hey, as long as the bottom line improves, surely that's the correct move.
It's sad, but entirely predictable from when Microsoft bought a stake in it. In my view, AI risk researchers need to mount a major campaign to get inter-governmental bodies to regulate AI, because the sector will never regulate itself.
Good. Do any other tech companies spend 20% compute on their Applied Theology org?
Goodness, AI risk denialism is losing context. OpenAI is an organization founded specifically for the purpose of bringing about AGI; their current "products" are incidental developments by people who are focused on AGI. If you view this entire branch of technology as theology, they were never a tech company in the first place.
(Reminder that AI risk denialism is a fringe view among the general public, a small-ish minority view among experts, and a dismissed view by world governments. The denialists endlessly fail to develop any unified story for how things don't go wrong. Instead, there's just dozens of completely incompatible theories all of which are rejected by basically all the others in the "group". AI risk denialism has not been a view worth taking seriously in quite a while.)
Demanding a proof that things *don't* go wrong is getting the burden of proof backwards - you can't prove a negative. The people making extraordinary claims about the power of AI need to show evidence that things *will* go wrong.
I've seen several stories about how things go wrong, but they all seem to fall into either "the AI can design and deploy an arbitrarily powerful superweapon with no resources besides an internet connection and its massive brain" or "the AI is so persuasive it can talk people into handing over arbitrary amounts of power," and neither of those seem convincing to me. Give me a story that doesn't have a giant black box in the middle of it labeled "THE POWER OF INTELLIGENCE."
Here's an easy story for how things don't go wrong: It turns out there's no secret super-science left for the AI to discover. The AI is really smart and answers a lot of scientific questions, but none of them are the key to world-destroying power. The AI comes up with a unified theory of everything, but it turns out we can't do anything cool like FTL or antigravity. The AI invents nanotechnology but it turns out that our immune system is already pretty good at fighting off microscopic threats, and assembling an object atom by atom turns out to be a really slow and ineffective way of building stuff. The AI solves psychology and becomes a really charismatic politician, but the government is full of checks and balances that make it hard to take over the world no matter how charismatic you are. And so on. The AI's super-tech either isn't super enough or runs into physical limits that can't be solved just by thinking harder.
This story still leaves a lot of room for what the AI *can* do! It's entirely possible that AI leads to a massive leap in our understanding of the world, that there are AI-caused disasters on par with 9/11 or COVID, that people remember AI as one of the most significant inventions in history. But all it takes to stop the hard-takeoff existential risk doomer story is basically "whoops, it turns out there are some physical limits to how much you can do with brainpower alone."
I recommend reading the review of Going Infinite on Zvi's substack if you haven't. It details how SBF was a metaphor for misaligned AI. Basically SBF was very intelligent and probably a psychopath. He was depressed and directionless as a youth until he stumbled on effective altruism. But he didn't draw the right lessons from EA. SBF became fixated on the money maximizing part, which resulted in him causing billions of dollars in losses and untold reputational damage. And that was just from a pretty smart guy who got lucky for a while.
Obviously if AI is much smarter than people, it has the capability to inflict much more damage. I know this isn't on the level of "AI wipes out humanity", but even discounting that there are very serious reasons to be concerned about the lack of commitment to alignment at OpenAI.
Also, seriously read the piece from Zvi, it's great and I can't do it justice in a mere paragraph.
So, you're going with hypothesis 2.d in my taxonomy: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BvFJnyqsJzBCybDSD/taxonomy-of-ai-risk-counterarguments
Given your phrasing, I assume you've already watched/read "The Power of Intelligence"? ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9Figerh89g )
> Demanding a proof that things *don't* go wrong is getting the burden of proof backwards - you can't prove a negative.
The situation of pitting intelligence vs everything else has appeared endless times in the past, with completely predictable outcomes. Humans won, chimpanzees didn't. Humans won, smallpox didn't. Humans won, vast physical obstacles didn't. I'd say the burden of proof is on those who say that this time will somehow be different.
I imagine you'd agree that even though you couldn't predict exactly what move a superintelligence would use to win at chess, you still would lose the game. Real life is not something somehow so much simpler than chess that it's been essentially solved, and everyone/everything is working at the mathematically-proven maximally-efficient "gameplay." Still, if you want actual examples of how superior ability results in taking over the world, Scott wrote on this in 2015: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/07/no-physical-substrate-no-problem/
maybe if they had, the present day would be less of a crapsack dystopia
A big part of what is moving our world towards the "crapsack dystopia" side, is algorithmic social media. It seems at least plausible that tech companies devoting 20% of their effort to "hey maybe not all things Tech are wonderful and good and we should carefully consider the social and ethical impacts" would have made a difference there.
I've argued before that algorithmic social media is digital crack and should be treated accordingly. The damage is being recognized more widely, esp. with the recent efforts of Jon Haidt (of all people, I already loved his foray into descriptive ethics).
The funny thing when you think about it, is that algorithmic feeds have been pushed in every case by tech companies. Users kept asking for sequential feeds of the sources they were following, and companies kept pushing algorithmic feeds instead, which are against the user's best interests in all sorts of ways.
I'd be 100% for a rule that no app can show an algorithmic feed to anyone as a main option or unless they actively push a button to get suggestions.
When the invisible hand of the market fails to prevent algorithmic social media, what else will, if not a regulatory crackdown?
Does it really seem reasonable that we can have it both ways? AI is a tremendous step forward that will allow us to do all kinds of things (we're not even sure what they all are) we've never done before -- and -- AI is no big deal when it comes to safety, and the idea that it could do a lot of damage is silly. After all, *Americans* are in charge, and we have a really good track record when it comes to safeguarding the public and not letting the interests of big corporations and the military override the needs of ordinary citizens.
Sick burn; the only problem is that OpenAI never actually honored their public commitment about the 20%.
Regardless of what you think of the "theological" aspects, it's pretty clear that Sam Altman is an amoral, lying psychopath.
...The perfect qualities for a CEO.
Good point! I wonder what the least damaging target for the activist ecosystem would be. Maybe demonstrations at North Korean embassies against their nuclear weapons and ICBM programs? They would be ignored, but at least they would do no harm...
Many Thanks! Yes, true... The silence from wokesters on Tibet, for instance, is deafening...
I wonder if it is worth trying to set up a fake, sacrificial target for woke ire, in the hopes of distracting them from actions damaging to anything actually vital...
One of the latest top-level comments is someone talking about a terrorism warning regarding international LGBTQ+ events. If something bad happens, that might do the trick. :-/
Many Thanks! Regrettably, as carateca said below, Western activists have, to my mind extremely pathologically, backed non-Western Islamic regimes even when those regimes kill people just for being gay.
My biweekly SARS-CoV-2 update for epidemiological weeks 19 and 20 is up on TwiXter (which is finally becoming X). Linked below.
Summary of my update along with some musings:
1. COVID data sources (both public and private) are continuing to go offline. Although I think the worst that SARS-CoV-2 can hand us is over, I think it's tremendously shortsighted not to keep monitoring this remarkably adaptable pathogen.
2.. Epi week 19 showed a slight uptick in SARS2 wastewater concentrations. The average US concentration is 226 copies/mL. This is higher than previous interwave gaps. Not discussed in my thread: this could indicate a higher background circulation rate for the SARS2 than previous interwave gaps, or given that recent studies show that JN.1 and its offspring shed more virions than previous vars, the actual background circulation for the virus may be lower than any previous interwave gap. But no one is doing any randomized population testing so your guess is as good as mine.
3. Per a CDC directive, as of May 1st hospitals are no longer mandated to report COVID-19 stats. It's all voluntary now. Going forward, the CDC will treat SARS-CoV-2 like the flu and RSV and a new system called COVID-NET will replace the current hospitalization reporting system. COVID-NET is a surveillance system that will sample 98 counties across 13 states for COVID cases. Remember there are 3,143 counties in the US, but I suppose these 98 will provide a decent statistical sample during waves. My nit to pick with this plan is that COVID does not behave like the flu and it's still a-seasonal (unlike the flu). COVID outbreaks when viewed from the county level seem to follow a random of pattern during the interwave periods. Counties flash on and off with outbreaks like Xmas lights until a big wave synchronizes all the flashes (outbreaks) across major regions of the country. So, excuse me if I doubt if this 98-county sample will provide us with enough warning if or when a new variant wave rolls in. We are now solely reliant on wastewater testing to provide an early warning for a wave (but see the caveats in my second point).
4. OTOH, despite abysmal booster uptake in the US, current immunity seems to be pretty solid against severe disease. Before the advent of COVID-NET, the COVID-19 hospitalization rates for epi week 17 and 18 had dropped to 0.7 per 100,000. Post COVID-NET (for epi week 19) they were estimated to be at 0.5 per 100k. These values are lower than for any time in the pandemic except the first two weeks in March 2020 (over four years ago, now).
https://x.com/beowulf888/status/1792370656790872121
Many Thanks!
Could someone here help me understand what the patriarchy is? Is it real? What does it mean? And what does it mean to smash it? How does one accomplish that? I have tried to do some basic research on the web and almost everything I've run into is all over the place with its interpretation, with rather partisan takes that you all can easily picture, both for and against it.
I'm mostly trying to get a somewhat unbiased good faith take on this as an outsider, and see what I can learn from the concept, if anything. It comes up in certain circles a lot and I'm never really sure what I think about it when it does.
I realize this is maybe a little spicy of a topic, sorry, but I suspect that ACX is about as sensible of a place to get a neutral pluralistic perspective on this as it gets.
Sarah Constantine has the most interesting take I've seen [0]. I endorse Viliam's summary for pointing you toward the term's anthropological origins, and discussing the semantic drift. Urstoff's link also looks promising, prima facie. Might also be useful to research kinship, as context [1]. Because, as it turns out, there's more to anthropology than just gender wars (anthropology is not my strong suit, so i can't recommend anything in particular; but i don't see it mentioned in other comments).
[0] https://srconstantin.github.io/2017/09/12/patriarchy-is-the-problem.html
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinship
Note: I don't believe in the patriarchy. But here's my impression from talking to people who do:
There are a bunch of ways in which society is bad for women: Gender pay gap, gendered expectations around which spouse does child rearing, some men being unable to take no for an answer when asking women out, some men threatening women, women being excluded from certain work-spaces and certain professional bonding experiences etc.
There are of course disagreements about each individual item on the above list about whether or not they are real. But most people agree there exists some such list.
The idea of "The Patriarchy" is the belief that the items on the above list are in some way connected.
In particular their connection means that fighting against one of the items on the list will somehow help in the fight for the others. Do more to prevent rape on college campuses and this will in some way help more women become plumbers. Because all the things on the list are caused by the same broad societal perception or culture or something (which we call the Patriarchy) and when you fight for one of the things that is like punching the "patriarchy" and if you punch it enough times it will smash.
Maybe someone who actually believes in it could give you a more fleshed out version of what they think is going on, and why they think it's happening. To me, it seems pretty obvious that this thing doesn't really exist in modern western world.
"Do more to prevent rape on college campuses and this will in some way help more women become plumbers. "
I don't think the people fighting rape on college campuses, would consider it a victory if more women became plumbers. They tend to have a fairly narrow vision as to what is "helpful" to women, as unreasonably restrictive as any 1950's patriarchal vision of women's place in the world. The best that can be said of the progressives on this front is that it is at least better for women to have a choice between two narrow visions instead of being limited to one.
But there's more than just the Progressives and the Patriarchy in play, so the theory that we need the former as an alternative to the latter seems quite dubious.
If you look up the word patriarchy it has multiple meanings. One of them is "society dominated by men" and a society would only need a 51/49 power imbalance in favor of men in order to qualify as that type of patriarchy. BTW, in case you're new here, this is EXACTLY the kind of culture war question Scott hates to see here.
I am sympathetic to the concept and understand it as follows:
- Classic patriarchy: all the movers and shakers in society are men, and they either explicitly act against women's interests, or fail to support them through ignorance and apathy. Power structures tend to seek to preserve themselves, so attempts to empower women are opposed.
- Systemic patriarchy: Societies with a patriarchal history contain baked in practices that were acceptable to prior male leaders, but hinder female leaders. These features serve to slow the rate of power transfer to make it harder to achieve equity. In our society those might look like:
- Working norms that aren't compatible with pregnancy or childcare
- Social norms around assertiveness and leadership that make it harder for women to be perceived as authoritative.
- Lack of role models and mentor figures in leadership positions.
Systemic considerations often also include the downstream effects of these on women at large ("we've historically not had a lot of research into endometriosis, but have had lots into erectile dysfunction") which are perceived to be due to lack of interest/advocacy from historically male authority figures making policy or funding choices.
There is a pernicious tendency to conflate object level and systemic concerns (which Scott has written about before) — so if someone blames lack of maternity provision on the patriarchy, both sides can wrongly take that to mean that there's a secret council of men plotting to keep women in their place. For the most part I don't think people really mean this, and they use "patriarchy" to refer to object level apathy from still-mostly-male leaders, as well as downstream systemic effects from the way our society has evolved.
Colloquially used, "systemic patriarchy" most often seems to convey that at every run of society there is an effort to keep power out of women's hands, which sounds more like your classic definition. They seem to be used interchangeably, or at least, I don't often hear the prefix "classical".
One of the features you mentioned works both ways; working norms of high-power leadership for men, supposing this means long hours, lead to diminished availability for family time and caretaking, but whether that deters really depends on custom and desires. I think this is redundant because societal expectation does most of the heavy lifting here and not work-hours. Historically it meant that women "ought" to be caretakers no matter what they do, with some of that lingering now broadly. Regardless of sex, if both caretaking and "ambitious" leadership is on the table, there is a compromise happening somewhere. As with most things, you can throw money at it (a nanny, etc).
Great answer
Good description. I'm broadly sympathetic to this definition describing real problems, but unfortunately I see it abused all the time. For example, when enrollment in the computer science major fails to be 50/50, many people will immediately jump to the conclusion that this *must* be due to systemic bias. Which of course it doesn't have to be. But try saying that out loud in polite company...
This answer is in line with my understanding of the definition. I think it leaves out one:
* Role patriarchy: Women are allocated subservient roles, and social/legal rules and beliefs reinforce this, eg
- women not allowed to own real estate ,open bank accounts/borrow money/start companies
- girls given no or less education ("no need for a girl to know that")
- In marriage vows wives swear to obey husband, but not vice versa
All of which were either the law or socially enforced by gatekeepers, in the west within living memory.
It is clear what patriarchy was historically, men being the main decision makers and privilege holders in most areas. It is less so now, but the vestiges still remain. A few of medical examples:
- men get controlled pain meds, ADHD meds etc. a lot easier on average than women [citation needed]
- you can get vasectomy pretty easily, while getting hysterectomy is nigh impossible as a youngish woman, even with endo or with contraindications to contraceptives. The doctors of all genders keep pushing you to suffer "because you might change your mind some day".
- until recently descriptions of, say, heart attack symptoms were based on what men would experience, not women.
- autism symptoms are often missed in women
In general, there is still a tendency to second-guess women more than men in various areas.
First the word "patriarchy" was used by anthropologists to describe those societies where a family (or a clan) is ruled by a father (or the oldest man, or a group of oldest men). In a completely literal sense, where e.g. 30 years old people would still unconditionally obey their 50 years old father, and if they do not, he can legally kill them or sentence them to death.
Later, by the power of hysteria, the word was adopted by feminists to describe every society ever (except for the fictional societies of noble savages), because of course every existing society is exactly like this, no exaggeration! That is the bailey... and the motte is that all things considered, there are more male CEOs or presidents than female CEOs or presidents, therefore the society is ruled by (some) men, which is kinda analogical to being ruled by your father.
> Is it real?
In the anthropological sense? Maybe some savage tribes are still like that. Historically, I think the ancient Rome was like this, but I am not sure.
In the feminist sense? If you extend the definition to mean "more male CEOs/presidents than female CEOs/presidents", maybe every society is like this.
> And what does it mean to smash it?
Quotas for CEOs/presidents, preferably in a way that makes it taboo to mention that someone became a CEO or a president because of the quota?
Language changes and words acquire new meanings. It's fine.
In modern American society, I think it's usually more of a metaphor, a design pattern that some people want to eradicate. But there are also parts of America (not specifically geographical parts), and non-American cultures, where it's a more real thing. If there were an EA equivalent in this domain, something like "Effective Anti-Patriarchalism", I suspect that they wouldn't devote much energy to America. Which is to say, don't expect a lot of consistency in the answers you find, but there's usually something real that they point to, even if it's not literally "women as property".
I think you might have a skewed view of who complains about patriarchy "the most". Choice feminism and intersectional feminism have had the most success capturing the mainstream in the "woke" era (not trying to be inflammatory, just don't know what to call it). These are the groups with the "you go girl!" attitude towards 18 year olds becoming OnlyFans models, etc.
Radical feminists and some groupings of fourth-wave feminists (on Reddit, see /r/fourthwavewomen) are still highly critical of female genital mutilation, educational inequality, mandatory veiling, etc. regardless of which culture the practices are a part of, and I'd say they "complain" about the patriarchy an awful lot.
Ironically, it's likely partially because of the "patriarchy" that choice feminism became the dominant strain in media -- the group that is young and openly sex and sex work-positive is certainly much more palatable to men than the one that has a lot of butch lesbians and middle aged women and women who don't shave their legs and stuff.
I think it's the result of an ideology that, in practice, rewards self-deception and punishes principled dissent.
No truer words were ever spoken.
Ehhh, it's very unlikely you will find someone who unironically believes in Patriarchy without at least one or two major qualms on ACX, they all got filtered by years and years of anti-woke writing by Scott on the old blog.
As training wheels for my abilities to engage with views that I see as ridiculous on their face, I will try to explain what I think the users of the concept mean:
- It's something along the lines of "Moloch", except it's specialized with respect to the kind of evil it can do. Moloch is an all-purpose evil God, anytime 2 parties fail to communicate or cooperate despite the best of intentions, Moloch is behind this.
- In contrast, Patriarchy is specifically the God of gender war, anytime 2 people of opposite genders fail to communicate or cooperate, proponents of the concept of Patriarchy (henceforth: Feminists) say that (A) this is due to the Patriarchy (B) which is primarily invented and maintained by men (C) to primarily hurt and control women.
- Patriarchy presumably originated by men who wanted to control women. But now it's systematic and self-sustaining, by not fighting to end the Patriarchy, you're yourself complicit in the Patriarchy. By not recognizing the Patriarchy, you're yourself complicit in the Patriarchy.
- Patriarchy also - bizarrely - hurts men. Whenever you confront feminists by the fact that men are not uniformly living the good life, that they're the first to be conscripted and killed in war and etc etc etc..., Feminists have a pretty surprising answer to this: Patriarchy. Patriarchy hurts men. Patriarchy also hurts women. At this point it seems that they just re-invented another way to say "Evil" or "Obscenely Rich People" or "The 1%", but no, they insist that Patriarchy is a very distinct concept to all of this. It's something that was invented by men, is maintained by men, primarily hurts women and yet **also** hurts men, who are presumably too stupid to realize the system they're maintaining is hurting them.
- But the fact that the Patriarchy hurts and kills men too is no excuse for them, nearly every man is held responsible for the Patriarchy in some sense or the other. Being a male feminist won't absolve you either.
- It's not clear what destroying the Patriarchy will entail. On the one hand, you have some extreme feminists like that chick who wrote about how the male population should be artificially kept to 10% of humanity (by the obvious ways) and her modern progeny who joke about aborting male fetuses, on the other hand some feminists take "Destroying the Patriarchy" simply to mean.... women in video games? More pay and promotions for women? More code-of-conduct HR policies that prevents people (but primarily men) from saying sexual jokes? It's a huge umbrella.
I think it's obvious at this point that I'm not a fan of either the concept or its typical proponents, and its possible I'm strawmanning here. But in practice you would be better off observing the actual in-the-wild usages of the term as well as possibly reading older feminist literature. As an opponent of Feminism, I think "Patriarchy" is just a euphemism for "Men". Feminism is often motivated by mindless and indiscriminate rage at men - not that its ideological opponents have done any better in the opposite direction -, but instead of taking out this rage on men in a straightforward way, and thus being open to being made fun of using all the usual stereotypes about men-hating feminists, Feminism invented a kind of Motte-and-Bailey word which can dynamically mean either "Men" or "Just the system created by men we totally don't hate men who are also victims of that same system" depending on whatever is most convenient.
=======
For what it's worth, I think "Patriarchy" has a non-strawman non-euphemism component. I think in actual practice, Women (like literally any other naturally occurring subset of humanity not explicitly selected for power or wealth) have particular weaknesses and traits that allows Men (but also other, typically older, women) to take advantage of them. Where I and Feminism disagree on is (A) This is far from one-sided, women aren't angels either (B) This is far from being solely a system of men's making (C) This can only be solved by both genders recognizing each other's pain and challenges, each gender signaling that they will commit to not use their unfair advantages and to condemn the extremists of their own if the other gender does the same.
Due to this pretty deep disagreement, I'm of the opinion that the label of "Feminism" should be thrown into the trash, left for those kinds of people who comment in r/FemaleDatingStrategy or whatever. When I want to emphasize the injustices and the oppression that women in particular face, I usually call myself a "Women's Advocate". When I want to point out the symmetry of the injustice that the 2 genders inflict on each other, I call myself a "Gender Egalitarian". My Gender Egalitarianism is not affected one bit by any objective biological difference (or lack thereof) between women and men, you can have 100 triple-blind top-notch studies about how women are worse or better than men in this and that job or hobby on my desk tomorrow, and that - to me - wouldn't imply anything from the moral point of view, any more than the fact that blind people are worse at seeing would imply they should be given less rights or treated morally differently. (Eh, besides the obvious, that they shouldn't drive or pilot an aircraft, and this is not strictly a moral difference, just a pragmatic yielding to the cruel objective world.)
Nonsense. I attend regular meetings of my local Patriarchy Club and attend the National Patriarchy Convention whenever I'm able. It's as entertaining as ComicCon! (Sorry, I couldn't resist!) I mostly agree with everything you said.
What do you mean, "is it real"? Of course it's real, just read any piece of history, or hell, just look around you. It's an inevitable consequence of the power dynamics caused by human sexual dimorphism. Women aren't less intelligent or capable on average, they simply lack power and agency. No matter how many anti-discrimnation laws you write or cultural memes you try to circulate, the reality of the situation will never change. Women will always be at the mercy of men.
> Women will always be at the mercy of men.
Not necessarily. We already have a technology which can overcome many of the power dynamics caused by human sexual dimorphism.
That's why I find it absolutely bizarre that so many feminists oppose guns.
The power imbalance isn't just physical. There's no point in having a gun if you don't have the spine to actually use it when necessary.
Hm.
I think enough women have the spine to shoot in self-defense or defense of others that you can't justify the kind of universal language you're using in these comments.
My absolute favorite case in point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4ebuv-QSeI , but there are plenty of other examples here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLr9w0uxRdNyvdcEFL7M8WMsVgovYlxnB3
Granted, apparently American women report owning guns at only half the rate of men 22% vs 43% (https://news.gallup.com/poll/406238/stark-gender-gap-gun-ownership-views-gun-laws.aspx), and in Florida, they get concealed carry permits at just one-third the rate of men (https://www.wusf.org/courts-law/2023-04-15/women-concealed-weapons-license-on-the-rise).
Those aren't great stats for the demographic that arguably needs personal firearms more than any other.
But there are enough women carrying guns on their person to have a whole cottage industry of female concealed carry products (https://www.forbes.com/sites/erictegler/2020/10/16/as-women-rush-to-obtain-concealed-carry-firearms-permits-female-entrepreneurs-help-cloak-their-guns-and-worries/).
And more American women are seeing the light every year.
I don't disagree with you that (way too) many women are essentially powerless, and that a lot of that powerlessness probably has natural roots in sexual dimorphism.
But technology has overcome a lot of things in nature.
>Granted, apparently American women report owning guns at only half the rate of men 22% vs 43%
Is this a reasonable case for a subsidy? And PSAs recommending that women own guns and get concealed carry permits?
I'm not sure if you're joking or not, but I'll take it semi-seriously:
I'm not sure PSAs would have much impact if the demonstrably obvious rational case for carrying a weapon plus all fiction about women successfully using guns aren't convincing.
But perhaps mandatory gun safety training - like a half-day module in school, where students learn to never put their finger on a goddamned trigger, never point it at a thing they aren't intending to kill, and how to fully unload a pistol - would demystify guns enough for some women to consider their utility, even if it goes against tribal opinion.
I mean, I've literally had more than one woman ask me, "but what if your gun just goes off?" And when I pointedly ask, "How would that happen?" the response is usually "I don't know."
I should add, I'm a rational person and thus I'm not slavishly devoted to Red Team ideas about gun ownership. Nor am I devoted to Gun Team's ideas about gun ownership.
So, despite the absolute language I was using here to match @anomie, I have pretty reasonable positions on this:
Not everyone should own a gun and regularly carry it.
In fact, OMG, so, so many people *shouldn't* own a gun and/or regularly carry one!
I don't want to see gun rights restricted, but I think it would be reasonable for gun ownership / permits to be contingent on passing a half-day module of training or an ultra-basic gun safety test, The basic bare minimum of knowing "don't put your finger on the trigger" is a reasonable restriction!
And then there are people whose circumstances are incompatible with the responsibilities of gun ownership. I'm pro-gun, but I never advocate for owning one without also outlining when it's a bad idea.
For example, my parents actually removed their guns from the home during the childhood years that my younger brother was particularly impulsive, relentless, defiant, and obsessed with the power of guns. They knew they wouldn't be able to hide them and that he would not be stopped by a locked box (my brother was a human raccoon).
This was responsible and wise. The risk of my brother getting his hands on a gun was much higher than the risk of crime.
Likewise, people who aren't confident in their ability to pick safe, totally trustworthy friends and loved ones should also forget about owning guns. Morons will occasionally tell me that keeping a gun in the home makes it far more likely I'll be a victim of domestic gun violence, because they've accepted the absurd idea that "anyone can be a victim of domestic violence," including me.
Of course this is utter nonsense; many people have personalities and/or life experience which make them fundamentally incapable of being attracted to abusers, much less tolerant of any actual abuse. I am one of them, so I'm not remotely worried about getting shot by any of the loved ones in my life.
But anyone who isn't equally confident in their ability to screen should avoid keeping guns in the home. It's just not worth the risk.
> Women will always be at the mercy of men.
Sure, in the very literal sense that the average man can physically overpower the average woman. Just like short people are at the mercy of tall people. That's relevant in a few narrow domains like domestic violence and being out alone at night. But that's a pretty small part of life. People who rage at "the patriarchy" inevitably mean something much stronger than that.
I'm not exactly the kind of person who talks about smashing the patriarchy, but I know people who are. Here's my understanding:
Our society tends to favor men over women; this favoritism is called the patriarchy. The most obvious manifestation of the patriarchy is that people in positions of power tend to be men. "Smashing the patriarchy" is a dramatic way of saying changing society to become more equitable.
There's also an older, narrower, more literal meaning of patriarchy that probably isn't the one you've been hearing. Some cultures expect the man of the house to rule over his household like a tiny king; those cultures are patriarchal.
*Edited because I left out the word "changing".
"And who has the right as master of the house to have the final word at home? THE PAPA! (why?) TRADITION!"
One ought to have some method of ensuring a decision is possible. For example, the Supreme Court has nine justices, because an odd number ensures a ruling one way or the other. It isn't necessarily bad for the man of the house to be the person that ultimately decides, so long as the decision takes the family as a whole into account. The same might be said of the woman, but various reasons put the man in that position, and which actual person ought to make no significant difference.
Of course, some men will abuse this power. If given the power, some women would abuse it, too. Who can say who would use it best? The answer varies on individual cases, and in some cases has no good answer.
"Our law of peace
Which understands
A husband leads
A wife commands"
Pretty terrible take. A family is fundamentally built on personal relationships. If those relationships have deteriorated to the point where the family can no longer reach consensus on an important decision without someone needing to be formally in charge, then it has bigger problems that won't be solved by designating someone to win ties on the object level decision.
Not really, not all things are equally important. When I go out with my all-men friend group, sometimes we disagree on (e.g.) which restaurant we will eat in. Any one of us will accept any restaurant, but every one of us has his own preference.
In order for the night out not to devolve into endless bickering, **some** sort of circuit-breaker need to be devised that will force an opinion and compel the group to act according to it. This "Circuit-Breaker" can simply be randomness, Rock-Paper-Scissors or Heads-Tails coin flipping. But it can also be an arbitrarily designated "Group-Leader" who chooses an option and follows through.
To account for human jealousy, maybe the "Group Leader" (whether in a friends group or a family) position can rotate, such that this year it's the man who calls the shots, the next it's the woman. So that no party feels perpetually silenced or forced to follow. And of course, it's assumed that the "Group Leader" is making a "Sensible" decision in the sense that he or she is not deliberately power-tripping or exercising their power just for the sake of it. All he or she is doing is just acting as some sort of intelligent better-than-random Rock-Papers-Scissors tiebreaker.
As you yourself point out, there's no shortage of ways to resolve disputes without committing to a formal hierarchy, much less a hierarchy based on gender or other traits completely orthogonal to decision making and leadership ability.
History shows that committing to rigid hierarchy like that, especially in the context of personal relationships, makes you drastically more vulnerable to various kinds of abuse.
If two people agree to disagree yet some action must be taken, what is to happen? I don't understand why you think this is a "terrible take".
For example, my wife and I often "fight" over who pays for the restaurant bill: the "winner" pays.
And do you resolve those little "fights" by saying, "as the man I am the Lord and Master of this family and it is my god-given right to pay the bill"? Or do you just work it out between the two of you on a case by case basis? Because most people these days in healthy relationships seem to manage just fine doing that second thing, so I question the value of the first one.
Perhaps I'm not clear. We are each trying to decide based on whether the OTHER person is better off. Yes, I may jest and demand to pay the bill as the husband, which always gets a laugh.
But what it basically comes down to is if we have a disagreement then she gets her way, whether that means she pays the bill or not. I DECIDE to give her her way, which she is fully aware of. It isn't really working anything out at all.
https://www.draliceevans.com/post/ten-thousand-years-of-patriarchy-1
I was going to post this, as well.
Regarding last week’s Mantic Mondays, why don’t prediction markets fashion themselves as sports betting sites? You can bet on chess, why not on the new competitive sport of forecasting? Here are some sample rules:
- matches are between two competitors and last four rounds
- in each round, competitors forecast a specific question (specified when the match is created) and earn points based on the log odds if it occurs.
- competitors specify their forecasts ahead of time to increase legibility.
- the person with the most points after four rounds is the winner.
Like in sports betting, you could bet on the outcome of each round, overall victor, points earned, etc. it’s slightly more complicated to recreate the mechanics of a prediction market, but sports betting seems like it’s now totally okay (it’s in the ESPN app!) whereas prediction markets are not. Plus, you’d then have an excuse to do all sorts of fun sports things, like having a world championship with trophies or title belts, college leagues, etc.
Haha, I have idly thought that trying to get regulated under "sports betting" might be an easier path to legalization than "event contracts" under CFTC. Manifold's doing a different thing, but would love to see someone make a go of this!
Kinda open-ended question, but are there any interesting essays from Europeans telling Americans how they should improve their country? I feel like we as Americans have a lot of strong feelings about how Europe should be run- Britain should be less NIMBY, the Germans shouldn't have a debt brake and shouldn't shut down their nuclear plants, Italy shouldn't make it impossible to fire employees, etc. I have read lots & lots & lots of pieces by Americans over the years telling other countries how to reform themselves. Any thoughtful pieces by Euros about what kind of reforms they'd like to see in America? Or even non-Europeans, Asian or Latin American countries. I just realized yesterday I don't think I've ever read one!
I'm thinking more 'substantive public policy reforms' and not low-quality polemic or anything shrill by The Guardian, etc.
(I suppose Alon Levy is a bit of an exception to my rule, Alon has some good critiques of our weak state capacity as it relates to infrastructure spending)
Talking about how America is so much inferior to Europe and how they feel sorry for us is Europe's continental pastime. We don't hear much about it though, because [insert Mad Men meme here].
I've written a number of pieces on various things Finland does with a subtext of "perhps this is something that America might consider, perhaps at a state level" (eg https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2024/02/21/understanding-labor-unions-in-finland/, for instance). Of course, I'm also aware enough of the American system to know it's not that simple to just import things from one country to another.
...and, even moreso, aware that any European who actually tried to write a piece absolutely *telling* Americans what to do would get an avalanche of "Fuck you, Americans do not care AT ALL what Europoors think, keep your socialism to yourself" etc etc...
UWell, I have seen a few people pointing out how scandinavian public health care actually is cheaper than US private insurance, while the population have overall better health:
https://www.sciencenordic.com/culture-denmark-forskerzonen/how-does-denmark-have-better-healthcare-than-the-us-for-less-money/1451158
Also, I haven't seen this anywhere but found it myself: Denmark, despite having state sponsored education all the way, have a lower tertiary education rate than the US. Perhaps the signalling is less important here:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-the-population-with-completed-tertiary-education?tab=chart&country=USA~DNK
Oh, and don't get me started on the voting system (multi-party, gerrymander-proof etc)
If I should guess why there's few articles about this in english, I think it might be because North Europeans are pretty confident in the things they believe they do better than the US, even to the degree that they don't argue enough about them, thus leaving no paper trail on the internet (None of the three I mentioned are ever up for debate at elections or seriously challenged by public intellectuals).
And just to prove I'm not trying to be shrill or Guardian like, I am completely aware of how the US has been overtaking all of Europe in real wages for the last twenty years. So they must be doing a lot of things right that Europeans don't get.
real wage differences seem to hide the basics, ie. life satisfaction (life expectancy, crime, stress, etc)
but probably this is the point where it starts to make sense to look at states instead of Europe vs USA :)
This isn't directly that, But I very much enjoyed LKY's Third World to First as a first-person view of the challenges of actually running a country (he doesn't have much advice for America, but he did have some for Deng Xiaoping). He deals with pretty different challenges, so it's hard to get direct lessons for america, but it's quite good ("learn to be more legible" would be my top lesson America should learn from Singapore).
Is there any sort of actual benefit to hot cycling or other cardio in high environments? Is it just a gimmick?
So I started doing group classes at my gym, think like cycling class, and I really liked it but I also noticed that I am drenched afterwards, like my light green shirt is now a soaked forest green, even when we're just doing relatively slow yoga. And it's cuz the room is hot, must be 90-100 with high humidity. I'm not sure whether there's some actual benefit or if the trainer pumps up the heat to make us sweat because us dummies associate more sweat with a better workout and they're just hacking the metrics.
It's mainly a gimmick IMHO. Heat can help for warming up, and sometimes in non-cardio contexts (e.g. saunas, yoga), but it hinders a cardio workout.
As others point out, heat can help improve the elastic properties of connective tissues. Your tendons, fascia, etc. operate best at temperatures slightly higher than your usual body temperature. That's why "warming up" is important to getting maximal athletic performance.
However, once you're to the point of sweating, extra heat is unhelpful, if not harmful. After all, the whole reason we sweat is to get rid of excess heat. If the excess heat exceeds your body's ability to eliminate it, your athletic performance will drop, and you risk hyperthermia if taken too far.
In fact, if you're doing really tough cardio workouts, temperatures below 70F are often better, since that'll help your body stay cool. Apparently marathon times are best in quite chilly weather.
According to an anatomy class I took back in college, fascia has some interesting properties where it becomes more "liquid" as it heats up, making it easier to get more range of motion than it would in the cold. Outside of yoga and gymnastics, I don't know if this is particularly desirable or not. It may be that it makes it less likely to injure your ligaments. Alternatively it may make it more likely to pull a muscle. Who knows? I don't think anyone has done any long term studies on it that are safe from marketing and health gurus.
I don't know if there's a benefit to cardio, specifically.
Heat does loosen up muscles and joints, which can help with stretching, but can also lead to overextension. (Sometimes that tension is keeping your body from doing something damaging.) Overextension shouldn't be a problem in yoga, and I'm guessing not in cycling, either, due to the restricted amount of motion.
I personally like the experience of sweat coming out of every pore in my body. I think it helps clean out my skin, and in a more woo-woo opinion of mine, I think it helps flush my system out. Be sure to drink lots and lots of water, and make sure you've got a healthy diet that has plenty of salt and other electrolytes.
I used to do hot yoga occasionally, but I do also question the benefits. One thing it does make easier is extreme stretching, but the benefits are few and the risks are substantial.
I'd say anything that makes you less likely to work out (e.g., a hot gym where you sweat more and feel exhausted faster) is not a good thing.
Hot yoga is its own category, plenty of studios offer it in addition to room-temperature classes. Anecdotally, I enjoy the challenge of hot yoga and feel more "loose" afterwards compared to room-temp classes, but I don't know if its purported benefits have been studied. Not sure what the benefit would be for hot cycling or other cardio unless you're trying to acclimatize to work in hot environments.
I'm no expert, but unless you're deliberately trying to build heat tolerance or sweat a lot, it seems like it would be worse. For things like cardio you'll probably do less of an actual workout because the heat will force you to slow down.
Does anyone know of research or any kind of insightful writing considering whether the increasing accessibility and quality of porn over the last few decades has shifted the balance of power between genders? Or, looking forward, how future sex tech might do so and thus reshape dating, families, and society? I’m writing a sequel to EroFutures and want to base it on more than an impish urge to fantasize in politically incorrect directions :)
This is neither research nor necessarily insightful, but the 1st order effect of massive availability of porn seems to be to make a lot of males less willing to do the effort it takes to get an actual woman to have sex with them. Which means that young ladies have less choice of suitable men, which means less bargaining power. So to the extent that porn satiates men more than it does women, it appears that women are ones losing on the balance of power.
At some point during the 00's I read that women were now the largest consumers of porn. I don't know if that factoid was true or not.
I suspect this might have been counting erotic fiction as porn, and finding some particular way to normalize across categories (number of pages turned, number of minutes per week spent, whatever).
Just scooted around online. Looks like that stat's not true now. Seems like about twice as many men as women consume porn.
But to Kenny's point could Fifty Shades of Gray be considered to be porn? I don't know. And I no longer know porn when I see it. :-)
I don’t know about the effect that free, widespread pornography has on gender equality, but I’ve often wondered if it could be at the root of the precipitous drop in sexual assault since the 1990s. In fact, I often wonder if it could’ve played a crucial role in the corresponding decline in violent crime in general.
The National Crime Victimization Survey from the Justice Department reported a significant decrease in sexual assault rates since the mid-1990s. Specifically, from 1995 to the late 2010s, there was a noted decrease of about 44% in the U.S. sexual assault rate. This timeframe would appear to correspond with when Internet porn access from home would’ve become widespread.
I've heard that on average, people are having less sex in general, not just assault, and age at first sexual experience has been going up. But a quick search was unable to find when this trend started, or how significant it has been.
But both of these are also parts of other larger trends that don't seem that plausibly connected to porn.
Don't forget, that the reduced background levels of lead in our environment have also correlated to the fall in violent crime. And this pattern seems to be playing out in other parts of the world. But correlation is not causation.
Reporting methods of sexual assault have also changed and skewed the statistics post 90s, possibly explaining some of the dramatic decrease. But I imagine that if widespread porn was having some positive effects on society, the world wouldn’t be that eager to embrace them, and consequently might be more prone to dismiss them out of hand.
It’s worth noting that none of this in any way excuses the clear harms of pornography (rampant exploitation, addiction, etc.).
Most technologies have their pluses and minuses. But, like you said, the pluses of porn are likely to be dismissed or shouted down, especially on our politically correct campuses. Maybe that's why there's so little research on the question.
I'll follow up on the sex crime stats that you mentioned -- thanks! If I find similar declines in other countries, then one could say that this isn't just an artifact of local changes in enforcement, reporting, or incident tracking.
Here's a meta-study that includes 2 studies from New Zealand, 4 from South Africa, 1 from Brazil, 1 from Scotland, 1 from Italy, and 9 from the United States.
https://journals.plos.org/globalpublichealth/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgph.0002177
> The range of outcomes that were significantly associated with lead exposure [7 of the studies] were primarily related to an arrest, incarceration, or conviction of some type, with increasing blood lead concentrations in childhood prospectively associated with later arrests and convictions in several studies. In addition to this association, 7 studies found strong associations between lead exposure and later delinquent or aggressive behavior irrespective of arrest status....Even in reviewed studies in which statistically significant associations between lead and crime did not exist [2 of the studies], significant relationships between lead and damaging patterns of behavior that are more likely to lead to negative long-term outcomes were still present.
>....This review demonstrates an association between exposure to lead and the later development of delinquent, antisocial, and criminal behavior. Although borderline levels of risk are seen in several of our included studies, most are above the null value and estimates of risk are generally precise.
I fly out to London tomorrow. Is there absolutely anything that I ought to do while I am there that I probably haven't thought to book?
Get a full English breakfast at "E Pellicci." It's address is 332 Bethnal Green Rd, London, and it's closest to the Bethnal Green station.
Thanks for the suggestion! I was up and down Benthal green, though I unfortunately did not make it to E Pellicci (admittedly not a big eater, either). Nonetheless, I really appreciated the suggestion and I feel like my trip to London was better for knowing about this!
Try pie and mash.
Leadenhall Market.
The bookshops in Chareng Cross Road.
Hey, thanks for the suggestions. When I finally got around to trying to check out Charing Cross, the station was undergoing some work, so I unfortunately did not make it there, but I did make it to Leadenhall right by London! Quite nice! Thanks again!!
No idea what you are interested in, so in case you don't know the local websites, try https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/ and https://londonist.com/ for what's open right now.
Thank you for these resources, I found them useful while I was down in London!
Hire a bike and cycle round the parks. I went round Regents Park today and it's looking lovely.
Kew Gardens, Hampton Court, Hampstead Heath, Greenwich
Thanks for the suggestion!! I can't ride a bike, but the weather was gorgeous in the week I was there and I really enjoyed all of the parks! Londoners have it good!
My favourite thing to do there was tour the HMS Belfast, would recommend.
Ah, drats! I did not get around top touring it, unfortunately. Hopefully I will get to do it next time. Thanks for the suggestion!
I'd go up to the St. Paul's cathedral dome if that is still open!
Thanks for the suggestion! I actually did make it there (passed it on the way to Dr. Johnson's house). So beautiful! Thank you for the suggestion!
Visit a pub where cask ale is served and give it a try. The CAMRA website (camra.org.uk) is a good way to find one.
Hey, thanks for the suggestion! I had one at the Lyric in Soho that was pretty good. Kinda sweet, not too hoppy. I definitely would love to have another one!
> Many thanks to Substack, who have streamlined some code to make ACX comments load faster.
jesus christ finally
this has been so unbelievably annoying, and for some reason this was the only Substack that had this problem
I don't know what other Substacks you follow, but Matthew Yglesias is the only other one I read that has even a quarter of the comments of this one.
They made a few custom enhancements here for Scott, when he started ACX. My guess is that those clashed with later developments, and weren't systematically tested.
Say, that Vox poetry contest that was solicited for here a while ago has resolved, and the winners are up.
https://www.rachellott.com/poems-and-translations/vox-poetry-contest/2024-contest-winners/
I enjoyed these, thanks for posting!
For anyone wondering:
1) “Vox” here is the name of the contest, with no relation to the media website of the same name.
2) The poetry solicited for the contest was explicitly formal poetry in the English tradition, with the corresponding rhyme schemes and stanzaic structures, etc.
Thanks for the reminder, Hal!
EDIT: removed rude comment about free form poetry.
Not formal poetry but pretty sure Dan was not a narcissistic asshole.
Dog poetry by my dog Stan - 80s Letterman (his empty dog dish mocks him) - all these years later I giggle when I think about it
Rude comment now deleted BTW
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=h_FUF1Mv0sk
> You won’t find the modern sort of “seven words an author pulled out of his narcissistic asshole and slapped onto the page in a column” so-called “poetry” here.
>EDIT: removed rude comment about free form poetry.
Wow, this is what remained *after* removing a rude comment about free form poetry?!
Wtf? That was the content I thought I cut out. Fucking substack. After I make or edit a comment, there’s no visual indication and the page doesn’t even update.
OK, that makes more sense! Substack reeeeallly needs to fix this sort of thing.
I guess you can edit a comment to add, but not to subtract? That might be reasonable, so that you can't take away the content that someone else's preserved reply is reacting to. But they should indicate that this is impossible, or even better, allow it to strikethrough but not delete the text.
Yawn. ;-)
Riveting commentary. Not sure what you meant, but if you wanna argue about poetry, by all means state your opinions — I may not be able to respond, but I’m sure you could get a good thread going.
As a published poet (albeit only in second- and third- tier literary journals), I'd prefer not rehash the arguments for form poetry vs the freer styles of poetry. It's a religious argument — and usually, the people staking their positions (on either side of the divide) have little understanding of the history of poetry in English (let alone other language traditions), and they are blinded by their prejudices. That "narcissistic asshole" ad hominem you tossed out suggests you are one of the true believers in form. So anything I say will likely cause you to lob ad hominem attacks in my general direction. I've got better things to do. Cheers!
You don't believe in the Marxian theory of literature, where worth drives from effort? ;-P
I may be a Leftie, but I never took communion in the Church of Marx.
Fair enough. In retrospect, I regret my phrasing. I am only so very tired of seeing bad examples of the free styles held up as the be-all end-all of poetry. I’ll see if there’s an edit button on here (and if we keep talking, I promise there will be no ad hominem from me.)
If you have favorite examples of the freer styles, I would like to see them.
Walt Whitman.
I don't necessarily value any style of poetry over another, but let's talk about the purpose of rhyme and meter.
The ancients used rhyme and meter to enable the illiterate to memorize and recite long narrative (epic) poems. And this allowed their cultural transmission to younger generations of illiterates. Of course, the literate minority also composed poetry. But few could read those works unless they were in a form that the illiterate majority could memorize. AFAIK most of ancient poetry was sung. For instance, Homeric bards sang his songs accompanied by the four-stringed phorminx. They'd improvise a four-note melody around the verses to enhance the rhythm and drama of the recital. (More drachma's in the bucket if he could keep the audience's attention!)
Some way through the Axial Age various cultures developed lyric styles of poetry that reflected the interior moods and thoughts of the (literate) author. Moods and thoughts can be didactic and boring to others when communicated in ordinary language. So lyric poets started using other devices — e.g. metaphors, conceits, metonymy and synecdoches — to make poems more interesting to their literate audience. For me, the poetic fragments of Sappho stand out as some as some of the most beautiful expressions of longing written in a poetic form.
“their heart grew cold
they let their wings down”
―from "If Not, Winter"
“In the crooks of your body, I find my religion.”
Sappho makes me wish I had been forced to learn Classical Greek in school. I'm pretty sure these lines in Sappho's Greek were in a rhyming matrix, but notice that translated into English, their images are beautiful without the need for rhyme. Are here words longer poetry because we no longer retain the meter and rhyme of the author's language?
One of my hobbies is translating Tang Dynasty poetry, so I'm somewhat familiar with their poetic styles and devices those poets. The ancient and medieval Chinese used meter and rhyming schemes, and their poems were written to be sung to familiar tunes (approved by the Emperor's Music Bureau — sort of like the French Academy for Chinese music). Middle Chinese had four tones, but they were different from the four tones of modern Mandarin. And although the characters are mostly readable to literate Chinese who can still read the traditional characters (less so for people raised on simplified characters). However the pronunciation of the characters has changed so drastically twelve hundred years that these poems no longer rhyme in spoken Mandarin — and because the tones are different, the old meters no longer work. Yet school kids still recite Li Bai and Du Fu in Mandarin without the help of rhyme or meter.
The Victorian British (and French) tried to translate Chinese poetry in rhymed forms, and their translations were atrocious. The Tang Dynasty poets had all sorts of poetic devices — and the implied meaning of the poems were frequently different from the explicit meanings (Chinese poetry has always been hypersensitive to the politics of the times). And there's no one-to-one mapping of Chinese words to English words. Moreover, every Chinese word has a different range of synonyms from corresponding English words. The meanings and the implied sentiments of the original poems were lost when the Victorian translators forced them into the meters and rhyming schemes they preferred.
The medieval Japanese emulated the Chinese five-word and seven-word verse forms. The Chines also had eight-word verse forms and free verse forms, but the Japanese latched on to the five- and seven-word formats. However, most words in Middle Chinese were single syllables (but, as an aside, some linguists have noted that Mandarin is evolving into a polysyllabic language). But Japanese is a polysyllabic language — they adapted their polysyllabic language to the five- and seven- forms of Chinese poetry. Thus we get the 5-7-5 and the 5-7-5-7-7 syllabic forms of Haiku and Tanka. Although literate Japanese could read Chinese characters, the rhyming schemes and metric schemes of Classical Chinese were lost on the Japanese. And AFAIK Japan never adopted rhyming schemes for their poetry (please correct me if I'm wrong!).
When Ezra Pound translated Chinese Poetry, he didn't attempt to make it rhyme. Instead, he tried to translate the mood and imagery of the poems. Unfortunately, he got stuck on getting more meaning across by adding extra verbiage. So the meaning and the implied meanings were translated, but the elegance and simplicity of the Chinese was lost. Other poets realized, "hey, maybe imagery was more important than rhyme and meter!" Seamus Heaney (who was no piker when it came to rhyme) said in a TV interview that a poem is “some kind of housing of a moment, a snapshot of consciousness, that can be looked upon by other persons…” As the Japanese did, modern English poets largely went off chasing the snapshot of consciousness as image at the expense of form. Some decry this, but that's the way it is. And to my mind, unless one is very very careful meter and rhyme can detract from the subtlety of the image.
But let's not forget about our glorious English language (and I mean that without any snark). The Tang Dynasty poets were writing poems with a modern feel when the illiterate Anglo-Saxons were reciting their epic poetry in kennings. But English poetry evolved quickly. The Anglo-Saxon rhyming schemes no longer work in modern English. Should we translate the poem about my namesake into rhymed English? I've seen it done, but it generally requires that the meter of the Anglo-Saxon be mangled. And if we keep the meter, then it's difficult to get the rhyming scheme to work (at least this is what I was told by my dad, who had some facility with Anglo-Saxon). Likewise, Shakespeare wrote some of the most elegant poetry in the English Language. But the Elizabethan rhyming schemes don't work that well with modern English pronunciation. Would we dare to update his wording to make the rhymes work? I don't think so! ;-)
Here's my translations of some of Du Mu's poetry. Feel free to tell me if you think it's shite. I won't be offended. Even though the originals were rhymed, I think that in English rhyme would detract from the simplicity of the image in Egrets...
-------
Egrets
by Du Mu (杜牧)
snow-clad in snow feathers black jade beaks
a flock of them stab their reflections catching little fish
alarmed they fly away bright against the blue-green hills
a pear tree's blossom falls on an evening’s breeze
> original text...
鹭鸶
杜牧
雪衣雪发青玉嘴，群捕鱼儿溪影中。
惊飞远映碧山去，一树梨花落晚风。
-------
And a rhyming would detract from unguarded bitterness in his poem commonly known as "Snow Letter" (Snow Within a Letter's Heart is the literal translation of title)...
-------
Snow Within a Letter’s Heart
by Du Mu
December snow is a foot thick—
I get cranky shivering in the frozen mist
I’m in Lonely City beside the big marsh,
and the man has neglected my little fire—it smokes
Who can I complain to?
I’m worried, hurt, and have no will to grasp with.
The Son of Heaven cries out for a humane sage [to guide him]—
appoint a worthy person to be your minister—
an expert in the worldly considerations of government—
few would have the character to take this on.
The machinations of Court can be seen clearly—
it takes endurance to preserve my restraint.
If only this were a day in my great-grandfather’s time
rising [again]
like the mythical phoenix with its flowered crest.
Peoples’ abilities have rotted away—
they’ve thrown out all that’s proper!
The Northern Palace is in the hands of evil obstructionists—
I hear there’s an army 300 miles away,
and they’re leaderless and breaking up
to steal and rob, foraging like bandits.
A minister of honest virtue would find a solution—
others deserve a slow flogging with bamboo canes.
It’s as if the Mongolians convened a committee to discuss
how animals eat and lie down in their fur—
and the affair takes place in a monastery’s great hall!
You know you’re helpless,
standing on the sidelines waiting to step forward,
but you’re continually falling in regard, status,
opportunities.
These are worn-out acts of longing in December.
Liquor will level our mood—
do not delay.
The spring waits warmly
inside a jar—pour out another measure.
> original text...
雪中書懷
杜牧
臘雪一尺厚，雲凍寒頑癡。
孤城大澤畔，人疎煙火微。
憤悱欲誰語？憂慍不能持。
天子號仁聖，任賢如事師。
凡稱曰治具，小大無不施。
明庭開廣敞，才儁受羈維。
如日月縆公曾切。升，若鸞鳳葳蕤。
人才自朽下，棄去亦其宜。
北虜壞亭障，聞屯千里師。
牽連久不解，他盜恐旁窺。
臣實有長策，彼可徐鞭笞。
如蒙一召議，食肉寢其皮。
斯乃廟堂事，爾微非爾知。
向來躐等語，長作陷身機。
行當臘欲破，酒齊去聲。不可遲。
且想春候暖，甕間傾一巵。
Amen. We've got too many Poets and not enough poetry.
Does anyone know of any papers/books that compare fertility rates between resource-rich countries and non resource-rich countries?
I'm thinking of a comparison between countries A and B, where both have the same - or similar - per capita income I, so as to avoid the effect of income on fertility, but A is a resource-rich country while B is not.
> I'm thinking of a comparison between countries A and B, where both have the same - or similar - per capita income I, so as to avoid the effect of income on fertility, but A is a resource-rich country while B is not.
I'm not sure that this sort of comparison will *avoid* the effect of income on fertility. There are many differences in the distribution and type of income between resource-rich and resource-poor countries, so that if you look at ones with the same overall level of income, one will be higher in certain sub-populations and the other will be higher in other sub-populations. This would certainly be an interesting set of comparisons to make, but it might also be equally interesting to compare countries with different total income and same non-resource-related income, and probably other ways of slicing.
"I'm thinking of a comparison between countries A and B, where both have the same - or similar - per capita income I, so as to avoid the effect of income on fertility, but A is a resource-rich country while B is not."
I don't know of a comparison, but would Norway (North Sea Oil) vs. Sweden count? The per-capita GDPs are kinda different, but culturally the two countries are pretty similar.
I think you are going to find that most pairs have too many confounding variables. Switzerland and the UAE have similar per-captia GDPs, but the differences aren't just resource-rich vs not.
And the current number of countries is "small" with a large spread in per-capita GDPs so your list of candidates is likely small, too.
Japan vs Korea (including the north) might count a little bit? But, again, confounding variables ...
>Switzerland and the UAE have similar per-captia GDPs, but the differences aren't just resource-rich vs not.
Understatement of the year? :-)
A look at Seinfeld's movie: Pop-Tarts Re-frosted: An allegory about creativity in a corporatized world?https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2024/05/pop-tarts-re-frosted-an-allegory-about-creativity-in-a-corporatized-world.html
From beginning to end, Unfrosted is constructed with the intricacy of Seinfeld’s stand-up bits. Taken as a sequence of five-minute segments it’s wonderful, and there are resonances among and mid- and long-range connections among those segments. But you can’t carry an hour and 20-minute film on watch-making intricacy alone. There’s got to be a compelling story, a plot. Oh, we’ve got lots of plotting: Kellogg’s vs. Post, Big Milk vs. Big Cereal, Cuban sugar vs. Puerto-Rican sugar, Russia vs. America, mascots vs. Kellogg’s, and all the while NASA’s shooting for the moon. What holds that together? Pop-Tarts
And that’s not enough. As I noted in my original review, “You can’t take a Godzilla toy, hook it up to an air-pump, and expect to inflate it into a world-destroying comedic monster.” Unfrosted in meticulously crafted, but unfocused and rambling.
Pop-Tarts themselves exist at the right scale for a meticulously-crafted stand-up bit, which is where the movie started, as a stand-up bit. But in a feature-length film Pop-Tarts are reduced to being a MacGuffin. “MacGuffin” is a term of art that means – I’m quoting the dictionary on my computer – “an object or device in a movie or a book that serves merely as a trigger for the plot.” The statue in The Maltese Falcon is a classic example. It turns out to be junk, but it motivates the action.
Eh, I enjoyed unfrosted. It's not the greatest movie ever and like you said the long term plot doesn't quite work, but it's fun enough to make for a good short movie.
1. Does a top loading (instead of front loading) washing machine completely bypass the problem of mold in the washing machine?
2. What is the best washing machine that also avoids the mold problem?
I recently got a combined washer-dryer (the GE Profile series) and though I haven't had it long enough to conclusively judge the mold issue, I strongly suspect that the drum being throughly dried immediately after washing will help significantly.
Mostly I just like spreading the gospel of this thing -- I put my laundry in at night and wake up with it clean AND dried? Crazy.
I've never had an issue of mold in my front-loading washer, but I've always just left the door and detergent containers slightly ajar. My washer is about 10 years old at this point.
1. Yes.
I don't even understand how front loaders are better.
A giant mistake in tech evolution.
2. Anything top loading.
Have you looked into SpeedQueen? They also avoid microchips as much as possible, so they don't break for stupid electronics reasons.
I think there are two main arguments for front-loaders.
One is space concerns. If you're in a tight unit and you need stacked units, you have to go front loader.
The other is water usage. Front loaders have an easier time making sure all the clothes get equal exposure even with lower water levels, so they have an easier time meeting whatever efficiency standards apply (for purposes of tax credits or regulations or whatnot).
But otherwise I don't see any benefit.
There are top loaders that spin the washing drum the same way that front loaders do (around a horizontal axis, like a wheel). That should eliminate the water usage difference. However, they're probably more like front loaders in terms of mold, noise and so on, too.
We have a stacked unit with a top loader. Maytag, had it for >30 years with minimal repair needs. Maybe they don't make them now?
Yes, I suppose less water usage is very important. I didn't know. Thanks.
They do, however, make it much more likely that your clothes colors will bleed into each other.
Cool, cool.
It's not that important compared to other uses of water, but some people seem to think that personal suffering is inherently virtuous.
This depends where you live
True. Although at least in America, those places sometimes have horrendous water rights systems that make the problem much worse than it should be.
Like others said, keep the door of the washer ajar and run a sanitizing cycle regularly to avoid mold. I've been using front loaders for over a decade, never had any mold problems.
LG makes excellent front loaders, for example, WM4000 model.
I never had mold in a washing machine until I got a front-loader. I think this is because the water doesn't sit in a place vulnerable to mold; it drains out completely every time. And I think the top-loader doesn't seal completely, allowing any water to evaporate; front-loaders must have water-tight seals.
There should be a little stop on your front loader's door that keeps it slightly ajar. Between loads, leave it slightly open.
Huh, I usually just leave the door to mine wide open. I wonder if it has that little device.
My (front-loading) washing machine does have that, and it doesn't get moldy.
I'm a philosophy teacher and I'm thinking of writing about video games. Although I'm passionate about the subject, I suffer from scruples: shouldn't I rather use my energy studying more important subjects, such as ethics? Do you think that devoting years of one's intellectual life to working on video games is a bad use of one's time?
Fellow philosophy professor here.
I would think that once you've gone the route of studying philosophy, while also being concerned with whether what you're doing is of greater value, you should be quite open to thinking that a lot of the value your work provides will be through the higher-order effects of how your work shapes the thinking of someone whose work shapes the thinking of someone whose work shapes the thinking of someone who does something really quite directly valuable.
Was Frege's clean delineation of the difference in semantic content between co-referring names particularly important in its own right? Hard to say, but it was very important for motivating him to develop quantificational logic properly, which was then extremely important for the word of Tarski, Turing, and Gödel, with all of its indirect effects through automated computing machinery.
I think it's very valuable to think about Philip Kitcher's 1990 paper, "The Division of Cognitive Labor" (https://www.jstor.org/stable/2026796). He argues that it is very valuable for the scientific researchers in a field to be distributed among different research paradigms, including some working on the paradigms that are unlikely to bear fruit, rather than having everyone work on the most likely paradigm, because it's valuable for society to have that chance of great success if the unlikely thing turns out to work. I think the same thing applies when thinking about the value of different fields of research, and not just different paradigms within a field - it's a good thing that not everyone is working on cancer cures and AI systems (or whatever one thinks the most directly beneficial subjects are). Kitcher argues that a lot of the incentive structure of academia is actually fairly well-designed to distribute people in good ways between these fields, even if these incentives seem perverse from a purely locally truth-maximizing or utility-maximizing metric.
Incidentally, have you read Thi Nguyen's book /Games: Agency as Art/? (https://global.oup.com/academic/product/games-9780190052089) It won the APA book prize a couple years back, and I think for very good reason. Even though games feel like a frivolous topic, they actually provide a really good lens through which to view core phenomena like agency, motivation, etc. I think that a lot of epistemologists should be reading chapter 2 of that book, about how goals consciously adopted for one purpose can be important for achieving another purpose. (It's no fun to play a game like Calvinball where the only rule is "try to have fun", but it can be lots of fun to play a game like Twister where you adopt these completely nonsensical goals of putting your hands and feet on particular colored circles. You end up having the most fun when someone fails to achieve the goal, but only when everyone is really trying.)
Not to say that work on video games is only valuable when it directly results in a book with these sorts of wide-ranging philosophical impacts, but rather that Nguyen read and digested a lot of work on games (and dance, and cooking, and art, and other things) and turned all of that into bigger implications for philosophy generally, and this sort of somewhat more obviously valuable project depends on other people doing all these somewhat less obviously valuable projects.
> working on video games
*Creating* video games might be simple artistic creation, or might be like brewing bathtub meth, depending on one's point of view. But *studying* video games seems like a completely reasonable thing for an academic to do, especially if you have passion for the subject. They exist, they are part of the world, and they need to be understood.
Depends on what the goal is that you would hope to achieve with such a project. For example, adjunct professor of History and huge nerd Bret Devereaux of https://acoup.blog/ fame aims to provide a public-facing educational outlet that frequently combines his profession with all kinds of popular works of media such as video games, movies, TV shows, and/or books, or public perception of historical topics in general. He also wants to drum up political support for ailing History departments in US universities that way, a topic which I suspect also looms over Philosophy departments. Finally, his blog has, through consistency (a post each Friday without fail) and quality, attracted enough readers that he found establishing a Patreon site worthwhile. If any or all of those goals appeal to you too, you should absolutely go for it.
A lot of people play a lot of video games, they're an influential art form, they're a big business, they have a big impact on children, they get brought up in political discussion from various angels.
There's plenty of ethically relevant things to write about video games, from the easy utils of just giving a lot of people more enjoyment from a major source of their entertainment and enrichment, to pushing for a major industry that affects our children and culture to be more ethical and better.
Also, very few people will read something that's just on the abstract philosophy of ethics. Lots of people will read something that introduces fundamental concepts from the philosophy of ethics while talking about video games they enjoy. No matter what you're writing about, an audience is always an opportunity to educate.
> Do you think that devoting years of one's intellectual life to working on video games is a bad use of one's time?<
...I mean arguably being a philosophy teacher is a bad use of one's time.
Videogames are the new TV, which were the new books. Would you question covering the ethics of books?
I know Errant Signal (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EPqF_o4mCs) and Superbunnyhop (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybczlSvboVs) were somewhere in the vicinity of vdeogame ethics years ago. Don't know if they are anymore.
Folding Ideas also touched on them with his April Fools Fortnite episode. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPHPNgIihR0
Is there something special about Video Games here, or is the more general question "Should I spend my time just writing on a form of art, or should I just focus on the more traditional topics that philosophers across history have written about?".
Because as a form of art, Video Games are as good as or better than many, the question doesn't change much if you replaced it with "Writing about films" or "Writing about theatre". As a matter of fact, Video Games are way more interesting from a philosophical perspective because its interactivity is unprecedented and allow fundamentally new questions to be asked. You simply can't reach the level of immersion that even the most mediocrely-graphic-ed and mediocrely-written game can induce in its player(s) in any other art form, in my very humble opinion.
This decision depends on a lot of things: Are you doing this unpaid, or are you going to get paid (but must convince those who pay you that studying video games is worthwhile)? Full time or just a hobby? Will the output be visible and/or published, or just for satisfying your curiosity?
> shouldn't I rather use my energy studying more important subjects, such as ethics
But why not both? You can explore a subject as vast as ethics from a myriad of perspectives. Video Games are a massive social phenomenon and a cultural innovation that offers plenty of question. For online games, there are the ethical questions raised by interacting with strangers as an anonymous stranger, and what kind of behavior this encourages and emphasizes. I recall a Hacker News comment once where (someone who claims to be) an Australian commented on how Filipinos and Filipinas have an absolutely cut-throat style of competition that ruins any game, and that this is ultimately traceable to how their society changed in the last couple of years (less jobs and opportunities for an ever-growing population). If this anecdote is correct, video games offer a micro-cosmos that amplifies and zooms in on existing ethical questions and tensions.
You can explore the ethics of blood and gore, and what it means to play games we fundamentally disagree with. For one example, the Call of Duty franchise in its Modern Warfare arc is an unbridled and unapologetic celebration of interventionism and the sort of pointless wars that the US military is most famously fond of since Vietnam, but they are also one of the finest pieces of art I have ever experienced in my life, their cutscenes play in my head for no reason at random times. What does it mean for a pacifist to love war games? What kind of moral statements or commitments (if any) are pressing a bunch of keys on the keyboard and moving the mouse making? Those are all very interesting questions.
Studying fiction can be as serious or as silly as you make it to be. For an extreme special case, consider Theology, a study of fiction whose scholars take themselves extremely seriously and debate endlessly over the finest minutia. The Abrahamic stories are not the most interesting or well-written stories I have seen - although there are some gems in there - but it doesn't matter: they're influential in shaping how billions of people have thought and continue to think about hundreds of topics from women to war to love to death to food, and so their scholars take those stories very seriously.
Video Games have also influenced at least many hundreds of millions on at least dozens of topics till now, they are credited with starting at least one major decade-long cultural war, they are a multi-billion Sports and Entertainement industry that whole countries like Saudi Arabia are rushing to make bank on. All of this, and they have only been around for something like 0.1% of the time that Abrahamic religions have been around for. Measured purely in the ratio of influence/size, that's impressive.
You probably have more insightful and original things to say about video games than about ethics in abstract. Do the thing you are good at.
> Do you think that devoting years of one's intellectual life to working on video games is a bad use of one's time?
Division of labor is the key to prosperity. If all of us stopped doing anything else and started writing books on ethics, we would soon starve to death. Do you have a comparative advantage at writing books on ethics? (You may have a comparative advantage at writing about the video games *and* ethics.)
By the way, you may find this interesting: https://www.darkpattern.games/
Hi Florent,
I considered the path of philosophy teacher/professor before giving it up. I think that my advice in this space would be to just do what you want. That's not a rigorous or philosophical answer, but I think it's a realistic one. Most philosophers (the vast majority) do not make huge or meaningful contributions to the field, and it seems to me to be self-defeating to deprive yourself of the opportunity to pursue an opportunity that you find interesting to instead pursue something that you may find less interesting on the very small chance that your contributions may be significant to the field at large. The hits of philosophy are huge (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Bentham, Russell, Rawls, Parfit, etc.) but between the hits are comparatively large numbers of philosophers tha worked really hard just to be forgotten. All of that is to say, in light of those odds, I think that the difference in expected value between doing video game philosophy or something more traditional, like ethics, is actually probably pretty small.
This could be read as a pessimistic take, but I would instead read a sort of optimism into it. You get to have your cake and eat it, too, in a sense. I would also like to add that I did sort of smuggle in my own way of decision making into my answer; maybe you disagree with following expected value (i.e. there's some grander duty to really think about questions like ethics, which have the potential to be more universal, than there is to think about games, which seem to have limited appeal, even in ideal circumstances). Finally, depending on your situation, the games thing may just be a better route for you in terms of getting published (and tenure). There's already philosophy on games generally, but I don't think it's as robust as ethics/meta-ethics/whatever. You could pretty easily build on the existing literature and dominate the field. Plus you could get really smart people into philosophy (i.e. by using video games to explain questions in ethics, aesthetics, value theory...).
Long story short, I say go for it!
Absolutely not. Suppose your goal is to do a lot of good in the world.
The good of studying ethics -> I guess you know more about ethics? best-case scenario you write a book or make some major point that really resonates with people and so you influence the world in a macroscopic way. This almost never happens and seems really hard. Likely out come is that you slightly-positively influence a few people in conversations. I doubt it actually makes you _more ethical_, because you already have the moral intuitions that lead you to want to study ethics, so you're not going to get those from studying it. Maybe you are like slightly better at trolley problem type decisions? But honestly I that just comes out in the wash; ethics are too fuzzy for fine-grained detailed calculations to make a large difference in the world.
The good of making video games -> well naively one might say there isn't any. But the fact that it is *hard* to quantify the moral value of making art, doesn't mean there isn't any. In fact I'd argue that the moral value of art is huge; it is the entire point of art; all the great art, especially great literature, was valuable and widely-appreciated precisely because it had a moral effect. Either it injects new ideas into the water supply, or it shows new perspectives that certain people are looking for, or it gives substance to their anxieties or tensions in understanding the world, or it makes them feel empathized and therefore less alone, or it shows them parts of their world they can treasure, maybe by casting their daily life in a good light, showing them lovely emotions, gives them hope for changing things, reminds them how to enjoy the small things, or maybe it shows them how to understand the things that threaten them, lets them reckon with their enemies and dangers... or maybe it just gives them some enjoyment in their downtime, lets them pass the days of an otherwise stressful life in a way that gives them joy.
Like yeah, if the game you would make is some stupid mobile casino game, skip it. But if you're drawn to making a work of literature? or a piece of immersive performance art? Even doing that badly is a much high moral +EV than reading about ethics. Reading about ethics by definition does not have a positive outcome--you'd be kicking the can down the road, hoping for a positive outcome from some unspecified act of creation _after_ you do it. Whereas making art has a positive outcome _directly_, because it's an act of creation _now_.
While the area of ethics might be more impactful, it's also very crowded. Video game philosophy is very neglected, so I think there might be low-hanging fruit left.
Why not try it out and see if it resonates with you and your audience?
How do you determine which subjects are more or less important?
I might not be philosophically minded enough to tackle this, but I'd argue that being passionate about the subject is as important as it gets, and no rational argument can - or should - change that.
The thing I found unethical about video games is they're addictive. Specially for kids. I know one who does nothing else.
One way you could do great service to such kids is by helping their parents understand this and educate them on how to cure them of this addiction, using insights you have.
You could also educate people on how to avoid this addiction.
Unethical of the developers to have developed the game, or unethical of the parents for allowing their kid to do video games and nothing else?
I think you could make a different case game by game. If you're talking about developers who just made mario or something, and it's "addictive" in the sense of being fun, with "I can't put it down/stop consuming" as a side effect the way a page-turner of a novel can be, I don't think there's much case to be made.
But if "addictiveness" is a design feature you're aiming directly at, implementing gatcha mechanics, pings to remind players that they haven't played in a while, etc. If you're design process looks more like casino design aimed at keeping players in the app where they can be monetized than it does like writing a good novel or movie where your audience wants and loves to be there, I think there comes a point where you can call it unethical design, especially if your target market is children.
Intuitively, I agree. But how would you draw the line so the lawyers can't slime their way around it?
Offline vs. Online is a nice bright line. If you can play the game without internet it's not casino addictive.
Not sure - I think I'm at the "I'm confident I can make a case that X is unethical, but still being very careful before making concrete policy proposals about it" step for now. Might read up a bit and see if there are any organizations with good ideas I can glom on.
It's an interesting coincidence that Jonathan Haidt's book is being discussed elsewhere in the thread - that had some proposals (phone free schools, age-gated social media, etc) that are kitty-corner to this and I thought sounded good, but they're not spot on for this and were described mostly at a high level, so more food for thought than concrete fixes.
Interestingly, it's casinos that took a page from the tappy game mechanics to increase the addictiveness of gambling.
If you're looking to make an impact, aim at the unscrupulous nature of apps that are designed to unbalance your life and foster an unhealthy relationship to your device so they can squeeze a few bucks out of you. I wonder how much improved human flourishing we'd find if we could eliminate the tappy game phenomenon.
I don't know. But it is super addictive. Many parents buy it for their kids without knowing about these problems ahead.
Games are designed to be fun, both in the short term and in the long term. Most things in life are not, especially not in the short term and kids are notoriously bad at thinking ahead.
Not all games are designed to be fun. Some are designed to make money, with various ways of supporting that, such as beautiful graphics, leader-boards, competitiveness, etc.
I hate games designed to make money, and wish people would look at that more when evaluating games, as to whether it is actually fun to play instead of the latest thing or something.
The two are not exclusive, but of course you can only optimize one, and anything that involves multiplayer or mtx invariable maximazes the money making.
Still, unless the game does a good enough job in fun department it is not going to make any money, and that baseline game is usually enough of a trap intself for some people.
All the money-making schemes that are built on top of it of course make things a lot worse, usually.
But even a single player game with no competitive content and no mtx can trap a kid for years if it's fun enough.
I don't think so, computer games have gone from not existing to taking up a huge amount of the worlds bandwidth in a very short space of time, so their impact is really underserved intellectually.
When and why did it become religiously important if people believe it not? As I understand e.g. ancient Greek religion or Old Testament Judaism, the important thing was that you did the right rituals and behaved honourably and all was well. But then we get to 300 AD and suddenly people are having fights over obscure questions of trinitarianism and what people believe in their hearts is suddenly really important. What happened? Was it "the Axial age"? Mystery cults? An unique Christian thing? Has doctrine always been important but it's harder to see in the sources? If anyone has a book recommendation or article I'd be super interested!
For the amusement of anyone interested in the question:
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1304/credo-the-game-of-dueling-dogmas
At various times, certain sects of Pure Land Buddhism have been effectively faith-based. The rough idea was that if you say the right 3 words even once, with enough faith, the bodhisattva Amitabha will guarantee that you will be reborn in the Pure Land, where you will inevitably achieve enlightenment. So one practice was to recite the words, over and over again, as sort of a meditation, in hopes that one of the recitations would be sufficient. And as I recall, in a few cases there were also more violent means used to encourage unwilling people to say the 3 words, in extremis, but I forget where I read that.
Namo Amida Butsu. You're likely referring to Jodo Shin Shu, which is currently the most popular form of Buddhism in Japan. It is an extremely simplified version of Pure Land, often reduced to reciting the nembutsu (the phrase at the beginning of this post). It has a fascinating history, going from being effectively outlawed for its tendency to inspire peasant revolts (the Ikko-Ikki), to a few centuries later effectively being the state religion with mandatory enrollment at the local temple functioning as a sort of census of the commoners. Of note, when becoming an official state religion it was deliberately adjusted over the years to make it a more competitive religion with Christianity by offering things like weddings, funerals, and weekly services with sermons etc, mimicking the structure of Christianity while retaining Buddhist cosmology.
>with enough faith
Not just faith, but shinjin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinjin
That would be them, I think. While poking around in Wikipedia, I found this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kakure_nenbutsu
Which mentions that it persisted in various places, including Satsuma, up until the Meiji Restoration. That of course makes me wonder if it had anything to do with the Satcho Alliance to overthrow the Shogunate, but I don't see anything on Wikipedia. It would make a cool "Da Vinci Code"/"Assassin's Creed" style revisionist history, though!
On the other hand, at least some forms of Pure Land Buddhism explicitly reject the notion that the efficacy of Amitabha's name depends on faith:
https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100010614
"Once a monk declined this gift, saying that he had no faith in Amitābha, and that it would be hypocritical for him to chant the name. This caused a crisis in Ippen's thinking [...] This doubt was resolved during a trip to Kumano, where a manifestation of Amitābha assured him that faith was immaterial; the Buddha's power was indeed enough to bring beings to rebirth."
Buddhism as it emerged in the Axial Age didn't really care about the bigger philosophical questions. You were a Buddhist if you agreed with the Four Noble Truths of Suffering and the Eightfold Path to escape suffering. Of course, Buddhism spawned a fabulous effluorescence of philosophical inquiry during the first half of the first millennium CE. But with rare exceptions, during its 2600-year history, it's been fairly tolerant of other religions and of its heresies.
You said it yourself, "if you agreed with the Four Noble Truths of Suffering and the Eightfold Path to escape suffering". Those are questions of belief. If Buddhism didn't care about belief and was oriented towards right practice, instead of what you wrote it would be something like "as long as you did the right kind of meditation".
The take that I like the best was that the 4 noble truths are like a doctor's prescription: this is the disease, this is the cause, this is the cure, and here's your prescription. If you don't think you suffer from the disease, that's fine, you can go about your life normally. If you do think you suffer from the disease, then think about it, maybe give it a try, and see if it works for you. They're not articles of faith, they're a working hypothesis. The sect I was involved with had no faith involved whatsoever. Despite being mystical, it was very empirical and treated all the supernatural elements as metaphor.
But one of the other main functions of the 4 noble truths is to identify who is a Buddhist and who isn't. A lot of the early structure of Theravada Buddhism can be seen in light of the surrounding Hindu practice, and its periodic gurus who'd form new and exciting sects. These could cause problems like social unrest, and one thing the rules accomplished was to make it clear that Buddhism was not a problem. They're not coming for your women, they're not a sex cult, they don't want parents to abandon children, they do have forms of practice which are compatible with everyday life. That sort of stuff. People can take parts of Buddhism and go off and do their own thing, but then they aren't Buddhists, so all the pitchforks and torches should go to those people over there doing their own thing, and not bother us Buddhists over here.
Hmmm. The first noble truth is that we suffer. Note that it doesn't say we suffer all the time (though some Buddhists seem to interpret it that way). That statement sounds to me like it's verifiably true — and thus it's not an opinion or a belief — unless you think it's possible to live without feeling pain, loss, and fear at some point in one's life. The other three truths and the eightfold path follow from that first premise. And the Buddha said you don't have to believe him or in his self-help formula He urged his followers to test his system out for themselves. No one was burned at the stake for not buying into his system.
But having said that, Buddhism has diverged into a bunch of different sects and traditions. The first Sangha that I belonged to was made up of people from diverse traditions. After I moved away I never found a Sangha with that sort of ecumenical spirit. I hopped around between different groups, and I noticed that people were uncomfortable if I mentioned how different groups did things. All the groups I encountered were sort of insular, and they all felt they were practicing Buddhism the right way.
> All the groups I encountered were sort of insular, and they all felt they were practicing Buddhism the right way.
Martial arts can feel the same way. :-(
One aspect to consider is that Christian identity is determined *entirely* by belief. Judaism was the religion of a particular ethnic group; even today there is basically no Jewish evangelism. I think they're actually opposed to the notion, and "conversion" generally happens only for someone who is marrying a Jew. Christianity, in contrast, seeks to proselytize the entire world. So if being a Christian is determined by what you believe, it's important to have those beliefs be generally clear and agreed upon. Otherwise you end up with 2 groups of "Christians" who don't actually believe the same things, and therefore have no connection to each other. Doubly so when communication is slow and you're going to be sending missionaries as far away as Gaul, Ethiopia, India, central Asia, etc; you have to have all those things nailed down quickly.
Additionally, Christianity was somewhat unique at the time in its unwavering belief that there were no other gods (Judaism also had this belief, as far as I know, but they rarely had enough power for it to matter). Once Christianity took over the Roman Empire, it became much harder to sustain the idea of "keep your existing gods, just also pay tribute to ours" that had been the status quo. In this context, performing rituals to other gods and to the Christian one makes no sense--if you believe in Christianity, you have to give up the old rituals.
One last difference between Christianity and other religions (probably tying back to point 1) was, well, their entire conception of the divine. In Christianity, God is an omnibenevolent entity who primarily asks for your faith, and wants you and all other humans to willingly join him in heaven after you "die" on Earth. He also knows what you truly believe, regardless of what you say or do. In other religions, gods are capricious, jealous, selfish, and limited. They care about whether they're given respect and sacrifice, but may not even know what worshippers are thinking. They give and take away Earthly rewards seemingly at random and with unclear motives. Faith just matters to Christianity more than rituals.
It's also worth noting that religious doctrine was important in the past. For example, one Egyptian pharaoh attempted to replace the existing religion with one of his own invention (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akhenaten#Atenism), which caused a great deal of strife over 1300 years before Christianity. This new religion did involve replacing rituals as well as belief, but it seems clear that the people of the time did actually care *who* they were worshipping and what that god did.
This is a pretty good historical overview
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_God
I'm not a Christianity expert, but from what i remember from the old testament I am pretty sure that it is a very early Christianity move (by Paul?) - an explicit replacement of Torah observance by Faith in Jesus, of the sacrifices in the (already destroyed anyway) Temple by the death of Jesus...
I'd agree, I'd add that the Christian move also sheds light on some events in the Old Testament too - was Moses only interested in ritual when he saw the Israelites worshipping the golden calf? Or was he interested in ritual as an act of faith (or, sacrilege)?
I wouldn't say "sheds light". At most, "suggests reinterpretation ".
I also think that "being only interested in ritual" was somewhat strawmanned by Christianity. Some "rituals" are arbitrary, but some make at least internal sense. Worshipping the golden calf was an act of unfaithfulness in the sense that cheating on your wife is, and is very different from just thinking about other woman.
Sorry I wasn't clear - for me any ritual qua ritual will always have some implicit beliefs behind it, certainly for Moses the Law was a visible act of faith in the true God whereas worshipping the golden calf was a visible act of unbelief.
Oh, then I generally agree - except I think it was more of a loyalty issue, and not of belief as such. So maybe not "implicit belief" but "implicit value/virtue". Do you agree?
Also, I don't see it as a contribution of Christianity.
Oh, then I generally agree - except I think it was more of a loyalty issue, and not of belief as such. So maybe not "implicit belief" but "implicit value/virtue". Do you agree?
Also, I don't see it as a contribution of Christianity.
Paul's letters are worth a read - on the one hand he's defending some liberalising of the Law (circumcision, dietary requirements), on the other hand he's saying this liberalisation is actually a re-disovery of the Law as an act of faith.
Judaism & Islam are/were legalistic communitarian religions with a heavy emphasis on orthopraxy. Christianity took a more philosophical/theological approach (influenced by Greek philosophy), and particularly in the form of Protestantism emphasized individual orthodoxy over ritual. This may be a W.E.I.R.D. thing.
Islam is very heavy on believing, much much more than any modern or historically recent form of Judaism.
The very first cornerstone of Islam, and the first thing that a new convert to Islam must do, is saying "I testify [i.e. believe, and publicly declare so] that there is no God but Allah, and that Muhammed is the messenger of Allah". Islam also vehemently denies even the most remote possibility that Muhammed is not the last messenger, a "Muslim" who believes in the possibility of other messengers after Muhammed will be declared an Infidel by all Muslims I know, even if they are otherwise identical in how they worship and practice Islam to those Muslims.
Islam also has a rule that if your father is a Muslim, you're a Muslim (for Judaism it's the mother). Once born into it, leaving Islam is prohibited.
Not necessarily born, just entering it by any means. Even if you just converted.
Islam is by far one of the worst of the 3 Abrahamic religions, rivaled only by very extreme Christian denominations like Evangelicals. It combines the worst praxis from Judaism with the worst theory from Christianity, all in one shitty package.
Yeah, you can enter via proclaiming the article of faith. My point is just that it can happen without that.
I suppose I look at religions as archives of texts, practises, rituals, arguments, stories. Every archive at some point needs a retention policy. That policy can be more or less philosophical but it can't avoid being more abstract than the things it is organising, and it can't completely avoid questions about fundamentals - what are the key texts/rituals of our faith?
I suspect it's a wrong framing, to be honest.
Most believers in any religion don't know enough about the dogma to have strong feelings one way or the other. It is still true nowadays, when practically everyone is literate. It was probably much worse at the times when absolutely majority could not even read.
People who were arguing about obscure questions of dogma were also mostly people in positions of power, which often involved power struggles between them. So I would not take dogmatic arguments at the face value, really.
I don't think it's the whole story - some of the arguments probably were about beliefs and the dogma, but it surely played a role.
I also notice that any surviving religion has different alive branches and often even more variations that did not survive, and often surviving branches played an active role at the death of the ones that did not make it. And when the history allows us to zoom in enough to analyze it, it's not at all rare to find less-than-pure motives there, too.
FWIW, Buddhism does make quite a big deal of belief. Theravadins have the Three Characteristics, and Tibetans tweak them into the Four Seals (terminology varies because there is no universal translation of the original Pali or Sanskrit terms). And of course everyone has the Four Noble Truths.
I'm not Christian, my understanding of ancient and medieval Christianity is that what the common person believed was considered really, really important. It comes up a lot. One can hardly deny that these issues had become way more important from Christianity on.
The point of the Credo (meaning "I believe") being a prayer or a part of liturgy was to make sure that everyone knows what they are supposed to believe. I believe this, I believe that.
Just by googling for a few minutes I've found this description of early baptism, (which references the Apostolic Tradition, a book from either the 3rd or 4th century):
A typical procedure would follow the lines set out in the Apostolic Tradition ascribed to Hippolytus—‘And when he who is to be baptised goes down into the water, let him who baptises lay his hand on him saying thus. “Dost thou believe in God the Father almighty?” And he who is being baptised shall say. “I believe”. Let him forthwith baptise him once, having his hand laid upon his head. And after this let him say, “Dost thou believe in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, Who was born by the Holy Spirit from the Virgin Mary, Who was crucified under Pontius Pilate and died, and rose again on the third day living from the dead, and ascended into the heavens, and sat down at the right hand of the Father, and will come to judge the living and the dead?” And when he says. “I believe”, let him baptise him a second time. And again let him say. “Dost thou believe in the Holy Spirit, in the holy Church, and the resurrection of the flesh?” And he who is being baptised shall say, “I believe”. And so let him baptise him the third time.’
See? I believe this, I believe that. I would be very surprised if you can find anything like this from before Christianity.
The last seems most likely to me. Our written records on a lot of ancient religions are spotty and vague at the best of times, and our understanding a synthesis of a broad tradition rather than the beliefs of a specific time and place. Recordkeeping for Christianity is an order of magnitude more complete, which gives us enough detail to actually see the arguments.
Religion without doctrine, religion that doesn't care about what people believe in their heart, exists even today - just look at Shinto - therefore it's quite plausible that some pre-Christian religions were like that.
Our records may be spotty but if belief had been as important in pre-Christian Greece and Rome as it was in Christianity, it would show up in the sources we have.
I agree with that. For Medieval Cat, there happens to be a book review on "Egypt's Golden Couple" in the current contest. This is on the Amun/Aten controversy in Ancient Egypt during the reign of Echn-aton (formerly Amen-hotep IV). From the record it's impossible to fully tell apart the political and religious parts, but it's at least partly a controversy about obscure questions like whether the Pharaoh "brings about cosmic order (maat)" or "lives in cosmic order". Questions that have political implications, but obscure questions nonetheless.
Probably the Neo-Babylonian Empire (Nebuchadnezzar) and its fall by Cyrus the Great also had religious aspects to them. From wikipedia:
"Religious policies introduced by the final Babylonian king Nabonidus, who favoured the moon god Sîn over Babylon's patron deity Marduk, eventually served as a casus belli for Persian king Cyrus the Great, who invaded Babylonia in 539 BC by portraying himself as a champion of Marduk divinely restoring order to Mesopotamia."
Perhaps this is less obscure and more political. I haven't found a book review on that matter yet.
Em dashes are the invermectin of grammar —the Elites don't want us to know about them
They're not in some of the core character encodings and will mess up data and parsing in a wide variety of contexts.
That's because overuse of em dashes leads to chaos — you can't just go around placing vaguely-connected clauses next to each other with no connecting tissue.
Hast thou considered the semicolon?
Did you read that book review, too? :-)
I discovered them a couple of years ago — and now I am addicted. I have almost given up parenthetical phrases using commas.
I prefer the en-dash – whose typography flows more naturally to my eye when surrounded by spaces. Many but not all manuals of style demand otherwise with an em-dash—it must be used in a "closed" form without spaces. I find this construction distracting, but adding spaces would make it particularly "heavy."
Fortunately, both characters are easy to type on systems that support a 'compose' key, which is naturally found on Unix- (Linux-) derived desktops and can be easily added on Windows desktops via the free 'WinCompose' utility.
Agreed. There seems to exist a US-UK divide on the matter (with Oxford breaking the American em-dash way). On the other hand, I do prefer to use a hyphen instead of an en-dash for compound adjectives (Sapir-Whorf as opposed to Sapir–Whorf) which is technically wrong, but visually more appealing to me.
TIL that there are different types of dash with different names. I had no idea.
But what do you call the normal dash, the one you have just used in the middle of the word en-dash? I have always used that one for all grammar purposes - for example, I'm using it now - see? The one that is right there on my keyboard and doesn't require me to press multiple keys at once. Am I doing something horribly wrong by using it for everything? Why do I have to press multiple keys, when one key does the job?
That's a hyphen, and you're using it incorrectly.
https://www.sjsu.edu/writingcenter/docs/handouts/Hyphens%20Dashes.pdf
I think I'll continue to use it incorrectly.
I believe "en" and "em" refer to the widths of the characters 'n' and 'm', and how wide the dashes are. How they're used is a different question. En-dashes can be used as minus signs, or hyphens, or with spaces as an ASCII-easy replacement for whatever the normal use of an em-dash is.
Anglo privilege, represent!
I usually call the - character a 'hyphen'. Note the same character gets used in math formulae as the 'minus sign' as well, but it's the same character code either way.
The ASCII-derived - is actually called a “hyphen-minus”. There's a separate real minus sign (− instead of -) at U+2212 which is quite useful in prose because (given a suitable font) it matches the plus sign properly in length and vertical positioning, and then there's a separate unambiguous hyphen at U+2010 which is rarely used because the hyphen-minus is usually rendered as a hyphen in running text.
Isn't a minus sign usually longer than a hyphen but shorter than an em dash? I don't know if it's the same length as an en dash (but I don't know what an en dash is for anyway).
You philistine! Joke
For completeness: command-shift-dash on a Mac.
I flirted with no spaces for a while but it looks better with to me with a little space around it.
Definitely. Looks much better with the space.
https://www.icc-cpi.int/news/statement-icc-prosecutor-karim-aa-khan-kc-applications-arrest-warrants-situation-state
International Criminal Court issues arrest warrants for top Hamas and Israeli leaders, including Haniyeh and Netanyahu. Exceedingly unlikely to bring them to the dock, of course, but would seem to be a major development insofar as the discourse goes.
As others have noted, the ICC has requested warrants, not issued them. Presuming they are issued, the interesting one is Ismail Haniyeh. There is approximately zero chance that any Israeli government will ever extradite Netanyahu or Gallant; really this just means those two people can't have any more European vacations and all the people who already have 107 reasons to hate Israel will now have 108. Similarly, any hypothetical postwar Hamas leadership in Gaza is not going to extradite its own leaders, and if Israel winds up controlling Gaza then they're going to be taking any local Hamas leadership off to their own prisons (and interrogators).
But Haniyeh is based out of Qatar, and his job requires frequent travel to e.g, Turkey. So if the ICC issues a warrant and Qatar or Turkey then ships Haniyeh off to the Hague in chains, that would be a huge feather in the cap of the ICC and would establish them as an organization that is at least sometimes relevant. If Haniyeh has to flee to Iran for protection, that would be a lesser but still significant win for the ICC (and for civilization). If Haniyeh gets to continue going about his business, maybe without the European vacations, then the ICC looks weak and ineffectual and Israel would be able to say "yeah, we'll get back to you on Netanyahu when you've dealt with Haniyeh, which you never will".
The cynic in me says that the most likely outcome is that warrants are only issued against the other four, with some lame excuse for not including Haniyeh because they know that really a warrant for Haniyeh will not be honored and will thus make the ICC look useless.
This would make sense even beyond any cynical optics. There are reasonable grounds to believe that Haniyeh and the Qatari station did not know about the October 7th attacks.
Most prosaically, operational security. Very few people were told at all. The mission chief/Hezbollah liaison in Beirut was apparently phoned thirty minutes prior to commencement. There's a video clip floating around of Haniyeh and others showing surprise at seeing the attacks on the news, followed by a genuflection in gratitude. Which, sure, could be a piece of theatre to put themselves in the clear, but a) they're not especially motivated to avoid culpability; b) they'll never be in the clear anyway in the eyes of the one country that might on any given day decide to kill them.
All that secrecy backfired, to an extent, because Iran and Hezbollah were not happy about being blindsided by something so big. There are other reasons for keeping their powder dry, but this resentment contributed to their support being much less robust than what Hamas had hoped for.
That's the sort of factual question that we generally want to see hashed out in a court of law, at least once a judge has decided there's enough evidence to justify a warrant. So if someone is trying to make sure that trial doesn't happen, and if they succeed, that's not a good look for the court in question. Maybe it's not their fault, but it still makes them look weak and irrelevant.
The trials for Netanyahu et al were never going to happen, which also makes the ICC look weak, but "...OK, not actually up to moving an Immovable Object" is a level of weakness that still allows for good work to be done in other contexts. But Haniyeh, living in a country of which he is not a citizen and which seems to want to play the role of "honest broker" in Arab-Israeli affairs, would seem to be an ideal test case for whether the ICC can actually do anything useful.
**If** the arrest warrants are granted, they will be a huge deal and a big reason for optimism. I say """If""" because all media sources I have seen report this as "Seeking" or "Applying" for an arrest warrant without clarifying what this actually means, and according to other comments in this thread it means that other people will decide on whether or not to grant the warrants requested by the general prosecutor Kareem Khan.
People who like to play the "This Is Fine" doggo-in-burning-room meme are invited to review the late April reports of Netanyahu panicking, having several emergency meetings with the war cabinet, and crying to the US for help to convince the ICC not to issue those arrest warrants. Here's a 19th of April (not yet a full week after Iran have bombarded the capital city with lots of fireworks) report in the Times of Israel on one such emergency meeting (https://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahus-office-hosts-emergency-talks-on-feared-icc-warrants-for-pm-ministers/), and here's a May 7th report in the Economist. (https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2024/05/07/could-the-international-criminal-court-indict-binyamin-netanyahu)
All the recent headlines from hours ago go something along the lines of "Netanyahu's worst fear have come true, he is now officially a loser" along with an unflattering photo of him. So, despite International Pseudo-Law being complicated, and despite loyal attack dogs like the US and Germany potentially getting out the big guns for this to save their genocidal BFF, it does seem like it that yeah, this is a pretty terrifying thing to Israel and its politicians, which means it's a great thing for human rights enjoyers everywhere.
As a reasonable first-order heuristic, if a target is terrified of being shot by a weapon, the weapon that terrifies them is likely pretty effective. Herzog and all the underlings are already screaming in rage (despite the arrest warrants haven't been granted yet) on how oh their fucking god how dare you compare them with Hamas. That doesn't sound like the nonchalant reactions that we would expect if we were to believe those who like to think that the arrest warrants are a useless gesture. Israel has been behaving nonchalantly to reports about human rights violations and to resolutions by the UN general assembly since forever, so we know how that generally looks like, and this set of reactions isn't it. It's a very panicked set of reactions. It's something new.
What can anyone say, may this please please be the *start* of something. Kareem Khan is accusing Netanyahu and Gallant of engaging in extermination, that's the same charge being investigated by the ICJ, only against the whole of Israel and the IDF not specific persons. Let us all hope that whoever grants those arrest warrants does grant them and doesn't pussy out under the inevitable concentrated bullying that is coming.
Always hope for the best, always expect the worst.
"Herzog and all the underlings are already screaming in rage (despite the arrest warrants haven't been granted yet) on how oh their fucking god how dare you compare them with Hamas."
The Biden administration appears to have joined them, quite vocally.
Ironically, that might be the most concrete outcome of the prosecutor's move. The Bidenites get a small, costless opportunity to flaunt their pro-Israel credentials to help balance out whatever feeble pressure they might decide to apply.
Yeah, yet another bootlicking contest between the Republicans and the Democrats in the US gov to see who is most loyal to "onLy JeWiSh StaTe".
I can't wait to throw up in disgust at the sight of the submissive pieces of shit going through the rituals of willing slavery. Truly a sight to behold.
It's quite extraordinary to keep coming up with worthless bait that consistently misrepresents the position you're ostensibly commenting on.
The ICC has not issued any such arrest warrants; a panel of ICC judges will now _consider_ the prosecutor's request for those warrants.
Most likely the impact of this news on discourse regarding Israel/Hamas will not reflect that point of course.
The page you linked has the prosecutor's application for warrants. Have they been granted?
Obviously jurisdiction is the biggest question here. The page you linked says that the court has asserted it's jurisdiction, but the statement is fuzzy on the grounds for doing so. It seems to be somehow asserting authority over Palestine and therefore, by the controversial terms of the treaty, over anyone at war in Palestine.
Presumably the belligerents will not cooperate in the handover of their leaders. And any attempt to enforce this claim to the court's jurisdiction over non-parties will be opposed by the U.S., Russia, and China. I wonder what the prosecutor is hoping to achieve here.
The main thing that the ICC arrest warrants will achieve is the prestige and legitimacy blow that 120+ countries (the signatories to the Rome Statute [1]) refusing to host, or ever interacting with diplomatically, or ever tolerating those to be arrested on their soil will deal. Those signatories include nearly all of Europe, Australia, all of South America, the majority of Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as Canada and Mexico.
Now theoretically, a country can just tell the ICC to fuck off and simply not comply, it can even claim that its security apparatus will deal with the fugitives itself (while not doing so), but when South Africa did so with Putin in 2022 or 2023, it was a huge deal and people kept bringing it up and being angry about it for months.
It's just more diplomatic friction for Israel, which have enough diplomatic friction as it is that their song contest team was being booed and heckled. It might also set a chain reaction, for example the ICJ judges might take it as a relevant input that the ICC thinks Netanyahu and Gallant, the head of state and defense minister, are engaging in extermination.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/States_parties_to_the_Rome_Statute
Didn't South Africa face this decision with Putin some time recently?
I mentioned this, there appears to be at least 2 instances of Putin and South Africa. In one, Putin visited South Africa and South Africa didn't enforce the ICC decision, which made it face international backlash. In another, Putin decided not to attend a BRICS summit out of his own accords, though probably influenced by South Africa quietly telling him to fuck off because they don't want trouble, possibly maybe.
As I said, anybody who understands the extent of the power of International Law and how nation states work shouldn't put too much unrealistic hope or expect crazy things like blue-clad UN personnel riding on white horses and powering through Tel Aviv to get Netanyahu to Justice. It's a purely diplomatic blow, Netanyahu - after the arrest warrant is granted, which people on HackerNews are saying the ICC panel has a track record of almost always granting - will be a fugitive in the eyes of 124 states. Those 124 states willingly said "Whoever the ICC deems a criminal, we will arrest" when they signed the Statute of Rome, and the ICC is on the verge of declaring Netanyahu a war criminal.
Whether the regimes of those countries like or not - and oh boy is scum like Geert Wilders going to rage so hard at this -, their official position - if the arrest warrant is granted - becomes that Netanyahu is whatever the ICC says he is and is not allowed on their sovereign land until he faces trial. Whether they follow through is an entirely different question.
This has more implications for the ICC than for either the discourse or real world politics, and I don't think anyone takes the ICC seriously enough for that to be notable.
If it's unlikely to accomplish anything concrete, then why is it a major development? It sounds, then, more like a talking point for whatever point of view you espouse.
It may not accomplish the arrest of any of these individuals, but if it means that these individually effectively can't visit half the countries of the world, then that's something concrete.
Putin specifically avoided a BRICS summit in South Africa because of an ICC warrant: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/putin-remotely-attends-brics-summit-in-south-africa-while-facing-war-crimes-warrant
You are correct that it doesn't mean "nothing at all". But the combined facts that Putin has stayed in Russia and that the war in Ukraine continues seem to indicate, then, that if warrants are issued then nothing will change.
If anything, it may impede the peace process. Anyone wanting to talk will have to travel to Israel (I cannot see anyone traveling to Gaza to talk peace). It may entrench Israel's position, making them harder to move.
I did say "if anything". I still do not classify the development as anything "major".
Interesting point about this potentially making negotiations harder. But the leadership hasn’t been traveling personally to do the negotiations, have they? I thought it was representatives.
I suppose there’s also the question of how this shifts the political situation for the next elections in Israel. I would guess that anyone who would be turned against Netanyahu by this was already against him in the past few elections, and anyone who would turn towards him would already have turned towards him during his domestic criminal trials. But it’s hard to know for sure.
That's why I specified "for the discourse", not the conflict in general.
No, I mean whichever side you favor (or oppose), if you feel fervently enough about it, this would just be one more point to excoriate the opposing side. It won't convince anyone. In what sense is this different from any other fact, real or imagined, however obliquely relating to the subject, that makes it major?
I mean, I'm more against Israel, but I'm perfectly ok with them calling for the arrest of the Hamas leadership too, and think it's a really good point they're making.
Presumably they would, in fact, need at least some time to verify the evidence after Oct 8, until issuing the indictments.
I wouldn't say I know that, no.
>Sinwar and company could hold a Hamas leadership conference in the Hague across the street from the ICC and nothing would happen.
A year ago, yes. Today, Geert Wilders might resist such a thing in the Netherlands, fortunately (in my view).
I wonder about the not-ending excitement about the Northern lights; pictures flood my Notes timeline. Do people not understand what happened and what the causes were?
All the data are apparent, especially regarding consciousness and unconsciousness. If you are interested in this, please read my May 14th piece.
To save anyone else the trouble of reading this guy's blog, he believes that the auroras are caused by some kind of military experiment, and the Vatican is also involved somehow.
The Vatican is *always* involved 😇
I understand that the post is too complex for you. You don't understand HAARP or what is going on in the world. But that is perfectly fine. Have a good time with your perception.
One of your posts includes this:
"On what grounds does an airline tell you how heavy your dog can be in the cabin?
You can't base the training of a dog on how much it weighs. Another example of moronic limits."
Are you familiar with the SF short story, "The Cold Equations"? That explains how it's not about weight = training, it's weight = fuel consumption. You have a lot of fake pseudo-science of the gibberish strain on your Substack, but if you're going to pretend that what you're presenting is based on Real Science, then at least try and understand the limits that you are criticising.
The heavier the dog, the more fuel is consumed to move that weight along with the weight of passengers, baggage, the aircraft itself, and the fuel. This is why airlines calculate weight and fuel economy, why there are baggage allowances and extra charges for going over them, etc. Cheap flights mean cutting costs as much as possible, and that means working out the minimum fuel you can get away with, and that means even things like yes, it does matter how big and heavy your dog is.
https://digitalcollection.zhaw.ch/bitstream/11475/1896/6/Steinegger_Fuel_Economy_as_a_Function_of_Weight_and_Distance_v1-1.pdf
"Fuel burn is crucial to the efficiency of aircraft operation. Empirical analysis shows, that it takes on average ~ 0.2 kg fuel to transport 1 kg of weight over a distance of 1'000 km. It also takes an additional ~ 0.02 to 0.03 kg fuel per 1’000 km for every kg of weight added. This is known as the marginal fuel burn rate (MFB). The opposite is also true: a reduction in weight by one kg saves ~ 0.02 to 0.03 kg of fuel per 1’000 km or ~ 2 to 3 €cent respectively."
"You have a lot of fake pseudo-science of the gibberish strain on your Substack,"
Based on your completely wrong understanding of the dog story, the problem seems to be on your side.
And YES, I doubt every "science" because "science" is the reason for many problems in this world.
Have a wonderful day.
PS: I assume that you also don't understand the true role of the Vatican in the world.
I also understand what happens when a rainbow appears, and when a solar eclipse occurs, but that doesn't make either of them less beautiful or breathtaking.
Rainbow or Eclipse are not related to HAARP.
But are they related to KAZOO?
I understand the Northern Lights just fine but undulating curtains of green and purple in the sky are still breathtaking.
Yep. This was the first time I ever saw them.
People like pretty colors.
I mean, there's not a lot of mystery about what's going on with a waterfall or a big canyon, and yet, many of us also find those things wonderful to look at.
Question for people who think that (a) consciousness is a crisp phenomenon, well-defined, conceptually distinct from physical stuff, hard problem makes sense, etc., and also (b) are very confident that simulations are necessarily conscious (an in particular, equally conscious to the system they're simulating).
The question is, why do you think this?
To elaborate a bit, you can generally analyze a system on three levels of abstraction: the physical structure, the computational steps, and the input/output level (these are called marr's levels). If A is a simulation of B, then they will coincide on the input/output level, but that's really it. They don't have to have the same physical structure, obviously, but they don't even need to perform the same or even similar computational steps. In fact, the more detailed the simulation is, the more the computations performed by both systems come apart. E.g., suppose you simulate a brain on a digital computer; if the simulation computes what each atom does whereas the brain just computes with neurons, then the steps performed by both systems look very different.
And generally an equivalence on just the input-output level is considered not sufficient to make two systems be equally conscious. If it were, a large lookup table would be conscious, which most people don't think it is.
Hence the question -- why do you think a simulation has to be conscious? (Note again that I'm *not* asking people who think consciousness is just a computational abstraction anyway; I realize that in that case, the question isn't even meaningful.)
Sidenote: Integrated Information Theory is a formalized and functionalist theory of consciousness (arguably the only formalized functionalist theory that exists) and its math implies that digital simulations are not conscious. So the "functionalism implies simulations must be conscious" idea arguably scores 0/1 on empirical predictions, but I know that lots of people strongly believe it regardless.
>then the steps performed by both systems look very different.
From a particular vantage point at a particular scale, yes. But why should this perspective be privileged? A low level ideal simulation necessarily reconstructs the information/state dynamics of the real system at the level at or above the basic units being simulated. Why should some external coordinate system from which we note differences in causal dynamics play a role in determining what systems are conscious? It should be based exclusively on internal considerations. But internally, the real system and the simulation are doing the same thing.
Thanks, I think this kind of reply gets at the intuition that people have.
So the starting point I use is just the physical steps performed by the system. (This is also what IIT does.) If you think the starting point is the internal working of the system, how do you define this? Like, if consciousness is a real thing, presumably there would ultimately be a precise theory that tells you the consciousness of any input system. Can you gesture at how that would look like?
Maybe a different way to get at this question is that your internal pov ultimately has to be reduced to the external pov since you have to start with a physical description to figure out what the internal pov is, and I don't see how that works.
My starting point is the question: what can the system know on its own terms? The raw material for decision making is distinctions, the ability to discriminate one state from another. So the question is what are the distinctions the system is capable of? This orientation starts to get at the system on its own terms as a cognitive entity, independent of the perspective of an outside investigator, and even independent of the particulars of the system's construction.
For example, I consist of a brain with a very fine grained set of neural states that entail my mental states. But none of that is accessible to me; I do not know the state of any one of my neurons. I am blind to the distinction between neuron X in an actively firing state vs a quiet state. Most of the details of one's makeup visible from an external perspective are completely inaccessible to the system considered on its own terms. There is a space of possible distinctions that any cognitive system can access in principle. Anything outside of this space is utterly inscrutible. Call this the epistemic context of the system. The epistemic context defines the system's "cognitive self", the kinds of facts, distinctions, concepts, belief states, desires, intentions, etc the system is capable of. It is dependent on the organizational properties which constitutes the system, but is independent of the particulars of the implementation details beyond these organizational properties.
With this concept in hand, the physical implementation is mostly an aside to the workings of the cognitive self. Not irrelevant as the system needs a physical implementation of some sort, but highly constrained in the manner in which the details of the implementation can impinge on the workings of the cognitive self being instantiated. The internal point-of-view doesn't reduce to the external point-of-view precisely because the epistemic context is much constrained compared to the external context. The internal point-of-view is fully determined by the organizational principles that define its implementation, i.e. the nature of the information dynamics being instantiated. The causal particulars beyond that which defines the information dynamics are incidental.
Consciousness is relevant to this analysis as (in my view) consciousness is the manner in which state distinctions are accessible to the cognitive system on its own terms. Consciousness facilitates discriminations of the external and internal environment relevant to cognition. The particulars of the organization and the qualities of consciousness are such as to maximize intelligibility for decision-making. Why does space have a seamless 2.5D look to it? Because this maximally facilitates effective cognitive decision-making in a 3D world projected onto a 2D sensor plane. Presumably all phenomenal qualities are similarly an apex in facilitating effective cognition in some particular context.
"If it were, a large lookup table would be conscious, which most people don't think it is"
I assume you're thinking of a huge lookup-table for what the computer should do for every possible combination of sensory input and memory. Aside from being ridiculously infeasible, the problem with it is, "how do you fill in the entries in the lookup table?". The only apparent way would be to run some other kind of simulation for every possible input/memory combination to see what it does. But then you've just moved the question of consciousness to this other simulation. So "huge lookup-tables can't be conscious, lol" isn't actually such a knock-down argument.
I agree you can trace back the point at which consciousness came in (e.g., https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/k6EPphHiBH4WWYFCj/gazp-vs-glut) but it doesn't seem relevant? Doesn't really seem related to whether the lookup table is conscious or not.
Fwiw Eliezer also doesn't use it as such, he makes the "trace back" argument but then states at the end that a lookup table isn't conscious.
> Well, then it wouldn't be conscious. IMHO.
> I mean, there's got to be more to it than inputs and outputs.
But yeah, whether you think the lookup table is conscious or not, I don't see how the traceback or "its too big to fit into the universe" things are relevant
Eliezer gives a cell phone analogy. You have a conversation with a little device, and not knowing what a cell phone is, conclude that the device must be conscious. You're sort of right - there is a conscious being that you're conversing with. But unknown to you, the cell phone is not the physical locale of this being, but only a transmission device. Same for the lookup table.
But I think Eliezer misses a point when concluding that a randomly-generated lookup table that by coincidence happens to produce a sensible conversation would not actually be conscious. That's true, but is interesting only if we might have been inclined to think it is conscious. We normally think that if something has behaved like a conscious being, that it is likely to be conscious. But that's a simplification. Really, we think something is likely to be conscious if we think that (if not destroyed) it is likely to behave in the future like a conscious being. It's an inductive conclusion. But if we know that the lookup table was filled at random, we will not think that the future responses will be indicative of a conscious being, even if the past responses have seemed to indicate consciousness (because we know that that was just chance).
I still don't see why any of this matters
Well, what do you think does matter? What are you trying to argue for? You seem to be asking, "why do you think a simulation has to be conscious?", and questioning that based on the lookup table idea. But actually the lookup table idea doesn't refute anything interesting.
I don't understand the refutation of the GLUT. Your point was about locating consciousness in the creation process of a GLUT, and about ability to assess whether a GLUT will behave humanlike in the future. Neither seems to indicate that a GLUT itself is conscious, which is what matters. (And I guess about size of a physical GLUT, which also doesn't seem relevant.)
Thank you for giving some substance to my frustration with this argument.
Umm... Since this is a thought experiment, and one is allowed to use hypotheticals which are completely unrealistic: What if the entries are filled in by capturing them from monitoring a human? ( Frankly, I'm not so sure that such a lookup table _isn't_ conscious, but I'm also sure that my intuition about such things breaks down many _many_ orders of magnitude before getting to a system with _that_ much embedded information... )
I think a lookup table doesn't have state. This means previous queries don't affect later queries. I just don't see how such a system could ever be called conscious.
Many Thanks! Hmm... Lack of state would indeed cripple it - but, I think, to the point where it couldn't pass the Turing test. There is an ambiguity in Radford Neal's
>I assume you're thinking of a huge lookup-table for what the computer should do for every possible combination of sensory input _and memory_.
[emphasis added]
If memory here _just_ means long term memory, like the frozen weights in an LLM, then, yes, that would severely cripple it, sort-of like an LLM with no context window. I don't think such a thing could come close to passing the Turing test.
On the other hand, if memory here includes short term memory as well as long term memory, then the system _does_ have state. I think that that is sufficient to make consciousness plausible again.
Perhaps, but to still call such a system a lookup table is kind of ridiculous. Yes, if you have an infinitely large lookup table prefilled with every possible input, you can do arbitrary "computation".
Consider: there is a real information difference in a reply that comes back immediately and one that is identical, but delayed. "Why did you hesitate?"
See Chalmers' work, particularly Absent Qualia, Dancing Qualia, Fading Qualia.
Chalmers argues for equivalence of computational steps implying equivalence of consciousness. This is basically the definition of functionalism but not relevant for simulations since they're only equivalent on the input/output level. (This is why I've mentioned marr's levels.)
People here are really into the pronatalism thing. I'm curious to hear your arguments.
I never wanted kids because (a) I'm too selfish to do a good job and too unselfish to do it anyway (b) I'm lazy and don't want to work hard...juggling the job and all the childcare stuff they want you to do nowadays and driving the kids to five afterschool activities...forget it! (c) I already bow and scrape all day to a boss, doing it to my wife when I come home doesn't sound like fun (d) I think I'd probably get divorced for any of the thousand reasons (including for fun) women do that nowadays and wind up paying alimony and child support to an ex-wife I hate and children I never see (e) I'm bad at the whole 'being sexy' thing and put off improving that way too long due to a combination of low self-esteem, second wave feminism in my teenage years, and general shyness and laziness (f) on account of (c)-(e) I genuinely resent the opposite sex at this point and don't want to get involved.
However, I'm 45 and just clocked over $3 million total assets (mostly index funds) as a result of years of hard work at a career I don't really care for. (I went to the secondhand bookstore to celebrate.) I have (based on all those 'calculate your life expectancy charts') an estimated 3-4 decades to live, and theoretically could retire if I wanted to. What I really want to do with the rest of my life is fight feminism, but there are very few avenues available for that which would actually be productive given financial constraints...it's not like I have a few billion to fund a think-tank. (Relax, I'm NOT Elliot Rodger...I don't believe in violence and that sort of thing would ultimately *help* the other side anyway due to the media coverage!) So...maybe just suck it up and bear the vile, degrading, cross of modern fatherhood? I mean, it's what I'm *supposed* to do according to every other culture in the world, right? Also, as the only child I hate to be the end of the line. Given my age I'd have to marry substantially younger, which increases the risk of divorce by a huge amount, but I could probably, if that's all I wanted to do with my life, produce grandchildren (probably with a woman no doubt looking to rip me off), even if half of them would be autistic by this point (and not in the fun 'Silicon Valley software engineer' way).
I don't know. Guys like Jacob Falkovich and Bryan Caplan and Malcolm Collins seem to think everyone should be having more kids (though Mr. Collins has hurt his credibility with the 'future police' thing), but I kind of feel like there are people who just shouldn't breed, and I'm one of them. It seems unfair to my parents, though, who really didn't do anything wrong. If I made it the only point of my life, I probably could produce grandchildren. I just don't want to. What do people think?
EDIT: Thank you for all the thoughtful replies (even the hostile ones!). I'm pretty much confirmed I am not going to have kids. I'm not going to use the word 'childfree' because I think it devalues parents, who are doing the ugly work of raising the next generation.
EDIT 2: Thanks to the lot of you for your support (one way or the other). I think it's time to stop hanging around here and do something worthwhile with my life (not to say that you who continue to hang around are not doing worthwhile things with yours!) Godspeed and I wish you all the best.
The rest is silence.
a) Congratulations on your savings!
b) Ok, I see you don't use "childfree" - but I am one. I do want to emphasize that mariage and children do not have to be a package deal. If you are sure, as I am and was, that you do not want children, get a vasectomy. That takes children firmly out of the picture.
c) Re feminism: There have been several (4??) "waves" of feminism, and
1) There was a lot of variation from wave to wave.
2) There were lots of variations between what individual feminists _within_ each wave wanted
3) Not all women are feminists.
Personally, I'm perfectly happy with anyone who wants equal pay for equal work, and perfectly disgusted by misandrist control freaks. I can certainly sympathize with having a grievance against the latter, but remember that they are far from the only women in the population. I was married for 30 years to my late wife, and, while we had our frictions, feminism wasn't the cause of any of them.
Re pro-natalism. Yeah, the industrialized world's population is going to very very slowly shrink over the coming decades. The timescale is longer than AI advances, longer than climate change, longer than geopolitical churn. Writing from the usa, I'd suggest mostly ignoring it. ( Ok, if I were in South Korea this would look a bit more alarming. )
If you don't want to have kids, don't. If you don't like women, avoid them.
Congratulations to making lots of money! If you don't like your job, retiring seems like the right choice. If I had that much money, I would retire instantly.
> What I really want to do with the rest of my life is fight feminism, but there are very few avenues available for that which would actually be productive given financial constraints
What financial constraints? The most important thing you can buy is your own time, and $3M seems enough to buy you 8 extra hours every day. That would effectively *double* whatever free time you have left. If being political is how you choose to spend that time, you could read books, write blogs, meet people, record videos, give speeches, organize protests, etc.
Caplan's point, if I understand it correctly, is that *people who want to have more kids* simply should go ahead and do it. No need to worry about providing them expensive toys and universities, because their life outcomes will mostly depend on biology anyway, if you succeed to provide them a not-too-dysfunctional family. (So it seems that you are not the intended audience.)
> It seems unfair to my parents, though, who really didn't do anything wrong.
People who want to have grandchildren should try to have more than one child. Bad luck can happen to anyone, but the extinction of one's line is more likely with only one child. It is not fair to put the entire burden of their legacy on you.
Good points all. I'm doing the first two. :)
I have to figure out the health insurance thing, but that's a good point. I actually doubt I will be very convincing politically, for the reasons others have stated (bitter people make poor spokesmen).
As you point out, I'm not Caplan's target audience (if I really need to worry what he says anyway).
The last point is a good one.
Not knowing you, I'm agnostic on the question if you "should" be a parent, but since you asked for reasons to do it, based on what you said.
1. If being stuck in a bad marriage/with a bad divorce is that big of a deal to you, you can do surrogacy. At your wealth level it's probably more cost-efficient.
2. "What I really want to do with the rest of my life is fight feminism" Given that you're, by your own description (correct me if I'm wrong) an intelligent but uncharismatic guy with a bunch of money, having children who are similarly temperamentally disposed and which you can raise on your own values is probably one of the better ways to do so.
3. If your parents are alive, they'll probably be really happy if you have children.
4. "I'm too selfish to do a good job and too unselfish to do it anyway" means you are probably overeestimating the effort it takes to do "a good job".
5. You already don't enjoy your job, so what are the chances you'll enjoy raising your children even less?
I would think my little screed would be pretty good evidence I wouldn't, but of course that's a snapshot of a person at one point in time.
1.Haven't really looked into surrogacy. It strikes me as a terrible idea.
2. I doubt I could pass on my values, and they might change over 18 years of childrearing (i.e. having a daughter would likely cause me to place her welfare over my own).
3. They're alive. I've actually been avoiding them over my embarassment over this issue.
4. I mean...I guess? It just seems like a lot of work, and I'm kind of a spent force at this point.
5. It's unclear. It might well be more rewarding. But is it worth inflicting my crappy parenting on the kids?
> 4. I mean...I guess? It just seems like a lot of work, and I'm kind of a spent force at this point.
Dude, that makes it clear. Can you allow yourself once and for all to drop all these stories about what others expect of you, and just *take it easy*? Forget ideas, figure out what actually feels good to you and allow yourself to enjoy it. You've earned every right to it.
1. Why? It saves you a ton of time, effort and money finding and mantaining a relationship with a woman. It's expensive, but well within your means.
2. Why not? They're going to have half your genetic material, and spend their formative years with you.
3. I might be unusual in this, but I think that's a good incentive to have them (not just to make them happy, but because it'd be good for them)
4 & 5. Here I have to defer to you in your self-evaluation as "a spent force", but if you're smart and hardworking enough to be as successful as you are (yes, you got lucky with stock market timing, but eh), I believe child-rearing shouldn't pose that big of a challenge. Children have had happy childhoods in way worse conditions than you'd be able to provide without even trying, unless you're worried you wouldn't be able to perform to the standard of "not criminal negligence".
If I was in your shoes, I'd consider becoming a priest. No expectation of having kids, get to enjoy a position of local prestige in a patriarchal institution, and (in the US) you get to claim income going toward housing expenses as a tax-free allowance. Many denominations have programs to transition middle aged men looking to start a second career in the clergy.
Of course being a fan of Jesus is a pre-req.
Frankly, that's a big responsibility, priests are supposed to be shepherds of souls and I'm not in a position to be shepherding anyone, and I respect the Church too much to disgrace it with my presence.
It's a difficult topic so I'll try my best, apologies if it still comes out incoherent.
Your asking a bunch of internet commenters about this is a big part of your problem, which, I think, is that you don't know what you are. Bear with me for a moment:
- "People here are really into the pronatalism thing" - why do you care what other people think?
- "I already bow and scrape all day to a boss" - that particular choice of words is interesting... what exactly does bowing and scraping entail?
- "doing it to my wife when I come home doesn't sound like fun" - why do you think you will need to do this? Again, what exactly do you think these words describe?
- ""What I really want to do [...] is fight feminism" - why? is this somehow related to what you think you'd have to endure if you were married?
- "[...] *supposed* to do according to every other culture in the world, right?" - why do you care about what other people think?
-"Given my age I'd have to marry substantially younger" - why?
- "with a woman no doubt looking to rip me off" - why would you marry someone like this?
- "Jacob Falkovich and Bryan Caplan and Malcolm Collins seem to think everyone should be having more kids" - why do you care what other people think?
This is enough - there's a pattern of an argument with imaginary "others", filled with unquestioned assumptions about what these "others" want you to do and how terrible all of this would be.
What do you want? You, yourself, forget Caplan or your parents (your parents' happiness is not your responsibility, you're 45 y.o., it's your life). Forget big categories, clever words like "feminism", "natalism" "fatherhood", etc. You don't want to have kids? Fine, no one can force you. You don't want to marry? Fine, no one can force you. You don't want to work for a crappy boss? Don't, you have enough money to stop and figure out what's next.
Why seek strangers' approval for your life's choices? Stop that, above all.
You have a point. Why should I care what they all think?
Mostly I was somewhat sympathetic to rationalist points of view, and they all seem to be ranting lately about the fertility crisis, so I was curious what arguments they had, particularly since there seemed to be undertones of 'smart people aren't having enough kids'. I'm pretty sure now I shouldn't have kids.
The rationalist argument for having kids isn't said out loud all that often because it has undertones of the Horrible Banned Discourse.
In short, current fertility trends are claimed to be dysgenic, with smart people like you (who are in all likelihood going to be way above average parents) thinking they don't have what it takes or being unwilling to make the needed lifestyle changes.
On top of that, there's the (not really rationalist but rather humanist) argument that having lots of humans around is good - this is based both on economic arguments like competitive advantage and specialization, as well as considering the existence of conscious life a good in itself.
The memes that have taken hold in developed countries recently ("humanity is actually bad because patriarchy/capitalism/etc", "I don't want to birth a child that is doomed to live in a bleak future because of Trump/climate change", and so on) are abominations that should *not* be considered any sort of sensible baseline. You are alive because an unbroken chain of your ancestors went about the business of keeping the world populated. Pay it forward. *That* should be the standard, common sense position.
I would argue the average person with my IQ would likely be a way above average parent, but I would be below average.
I actually don't like a lot of those memes. People have had kids into worse environments than climate change, and the leftist arguments that humanity is bad because patriarchy/capitalism I frankly find risible. But...I think, in my case, it's a bad idea.
I agree with you on everything else.
Understood. It's natural to feel influenced by people whose general viewpoints resonate with you. But especially when it comes to children, it's such a huge decision, and having them has such an impact on the rest of your life (not just next 18 years :) - once a parent, forever a parent), that others should have 0 unwanted input into it.
Best of luck to you, hope you figure it out.
FWIW there's some research showing people in their 40's are often at the most unhappy point of their lives... so maybe take that perspective into account....
Have you considered going to Bangkok for 6 months and just partying your butt off?
Like, no joke, you sound insanely depressed, like "wouldn't play with a puppy" depressed. And I want you to consider the possibility that your depression is making you act irrationally. I want you to consider the possibility that, on $3 million at 4% you can withdraw $10k/month forever and for $10k/month you can rent a freaking penthouse in Bangkok, go see awesome art and beaches and nature and culture and then return at night and party your tuckus off with hot women who will be very into you. Or just read on your balcony, whatever.
But I want you to consider the possibility that if you did that for 6 months, your perspective would be insanely different. And that it's a big beautiful world full of awesome people and not every place is the West. That if you resent American women...just go somewhere else where the women are different. They'd be more than happy to have you.
Dude, whatever you're doing now and wherever you're living, it's not good for you. You're not trapped there. There's nothing in the world stopping you from quitting your job tomorrow, jumping on a plane, and enjoying every day of the rest of your life.
I can't logically argue pronatalism anymore than I can logically argue for puppies. It's not a logical thing, it's an emotional thing where...one day you wake up and everything is so awesome and the only way it could be awesome-r is if you were surrounded by people who love you.
This is great advice. OP, if you're unsure about following it, just spot me the 10k and I'll go to Bangkok for the first month for you, and let you know if it's worthwhile.
I don't know. Bangkok usually implies sex workers, and that's just an exploitation level I'm not comfortable with. And even if they're not being paid, I doubt they'd be into me as much as my American dollars.
By the way, I can't remember ever wanting to play with a puppy. I don't like dogs.
That said, an extended vacation probably isn't a bad idea.
You hate all women and yet you don't want to "exploit" prostitutes? Bro, pick a lane!
Genuinely, you sound overconscientious. It's been my experience that people actually like and respect you more when you stop thinking like that. In certain ways it's quite acceptable and even desirable to be selfish. The only way to find out exactly which ways is try on different mindsets and see what happens.
It's more that sufficient resentment exists that I don't want to be in a relationship, but not that I want to exploit random people who had no role in creating my circumstances.
Overconscientious. There is no one evaluating you on this stuff. You don't get a cosmic pat on the head if you're good enough. Try exploiting people a bit - odds are you'll find they don't mind, some will actively like it, and you'll end up realising you were totally wrong about what the word "exploitation" means.
If you don't want to marry and have kids, then don't marry and have kids. There you go, simple. If you hate women, don't get involved with women. If you hate women but happen to be heterosexual, I don't know what advice I can give you, other than either try not to hate women and find a woman you can tolerate for as long as it takes to have sex, or try the various medications the side effects of which are to reduce sexual drive.
If I sound unsympathetic, it's because I am. I'm not married and have no children for some of the same reasons as you, yet I don't find it necessary to cry about my poor hard life where those bastards, all men, would just use and discard me so how can I best use my time to fight masculinism and/or take up the vile degrading cross of modern motherhood?
If you don't want it, nobody is making you do it. Are your parents standing over you beating you with sticks to get married and give them grandchildren? Why do you feel you need to carry on the family name, given that there probably are cousins or other branches in existence which will carry it on?
If you think you're a bad genetic gamble, then don't have kids (that's one of the reasons I never wanted to have children, myself). Once again, nobody is forcing you into an arranged marriage and you sound as if you don't need to get married in order to provide for yourself.
You don't like women, you don't like kids, you don't like your job, you don't much like the modern world - is there anything you do like? Then go and do that.
And why do you think fighting feminism would improve your life, given that you still would have the same reasons, in a traditional society, for "I don't wanna get married and have ankle-biters because that would take up my time and money and I'd have to be nice to the mother of my kids and yuck that's all horrible"? You would resent even more not being able to divorce her and get rid of her and shove off responsibility for the brats onto her and whatever family would help her.
> You don't like X, you don't like Y, you don't like Z, you don't much like the modern world - is there anything you do like? Then go and do that.
Best advice I've heard in a long time, thanks for that one. My XYZs are not the same as Anon above but it still applies.
Oh, you're right on that last point. In a traditional society I'd probably be even more unhappy.
I think you are right overall: I should avoid the opposite sex and kids. (It's more of a resentment than a true hatred, BTW; I know the opposite sex is human--the definition of species doesn't really make any sense otherwise--but there's enough bad blood I think any relationship would be poisoned. Ironically there is very little real-world evidence of this; I've had women try to get back together with me after breakups I've initiated, sometimes over bizarrely long periods of time! I also remained friends with some exes for fairly long periods, sometimes long-term. They are, of course, unaware of my views.)
I haven't really cried about it outside here, and don't intend to. I was curious to get the perspectives of one of the few sites I thought I might find sympathetic people, but your perspective is quite valid and probably would be closer to most people's.
Quite a few women *do* do just that, by the way. (Ever seen the book 'How to Date Men When You Hate Men'? I read the whole thing start to finish in the bookstore...) I haven't decided to be an antifeminist yet (apart from some postings on Astral Codex Ten), and I still may not.
There really isn't much I like anymore. But attempting to form relationships would probably bring nothing but grief to all parties.
If I'm reading you right that you actually get along well enough with real-life women, but an ideology that sits entirely within your conceptual mind is actively poisoning that relationship... well, I'd strongly suggest flushing the ideology into the toilet and applying a suitable amount of brain bleach.
Sorry for the snarky tone, but I think it's important to say that it can be done.
I'm brusque in my replies here, because I'm sort of in the same boat but not really. From my mid-20s onwards, my mother was dropping heavy hints until she finally came out and asked me outright in my late 30s or so, was I ever going to get married?
My answer there was "No" and I've stuck to that ever since. I know she was motivated by concern, she said she didn't want me to be lonely. Well, lonely or not, this is how I am.
I think you're feeling the pinch of societal expectations. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm assuming you were never married (though you do mention past relationships?) Thus, at your age - mid 40s - it's very unusual not to be married or cohabiting. Being divorced would be acceptable, but "in his 40s, never married, no kids, no partner - what's *wrong* with him?" is something that stands out; it's still a human adult rite of passage to form families, and even though marriage and children have now been cloven asunder (remember all the same-sex marriage stuff about it being about two people who love each other and that's all marriage is about), still forming couples or other intimate domestic relationships is an expectation.
I think you're feeling the consequences of being left out, of being the third wheel where you aren't in a couple, your friends/family are probably all married by now and many of them having children, and now you're isolated from all that because you're the singleton who sits alone and the groupings have all changed now to be couples + kids.
But I don't know. I'm just guessing. You mentioned you've had relationships so you must be able to get on with women in some capacity, were there really none you ever felt that you might make a go of it with them?
However, if you really really do not want to be living in proximity with someone, sharing space, having them involved in your life and with a right to call on you, don't get married. You'll just make yourself more miserable and resentful, and make the other person unhappy as well. What person, man or woman, wants to be on the receiving end of the trope:
"I bust my butt all day working in a job I hate to be the breadwinner, and I come home to my bitch of a wife complaining about 'do this, do that' and expecting me to kiss her ass all because she managed to pop out a couple of rugrats, on top of 'do your fair share of the housework' and shit".
Funnily enough, I'm watching as a guilty pleasure a ton of Youtube 'text' stories which seem to be Japanese/Asian in origin, and they're clearly revenge porn for women, and they're all on the lines above: husband is workaholic (or claims to be) in the Japanese style - they're ostensibly set in America but no way are these American - who either (a) makes a big deal out of "I'm the breadwinner, you're only a housewife, do what I say or I'll divorce you" (b) interfering mother-in-law who expects the daughter-in-law to be her servant and threatens to have her son divorce her or (c) wife is working, husband resents this because she's not at home full-time to be devoted to his every wish and whim. Often he's cheating on the side and this comes out when he does divorce her/she snaps and asks for a divorce. The story ends with her triumphant and him (or the affair partner who stole the husband/boyfriend) having their life ruined.
I'm smiling because a lot of the 'bad husband' set-up is precisely as described by your original comment: I make money in a job I hate, I don't want bratty kids since I can't be bothered trying to raise them, I don't want a nagging wife who I'm expected to be nice to, I only got married because my mom wants grandkids/society expects it.
Even though I sometimes disagree with some of your takes, I am usually glad to read them - and when I completely agree with your take, as in this one, I am extra thankful that you are here.
Anonymous Dude- my recommendation to you is: do not have kids. At any given point in time, there are probably several tens of millions of people that are regretting parenthood. As you are now, you will probably fail at being a parent, and there's probably nothing but mutual resentment in store if you do start a family.
People who are 'successful' at the whole 'happy family' thing tend to inherit or painstakingly acquire and maintain specific types of social capital that give them an 'edge' over the average person that knocks somebody up/gets knocked up and ends up with a spouse/kid. Specifically:
(a) The 'successful' types tend to invest incredible amounts of time in finding the right partner to start a family with. Like-many start searching for the 'right person' right from their late teens and usually start panicking if they haven't found a soulmate by their twenties/thirties. At 45, your options are pretty limited, and you'll realistically have more opportunities to be somebody's stepfather than have kids of your own.
(b) The whole 'it takes a village' thing is real. Parenting is a time and effort intensive commitment that spans decades. Successful types usually have at least (and I do mean <i>at least</i>) half a dozen people with sizable amounts of time, money, logistical capacity, affection, experience, and enthusiasm that are actively rooting for you and yours to be successful. Life will inevitably throw a curveball every now and then. When that happens, you'll either be humbled and extremely grateful for having this safety net, or will be humbled and sorely feel the safety net's absence.
(c) Finally, its pretty important to remember that your children aren't going to fill your life with joy-it's the other way around. You are your kids' competitive advantage in the world. Having kids is not a particularly noteworthy achievement. Giving said kids an advantage in the world- by being a capable, sane, stable and dependable parent is the thing to be admired. If you're not able to be that person, don't bring misery into your life or that of others.
Also, you said you're 45 and think you have 'an estimated 3-4 decades to live'. Yeah, I'd revisit that notion. Realistically, you have about a decade and a half of okay-ish quality of life. Once you hit 60, your body and mind will probably start to fail and chances are, your time and energy will be focused on trying to maintain the quality of life you used to have.
If I were you, I'd consider staying single and child free. Develop quality relationships that will last you a couple of decades, be the cool uncle for somebody, if you can. Start living the life you want, not the life you think society wants you to have.
(Source: was conceived to check a box in a socially conservative country, have depression and PTSD from miserable childhood, leaning towards antinatalism consequently.)
This doesn't match my experience, as someone who became a father at age 51. Neither (a) nor (b) apply to me. I don't think my mind started failing after age 60. Regarding (c), it can be both ways around.
I was lucky that we have a healthy child and are financially secure. My sympathy to those not so lucky in those respects.
Radford: I think you were very lucky. Luck notwithstanding, finding a partner to start a family with and becoming a father at 51 are impressive achievements in themselves. But I think that (a) applies to you. If I'm not mistaken you're the retired Canadian professor Radford Neal, and you seem to have published a blogpost titled "Down Syndrome and Decision Theory" in 2008 about how you and your wife navigated the risk of down syndrome during your child's birth.
My point in (a) was that successful 'happy family' types highly prioritize finding the right partner to start a family with, and are aware of all the downstream benefits of being married to the 'right' person. I think the level of marital stability where both of you calmly discuss and prepare for all possibilities of a high-risk pregnancy definitely qualifies as evidence of the kind of social capital I was talking about in (a).
I don't know you personally, so I'm unsure about (b). But say, in a hypothetical alternate timeline, you and your wife had died in 2009. Did you, at the time have enough of a family/social circle and safety net that your child would have had a solid chance at becoming a well-adjusted adult? If the answer to that hypothetical is 'yes' then I think you qualify as a village-haver. If the answer is 'no' then you (and the kid) are just very lucky.
Re: (c), yeah, it *can* be both ways around, but shouldn't have to be. See my reply to D8Mole.
Anyway, my advice to the OP is of the "don't forget the foundation when you build a house" variety. I'm not saying a family at 45 is a pipe dream per se.
Yeah, I agree. I put it off way too long, figuring I'd do all that after I made enough to be stable financially, and it took longer than I expected.
Interestingly, I'm told this is the expected path in some East Asian cultures. But I don't live in East Asia.
Anyway, too late now.
Thank you for your time.
I kinda get where you're coming from, but I think we're talking past each other. I mean, of course it is *possible* to be married with kids. You don't even need $3 million for that. What I'm trying to say is that if you want to consciously increase the odds of having a happy family life, a certain minimum of social capital is necessary - that lots of people already have- but many do not, and (painstakingly) need to create said capital from scratch.
OP would prefer to avoid acrimony and isn't desperate for a hail-mary-leave-everything-to-god kind of marriage-at least, that's what I surmised from the OP's query. And so:
(A) Yeah, finding a good partner comes down to luck, but my point was that *having* a compatible partner is a prerequisite for a happy family life. You need to find a *compatible* person, at the very least- that is, somebody who doesn't drive you up the wall (and the partner feels the same way about you), somebody who you won't get bored or grow distant with (and partner feels the same way about you), somebody you don't mind growing old with, in sickness and in health, till death do you part (and the partner feels the same way about you). Also, all of this should be easily achievable, with 20% to 40% of your ordinary mental and psychological bandwidth, the remaining bandwidth needing to be allocated to raising kids and generally functioning in society.
My point was that finding someone compatible takes non-trivial effort, not that it was impossible. If you have this kind of partner available already, cat's in the bag. If you don't but still marry, misery usually follows. Also, I'm from one of those 'poorer socially conservative countries', and I can tell you that finding a *compatible* mail order bride is fairly difficult. For one thing, if money is your only selling point then your poorer in-laws might want you to spread the wealth, or else. And this might strain your marital relationship and waste your time. For another, even mail order brides are full fledged, agentic, living human beings. Also, once they set foot on American soil, American laws and social mores apply and the shackles of poor country conservatism are gone. So the pros and cons of marrying a foreign woman and a local woman are mostly identical.
(B) By 'it takes a village' I didn't mean hire-able babysitters or close-knit joint family type setups. You and your wife probably have *a* group of sane, normal people that are interested in your and your kids' well being, even if its you and your wife doing the heavy lifting. My point was that its better for kids to have exposure, through their parents, to a group of useful, productive adults with healthy social skills and personal and professional relationships.
In contrast, for example, in the ACX social sphere, Aella's Substack posts about her batshit crazy fundamentalist Christian childhood is a good example of someone having a catastrophically dysfunctional social setting to grow up in. I can also point to my own family, that has a significantly above-average number of mal-adjusted weirdos and loners; and family get-togethers and even weddings and funerals are tense, combustible stand-off situations where most people are stroking their egos with chips on their shoulders.
As long as you have, like I said, at least 6 normal, well adjusted people in your social circle, that have the bandwidth to mentor and engage, intellectually and emotionally, with you and your kids, and provide a safety net, emotionally, psychologically and maybe financially, you're doing great.
(C) Yeah, ideally. Ideally there is mutual joy. But, like ethically and morally, on whose shoulders would you put the burden of family life being a joyful experience? The parent or the child? Also, $3 million and first world citizenship are great things to have. But I'll just quote what I said to the OP: "Having kids is not a particularly noteworthy achievement. Giving said kids an advantage in the world- by being a capable, sane, stable and dependable parent is the thing to be admired. If you're not able to be that person, don't bring misery into your life or that of others."
I assume most women acting in good faith to find a partnership would not want to get involved with a bitter person who dislikes them because of their gender. Unless you are willing to work very hard on your outlook, things will be tough. It is still possible to find fulfilment in other ways outside of marriage/kids. Best of luck, but I don’t think it sounds like you have the skills or mindset for a healthy relationship & kids right now.
That's true. I think you are right and I am going to avoid the kids thing.
I was all ready to make the case for having kids, but this post isn't an antinatalist argument. Thus post is a cry for help.
Women and children would very definitely add meaning to your life, but they're not fungible objects. A woman might make you happy - but you are talking as if that means *any* women should make you happy. Which obviously isn't true because a lot of them are shit.
You have to find amongst the dross someone who's worth it, who doesn't make you feel like she's a vile, degrading cross to bear.
Your problem is that if you find her tomorrow, you'll be unable to land her because the kind of woman you need won't be attracted to the kind of person you are right now.
The only "attractive" thing you have (going from this post) is money; well that's only going to attract the kind of girls who've given you your current opinions.
Best thing you can do right now is improve yourself. Not because you want to get a woman: because you want meaning in your life and this is a way to get it.
A bitter, unhappy man saying, "feminism sucks," is an advert for feminism. A cool, attractive guy who says feminism sucks will have the girls disowning feminism in droves.
Learn to make people smile and laugh bro.
I think you are correct.
I'm not sure meaning is necessary, frankly. The meaning of life is only what we give it; there is no external meaning (I guess I would call myself an existentialist in that regard, though my politics are less left-wing).
You have an excellent point that bitter people are poor spokesmen. I do not think anything could make me cool or attractive, but there may be other ways to exert change that do not require serving as a spokesman or role model. Thank you.
You seem like a thoughtful person, that's a big plus you have going for you. As opposed to partying in Bankok as other people have suggested, I'm going to recommend to take up some kind of grounded, physical activity. Build a piece of furniture; grow your own food, that kind of thing. In the modern world, we have lost our connection to the visceral experiences that make the concept of "being alive" mean something more than a symbol pushed around on the stack. This seems to be the one thing that postmodernism got right, as much as I dislike the stuff downstream from it like feminism and critical theory.
Yes to all this.
Just one more thing to add: feminism doesn't exist. It's a word on a page, it does nothing, compels no action, causes no consequences. Not once in an argument with my wife I had a though, "oh, feminism made her do/say this; if it weren't for feminism, she wouldn't".
A cool, attractive guy who says "feminism sucks" (when unprompted - I can see it as a direct answer in context) seems like an oxymoron...
Lol, what?
Come to think of it, my girlfriend and I have never discussed the energy crisis. Phew, good thing that means no consequences, cause everyone was saying that was gonna be rough.
While there's a point the OP could heed about allowing tribal division to blind you to reality, saying "There's no such thing as feminism," is a lie. More to the point, it's the kind of lie you tell to shut someone up and make it hard for them to identify what's being done to them. It's the kind of lie you repeat until society has changed enough that you can instead start saying, "There's always been feminism, And That's A Good Thing."
Without the word "feminism" we all have to keep saying, "that point when suddenly, for no reason at all, 70% of women turned into horrible bitches."
Without the word "feminism" we all have to keep saying, "that point when suddenly, for no reason at all, 70% of women turned into horrible bitches."
I can't... even...
Are you sure it's 70%?
What percent of women were... that... before "feminism"? 0?
The point about "there's no such thing as feminism" is that it's irrelevant to this specific person's issues; moreover, the term is so overused as to lose all its meaning. In fact, it's a cognitive kill switch, much like "socialism" or "capitalism" are. Once brought in, productive discussion becomes impossible.
I think It would benefit the OP to formulate his issues with relationships with women without the use of grandiose words like "feminism"; also, use "to do", not "to be", as in, "she does this" as opposed to "she is this"; "I do this" as opposed to "I am this". Then the fog may lift and an understanding of what the actual problem is, and what could be done about it, may emerge.
It is exactly 69% of women but I round it up so no one feels the urge to comment, "Nice."
OP has a model of the world which is true but not nearly to the extent he thinks it is.
Part of that model is that feminists will lie, evade, and gaslight whenever you shine a light on them. Your post pattern matches perfectly to that. OP is within his rights to reject everything you say for that reason alone.
And while your followup contains some generic advice, your first post seems motivated more by my suggestion that cool people can harm the social standing of feminism than by any interest in helping the OP.
"Part of that model is that feminists will lie, evade, and gaslight whenever you shine a light on them."
Oh. A girl did this to you? No need to be scared anymore, she's gone.
>I think It would benefit the OP to formulate his issues with relationships with women without the use of grandiose words like "feminism"; also, use "to do", not "to be", as in, "she does this" as opposed to "she is this"; "I do this" as opposed to "I am this".
Yes, that sounds very plausible. Shrug. Any relationship has frictions. Some can be negotiated. Some turn out to be deal breakers. But the useful action is to discuss the _particular_ conflicts and see if what each person wants can be negotiated to some livable compromise or not.
Yep!
“You leave crusty dirty dishes in the sink for days and it pisses me off” is specifically actionable: I may choose to wash dishes right away, or plead for understanding, etc. Productive discussion and a resolution are possible.
“You are a f..ing jerk I hate you!” - surely packs a punch, but what am I supposed to do here? What’s the action item to address?
I say, "feminism sucks". I stand ready to hold open doors and carry things. Not that they need it, but they do LIKE it.
I like carrying things. If I receive inadequate levels of gratitude, I carry them back, pick the girl up and carry her back to them, so it's more convenient for her to carry them herself.
Lol
I don't have any great arguments for having kids.
From a utilitarian perspective your better off donating the money and time you would lose.
And from a "personal happiness" I can't judge what would make you happier.
I think ultimately people have kids because they want to. Meaning that they feel within the core of their being that their life would be more meaningful with kids. That they don't want to age alone with no family.
Only you can decide if that's true for you or not. But if you feel that it is, then you can reexamine your reasons and see if they still hold true
(a) too selfish to do a good job and too unselfish to do it anyway => Probably still holds true. Unless you are defining "good job" as being some kind of super-parent. Like, I think even if you are in the top 80% of parents your kids are probably more or less fine. And if you have that much money that already puts you a leg up.
(b) lazy and don't want to work hard => Maybe still holds true. Depends if your desire to not work hard is stronger or weaker than your innate desire to have a family
(c) I already bow and scrape all day to a boss, doing it to my wife when I come home doesn't sound like fun => Again, it depends if your desire to not work for your wife is stronger or weaker than your desire to have kids. You could just try to find a low maintenance woman. But of course there is no such thing as a low maintenance 1 year old.
(d) I think I'd probably get divorced for any of the thousand reasons (including for fun) => This is probably a reason not to do it. While prenups can protect your money, it's not great for the kids. I would say only get married if you believe you are capable of commitment.
(e) I'm bad at the whole 'being sexy' thing => That's not a reason not to go for it. I mean, not a reason not to try. Worst comes to worst you fail. But anyway being sexy could be a learned skill.
(f) I genuinely resent the opposite sex at this point and don't want to get involved. => Don't marry a woman if you hate women. Maybe marry a man and adopt?
I think you're correct. I won't do it. Thanks for your time.
(And I'm not doing the gay marriage thing. I might be a little bi but I doubt there's enough gay there to support a gay marriage, and frankly I don't think I should be raising kids.)
It sounds like you're having a mid-life crisis. If you're a self-confessed selfish person, I think having children is a mistake, even if you feel some kind of pressure to have some. You need to actually figure out what you want in life.
Of course, having kids or even relationships is, financially, a stupid idea. You are guaranteed to have less money than you would otherwise. But ask yourself what your money is actually FOR. It ought to be easy to earn $150k a year on $3 million, with only a paltry 5% return (which you can get close to with treasury bonds, and easily pass with certain dividend stocks). So you retire, and do...what? Only you can figure that out.
True, but I'm in no position to be raising them right.
I'm talking about my personality.
I'm not an antinatalist; I don't think *I* should have kids. And I don't plan to dump all the hard work on the (hypothetical) woman; I'm not a feminist but they are right about that much.
Scott, you're going to less.online, right? Do you have any specific plans, maybe Unsong-related?
Yes, no.
The older porn is, the more unwatchable/unworkable as porn it is; it's difficult to see victorian erotica as even being erotic at all, while the saggy body parts of 70s supposed "golden age" porn make it awkward viewing today. Even enhanced, post-Pamela Anderson 90s porn seems uncomfortably plasticky. Assuming that this is a trend that will continue, in what way will porn develop to make today's porn unviewable to a future audience, given that porn is (you'd think) kind of like athletics, right now as professionalized as it's possible for it to be?
I continue to hope against hope that porn in the future will have basic elements of film editing to convey emotion (specifically horniness). The single camera style will be as archaic as the Great Train Robbery.
This is true of pretty much any media.
The comparison to athletics gives you the answer; porn steroids. Biological enhancers that probably mess people up in the long term but allow crazy superhuman stunts.
Alternately, cartoons currently offer utterly impractical scenarios, and improving technology will allow cartoons to appear more lifelike. A video with a 4x4 grid of bouncing squares that x-ray through different layers of clothing as they pass over people standing behind the grid, will no longer be the sole domain of hentai videos.
I still have an idea for one, where everything is pitch black but any sound that's made creates a sonar-like ping that illuminates the area around it.
> right now as professionalized as it's possible for it to be?
My impression is that there's a wide variety, from random people filming themselves, all the way up through commercial productions. So whatever the near-term trends are, they're probably already out there, but something that you personally don't consider attractive.
Longer term, I'll make a wild guess that today's stuff is all 2D, audio-visual-only, non-interactive, with mere humans instead of custom AI-designed avatars that are more real than any mere flesh-and-blood body can be. It's not even using biofeedback!
I guess the main question is whether AI generated porn gets good enough to make human actord superfluous or if a. it never gets good enough in some way or b. a large enough audience continues to care about watching human actors to keep that market afloat.
Why do you think it's as professionalised as possible? Given that it still uses real humans, there is only so much even surgery can do there (and that leaves the women still looking plasticky).
AI generated porn will presumably be the next step, with anatomically unrealistic bodies in superhuman perfection and capable of flexibility that real bodies aren't, never mind what other imaginative requirements the consumer may wish the dolls to perform. Making the unreal look more and more 'real' will be the hurdle.
Have you checked it doesn't work the other way around as well? I know pop stars used to be sexy but all the modern ones leave me cold.
For Science you need to time travel some Victorians over here and show them Pornhub.
Okay, that's sort of topic but I still want to ask...
> I know pop stars used to be sexy but all the modern ones leave me cold.
I wonder if that's really a sign of changes in you, or in the modern western culture?
I have this impression that newer generation of western pop stars is not trying as hard to look sexy as pop-stars of 80s and 90s did, especially the latest bunch (2010s and newer). Of course they are young and attractive, but they are not dressing as agressively (or should I say undressing?), there's less emphasis on dances and especially on obviously sexual dances (but then again there's still some that do that stuff, too).
In comparison, korean boybands and girlbands are clearly trying to look very sexy and they are fairly popular in the west too (and I'd argue that it's big part of the appeal, but that's a whole other topic). Do they also leave you cold?
It's not the best test and the results would not be conclusive, but maybe that would offer you some food for thought (or maybe not just for thought I don't judge).
I'm leaning towards it being a change in the world, because as you say Oriental girls are still hot - as are AI pinups, come to think of it.
Right. They'll solve the problems with AI movie generation and you'll be able to dial up a 3D simulated sexual encounter of your choice. You tell it "let me sleep with Aella" and a digitized Aella appears and talks to you about her research while you have sex with her.
(I've chosen the one celebrity I'm fairly sure would not object.)
Aella entered into a sponsorship deal with the company, you get her free in exchange for the second-by-second analytics data of your performance.
I'd love a "More than you ever wanted to know" post about micro plastics. It seems like one of those new "could be an enormous problem or relatively benign" type things and I'm really not sure how to feel about it as of yet.
Yeah I don't know what the sensitivity of the tests they use to detect them in biological organisms are. The amount presumably matters, and these days our tech is good enough that you can detect very tiny amounts of stuff if you try. Really need some kind of cohort comparisons (here's group A with 10x the level of microplastics that are found in group B, let's look for differences in acm or whatever).
I wonder how much it would cost if it turns out that we would benefit greatly from reducing them. Some plastics are easy to replace with cardboard or biodegradable variants (PLA or whatever), but then a lot of the bits also come from car tires and that's a much taller order to find a good substitute for.
a decent podcast episode on it, at least: https://www.thestudiesshowpod.com/p/episode-32-microplastics
I mainly want to know if there's a good way to test my blood for micro plastics!
I’ve recently been developing, for funsies, a probabilistic case for Hinduism https://open.substack.com/pub/wollenblog/p/the-evidence-for-hinduism?
r=2248ub&utm_medium=ios I also recently did a debate a couple nights ago with a Christian on the subject https://www.youtube.com/live/zrc4uOVoQ40?si=LYzZkFu98TX9u9QU
I’m not a Hindu myself, so the learning curve has been steep. Would love if anyone knew any good Substacks on Hinduism, or Indian religion generally.
I think that this paper was written mostly tongue-in-cheek, but I could imagine putting it together with some of your discussion into something deeper: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00048402.2019.1621912
I just did! https://open.substack.com/pub/wollenblog/p/the-common-consent-argument-for-hinduism?r=2248ub&utm_medium=ios (I’ve listed to Tiddy talk about this and I’m pretty sure he’s not joking—he has a middling credence in nature spirits)
I love Hinduism as much as anyone, but honestly I don't think the philosophical arguments you link to are very convincing. It reads like motivated reasoning, or "apologetics" as religious scholars like to call it, where you know where you want to get to and then wrangle concepts around to make it sound inevitable.
To give just a few examples: your argument for time being infinite is "you can always imagine one minute before a given time", and that it feels intuitively that it should be so. But our imagination and intuition are shaped by experience and culture, which operate at a certain local range of scales or orders of magnitude, and tell us basically nothing about what happens beyond those. The argument falls flat because it "proves" too much; by the same kind of reasoning one could have dismissed the possibility of e.g energy being quantized before physicists started to find evidence for it.
Then you have a whole variety of arguments that more or less amount to "if X only happens once among an infinity of occasions, then the probability of X at each occasion is zero, which entails non-X, so if X happens at all, it has to happen an infinity of times". But that is a mathematical fallacy, which once again proves too much. If the argument were valid, it would mean that the identity function over integers, which only takes the value 0 once, couldn't exist.
Then, your "tweak" of the idea of moksha, making it extremely long but not permanent, is completely incompatible with the Hindu view of it, and also with the Buddhist (seen from this far they're almost the same). Ultra simplified, the Hindu and Buddhist idea of liberation is that conditioning is finite, and liberation is what you get when you stop adding more, so the current load eventually runs out.
And finally, the argument that a religion is more likely to be true if lots of people believe in it completely ignores cultural evolutionary forces. Practical ideas on how to build stuff do evolve somewhat in accordance with reality because the proof is in the pudding, if you build your ship wrong it sinks instead of sailing. But religions thrive on their ability to make a culture cohesive, inspired, stable and competitive, and that has nearly zero to do with how true their underlying philosophies are.
I'm wondering if one can be reincarnated as a mineral, a stone. Would you retain a soul? Could that soul then migrate to a tree or a stalk of corn? Rocks live. They just have a slower "metabolism".
A half century ago I did some cross-country backpacking in wilderness areas in the Far West, and it always seemed to me the geological landscape was as lively as the pikas and marmots.
Stone is alive, I think. Once, after taking LSD, I found an obsidian bird arrow at 13,000 feet.
They played with the idea of stones having a soul of sorts in that film Everything Everywhere All at Once.
The idea of being igneous rock for a few million years, say, in Glacier National Park is appealing. Then maybe your next incarnation might be as a Mayfly or a cicada, before you move on to work as a root system for Sequoias in the Sierra Nevada. Maybe souls aren't just for mammals.
From my very limited understanding, there are hells in Hinduism as well, just not permanent forever hell. But they are unpleasant, they do last a long time, and they are punitive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naraka_(Hinduism)
Hinduism is a very wide topic, it's difficult to say that there is one 'official' Hinduism; it encompasses everything from varying schools of philosophy and theology right down to peasant folk beliefs.
In what sense is reincarnated you you, according to Hinduism? We know people don't remember anything from their previous lives (even if reincarnation is a thing). If, after I die, all my memory is reset, then for all purposes that matter IMO, it's equivalent to dying, and a new person/animal being born.
Many Hindus are substance dualists—so they’d say you’re you so long as you have the same soul, regardless of which past memories it can access
I was recently quoted by Scott in his post on the highlights for the Hanania book review about how we might not see any correlation between test and job performance amongst those hired for the job even though the test might be a very good predictor of job performance (end of Section 4):
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-cf9
Some commenters on the post asked me to further clarify what I was trying to say and engaged me in discussion, noting that my claim wasn't exactly what the standard treatment of Berkson's Paradox talks about.
It turns out that the exact claim I made in my comment isn't quite true. Even at perfect calibration of the hiring criterion with the determinants of job performance the measured effect size/correlation still turns out to be positive.
However a variant of it does hold and I've made a post in which I do a deep dive of just how strong the Berkson's Paradox variant effect is for the claim I was making in my comment:
https://ofaurochsandangels.substack.com/p/an-analysis-of-berksons-paradox
Great post! Fun to watch the animation, and I hope you do write about your "ideal statistics class for non-mathematicians" too.
I recently wrote a piece called European Accelerationism which was featured in the FT and on Marginal Revolution. In it I mention 5 policies to ignite European progress: https://www.santiago-martins.com/european-accelerationism-eu-acc.html
If you are European or work in the European scientific or tech ecosystems, and if you agree with these policies, I should be very grateful if you could sign the petition: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jF_d49euri9a-c_kGd5G-hrniNoQeJtkiIeBii_ir5A/edit
The policies are chosen based on evidence, political consensus, and precedent. I’m happy to say that they’ve received good feedback from those in tech and in the political milieu, so I’m hopeful they can achieve something tangible. Regardless of the above however, it would be great to get the community's feedback.
Cheers
All very sensible ideas, glad to hear they're getting traction, good luck advancing them!
Thank you for the kind words!
This just popped up on my radar too this morning: https://eu-acc.com
related, I guess!?
Yes, I’m working with Andreas and others on this. Feel free to join the discord if you’re that way inclined!
very cool!
Very interesting!
I think you're mistaking some of the pushback. The bigger pushback I've been seeing is from people who say that phones aren't the reason for adolescent mental health issues - it's actually climate change and racism.
Is the consensus around here that climate change is not a major issue? Because in my info world it certainly is one of the world's biggest and most pressing problems.
To the extent that there's a consensus in the community here, I would say that the consensus is that most people who understand its significance have then gone on to endorse overhyped versions of the problems associated with it. Some people here are definitely then getting into the opposite failure mode, of thinking that if something is overhyped, then it must not actually be significant.
To me, the issue is that global poverty is as big and pressing an issue as climate change, and many proposals about dealing with climate change make it much harder to deal with global poverty, but I also see that climate change causes a potentially irreversible set of changes, which makes it hard to properly compare them. Also, I agree with the statement that was issued about a year ago that "mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war" - and this statement pointedly left out climate change, which is definitely also a societal-scale risk, but seems to me to pose less risk of actual civilizational collapse (or extinction) than AI, pandemics, and nuclear war.
It's hard to properly convey my thought that we should societally be doing more to address all five of these problems (poverty, climate change, AI risk, pandemics, nuclear war), but also that it doesn't help to make unrealistically confident predictions of worse versions of climate change than the science supports.
I'm about 95% in agreement with you. Indeed, I'd say global poverty is actually a bigger problem (in the sense of human flourishing) than AGW. I also don't see how AGW anywhere close to serious forecasts can threaten civilization. It will make things a lot worse in some places, and that's bad and we should avoid it if we can, but it's not going to cause the collapse of first-world countries anywhere.
I'd also say that a lot of the big things being done to address AGW don't seem likely to have much effect. (Often they are about being seen to do something rather than doing something; sometimes they are actively harmful.) I think the best way to make things better involve technology--LED bulbs, better heat pumps, better/cheaper solar panels, better batteries, etc. Solutions that require democratic governments to intentionally make their voters much worse off for a decades-away improvement in the world seem unlikely to be sustained.
If someone manages to get working fusion reactors or figure out how to unsnarl our ability to build fission reactors, or gets energy storage technology that makes it economical to mostly rely on intermittent renewable sources, then CO2 emissions will fall very quickly in a way that involves most people being made substantially better off.
Not following the pushback, but I read the book itself and found it thought provoking. Phone free schools strike me as a good idea. It also gave me the nudge I've been needing to get around to moving my phone charger into the living room instead of next to my bed, which I've been meaning to do for some time to cut down on the temptation to doomscroll social media instead of going to sleep - that's been pretty successful and assuming it continues would be a trend I'd continue with kids.
I generally like his proposals for more precise age bracketing for social media. It's a fair point that COPPA was enacted in 1998 and its hard to say with a straight face that 13 was picked at the time with a much understanding of the implications of social media for the 13-16 age bracket.
To an extent this is preaching to the choir for me; my spouse and I are currently not-exactly-working-to-avoid having a first kid, and I've seen enough negative cases in my own social circle to be primed for "yeah, we're not going to be tablet raising a tiny human," but I thought it was a good read.
I don't have access to the wired article since it's paywalled, but the tone of what I can see seems more like it's arguing that tech in childhood is a fait accompli rather than that it isn't harmful ("[w]hatever your views on kids and technology are... connectivity is now a part of childhood"). I'm admittedly not the choir for this one, but if that's Levy's line of argument it strikes me as a pretty poor one - "it might be harming kids, but you haven't proven it and even if you did nothing can be done" is not a good best-foot forward if one is looking to persuade.
I think the problem is less phones per se than it is algorithmic social media.
Is this anything more than the latest technology scare? Video games were leading kids astray. Before that, videos were doing it. A few years from now, it'll be whatever AI babysitter/teacher combination that is in common use.
If I go by that article, Haidt is doing "In my day we had none of this, we went outside and played and fell out of trees!" old codger line. I'm an old codger type myself, so I sympathise, but sheesh, reading too many books instead of going out and getting your leg broken in proper manly sport (or whatever the equivalent for girls was) was also considered to be a bad thing I was warned against:
"At one point in his new book, Haidt expresses unhappiness that hospitals aren’t seeing as many boys show up with shattered limbs, because it means that young males aren’t bulking up with the requisite toughness that will stand them in good stead during adulthood. He seems to idealize the Leave It to Beaver-style aimless hangouts of an earlier era, taking for granted that it’s a superior environment than the online one where people might make friends from anywhere in the world but not fall out of trees with them."
Okay, so how many of you broke limbs as kids and how many of you are weak four-eyed nerds? 😁
Well, there is a well-documented increase in mental health problems among the latest generation that is crying for an explanation and hopefully some kind of remedy, because it amounts to a pretty huge amount of suffering.
But the world is changing so fast that it's hard to figure out what the main cause may be, if there is even one. I've actually been reading Haidt's arguments for a while on his Substack, and I think he makes a decent case that smartphones (and more specifically social media feeds) are a major force.
Weak four-eyed nerd here, with all limbs intact.
I was a weak two-eyed nerd. Does that count?
I broke no bones as a kid, but was in fact pushed around a lot. I didn't often give in.
Was a weak four eyed nerd at least through high school but seemed like I had a revolving credit line at the ER. Too many broken bones, stitches, even a couple reconstructive surgeries to even think about without making my head hurt.
>>"At one point in his new book, Haidt expresses unhappiness that hospitals aren’t seeing as many boys show up with shattered limbs, because it means that young males aren’t bulking up with the requisite toughness that will stand them in good stead during adulthood. He seems to idealize the Leave It to Beaver-style aimless hangouts of an earlier era, taking for granted that it’s a superior environment than the online one where people might make friends from anywhere in the world but not fall out of trees with them."
I suspect this a a creative bad-faith reading by the author of the article, given the snarky delivery and the fact that I recall absolutely nothing like it from my reading of the actual book itself. Haidt definitely talks about the importance of unstructured play ("leave it to Beaver-style aimless hangouts of an earlier era?") and the value of play in person relative to play that is moderated/soft-managed through a device, but I don't recall anything like "break legs, it builds character."
I never broke any limbs which I think must be owing to having fairly strong bones, because I was pretty clumsy and preferred to play outside, and further preferred to play with boys if they would have me. My particular thing was getting the wind knocked out of me. I remember clearly the shock, then panic, the first time it happened.
The rest of the time I definitely spent too much time with both TV and books but in fact the latter was (accidentally) controlled by the fact that parents (or at least mine) didn't care whether kids read or not, didn't monitor that - so that my book supply was constrained by whether my mother would take me to the library, and as she was not much of a reader then, in her busy years, this was not a weekly occurrence. The downside was that I read anything that came in my way to fill the void and this in turn led to reading inappropriate stuff.
As for TV I feel I watched so much, mostly the same reruns over and over, more so than what was new. But again, constrained not by wise parents but by our having but one TV so at night it wasn't mine. This is surely a difference worth noting. And yet that too furnished happy memories of the times we fractious bunch watched a movie as a family. Never "scheduled", just by chance.
But children like me were called "bookworms" precisely because few children found text similarly addicting.
When I see the good parents of today riding bikes with their children, all helmeted and learning the proper rules of the road - I have this exact reaction: I wish I (and more particuarly my spouse) had done this with our kid, had been good parents in that way.
I never think - I wish instead of playing freely with the kids in the hood, I had ridden bikes with my parents. "Catch" is a great pastime for parents and kids for a reason - it is just the right length.
The scare about TV/videogames was right: people spend huge amounts of time watching screens, to the exclusion of real life.
I broke limbs as a kid (my asthma medication might have made me more prone to that), and am a four-eyed nerd.
Well, I hope you're happy to have let down Jonathan Heidt and not used the broken limbs to turn you into the manly man who can win the battle of human strife in the world today with your toughened muscles and knitted bones 😁
Haidt is a gay social psychologist, not a "manly man".
Are you saying gay psychologists can't be manly?
That wouldn't be the way to bet, but it seems I was mistaken about him being gay.
Okay, so how were *you* ruined by the technology of your youth? And if you claim "But that was different, it wasn't at all as sophisticated as it is today", well the tech of our times was way more sophisticated than that of our parents and so on backwards.
I'm not saying Haidt does not have a point, I'm saying that claiming what is going on today is uniquely bad and dangerous needs to be backed up. I'm well aware myself of how much "this is just different to what I know and what was around when I was that age" as an attitude affects my reactions to new technology separate from the virtues or faults of that technology.
Haidt is very late Boomer/early Gen X, like myself. He may indeed be out of touch, you have to take *that* into account as well before treating every word as true, true.
That well could be. It could also be social contagion (right now it seems to be almost de rigeur to present yourself, as a teenager, as having some kind of problem or condition; to be able-bodied, mentally healthy, cis and het is the worst thing in the world, double worst if you add in white and male to that).
There could be more diagnoses now than in the past. There could be other social and cultural reasons. I'm not denying that "addictive solitary online time stuck in front of screens all the time" is bad, but I'm asking how much of that is true. The review makes it sound like Haidt's solution to the ailments of modern life is "make the kids go outside and play". That's never a bad thing, but will it work now as well as in the past? Are there no differences between expectations for little Jimmy today and back when little Jimmy's grandpa was Jimmy's age?
I think the internet + phones mean that 13-year-olds at their maximum susceptibility to social contagion are exposed to the most infectious social contagion produced anywhere in the world. It's like the difference between your kids being exposed to childhood illnesses in a small town somewhere, and your kids being exposed to raw sewage from a huge city.
What makes it different now, though? Yes, smartphones seem to be very addictive, but we've made it so that even adults have to be plugged in 24/7 in case work calls them, so they may as well look at their phones all the time anyway.
We've had this about "people are all reading newspapers on the train instead of interacting with their neighbours" and every new tech that comes along gets this treatment. I don't think having young children stuck in front of screens as a replacement for human contact is good, but do you remember the concerns over "latch key kids"? And when was the last time that popped up as a hot topic area of concern?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latchkey_kid
Apparently Gen X were all latchkey kids, but funnily enough when people are discussing generations they're either complaining about the Boomers (still) or Millenials. Poor old Gen X is constantly forgotten!
> we've made it so that even adults have to be plugged in 24/7 in case work calls them, so they may as well look at their phones all the time anyway.
Huh? It's perfectly possible to be "plugged in" for work purposes while spending literally 0 time using the phone.
Absolutely they shouldn't be glued to their screens. Or plonked in front of the Saturday morning cartoon shows as substitute babysitters. Or let run around in the streets like feral dogs because the parents can't be bothered to look after them.
It all does have to do with parenting. Decent parenting means being aware of what is going on and monitoring such devices and saying "no". Poor parenting is giving the four year old an iPad because that's what everyone else has. Parents who buy their kids scramblers and then let them run wild are not better parents merely because the kid is outside in the open causing mayhem and injuring themselves and others.
https://www.rsa.ie/news-events/news/details/2022/10/19/parents-urged-not-to-gift-quad-bikes-or-scramblers-as-presents-for-children-this-christmas
Simply saying "This thing is Bad!" isn't enough, we *do* need to interrogate it - and the role and responsibility of parenting. Smartphones and other devices don't simply grow on trees or fall out of the air into the hands of children.
I'm not really sure what you're disagreeing with here, have you actually read Haidt? You seem to agree that the current common usage patterns *are* problematic, which is his main point.
Of course it all does have to do with parenting, but parenting does not happen in a vacuum. If you want parents to not feed their kids into a social media feed addiction machine, you want to do exactly what Haidt is doing at the moment: trying to create shared momentum of parents, schools, etc. working together to make that possible.
>>Absolutely they shouldn't be glued to their screens. Or plonked in front of the Saturday morning cartoon shows as substitute babysitters. Or let run around in the streets like feral dogs because the parents can't be bothered to look after them.
I'm actually pro-letting-kids-run-around-like-feral-dogs. Running around a suburb with a group of kids my own age, without adults around to solve problems and resolve disputes is a big part of how I was successfully phased into independence as an adult.
Adults should be reachable if something kids truly can't handle happens (e.g. when one of my friends broke an arm playing street hockey, there were adults near enough for us to run to a friend's house and grab one), but they can be too close in addition to being too far.
The All In Podcast (which is as tech optimistic as it gets) strongly recommended it. Not seeing any pushback.
Fewer comments like this, please - 25% warning.
Because in the words of another related forum, you're optimizing for heat instead of light.
Yeah, if we have exceptions, it's probably for literal Nazis and the stupidly woke, but even there I think this would have been over the line? Other than that, I'm not sure if I can think of topic areas that we'd tend to give people exceptions for.
Scott's made a case for "niceness, community, and civilization", and that seems like as good a motto as any. There's also the (somewhat lapsed) Victorian Sufi Buddha Lite comment moderation rule, where comments should be at least two of "true, necessary, and kind".
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/02/the-comment-policy-is-victorian-sufi-buddha-lite/
Because it’s snark
Seems completely obvious to an outsider, you are missing something due to personal bias.
To be specific, instead of "I am just so cherishing watching the relentless tech optimists scramble and furiously try to discredit his thesis on behalf of the nervous overlords. He's clearly struck a chord because it smells like desperation up in here. And it's triple chef's kiss delicious."
You could have written something less overtly hateful towards the people you disagree with. Such as
"There's a type of person who seems to agree with anything that tech companies do. I dislike this; it seems obvious that social media is making the world worse in a lot of ways. Even if his book is not exactly right in all the details it is a relief to see the basic thesis being taken seriously and the onus being on defenders of technology to refute it, rather than the other way around. Gives me hope that we might be able to start making positive improvements in the future."
Whatever you choose to call it, the point is that we prefer to have less of that here.
But thanks for mentioning the book, it seems interesting!
> Overtly hateful is a tad hyperbolic, no?
No? You got the warning for a reason.
I think it's arguments of the form "I am gloating watching X fanatics making excuses for the failures of their Y overlords".
There's also the matter of 'I honestly don't even care how much of the story he may or may not have exactly right', which while it may well be a *completely accurate* summary of his feelings is a very poor attitude to flaunt in a nominally rationalist forum.
Instead of agreeing or disagreeing with a thesis, sort of painting one side as evil for having the opinion at all, and making vague conspiracy-ish allegations for why someone would disagree with something without backing it up, all in a kind of snide and superior tone.
I dunno, seems to me he's pointing to something novel and modern - Luddites now have the power to hurt feelings as well as smash machines, we must suppress this line of thinking about tech.
I concede the uniformity of the response to the book had that quality of the morning memo that some of us do indeed marvel at, in our conspiracy-minded way. Fast as the speed of light, everyone understood that a major change being questioned for possibly wreaking major changes, was not the accepted "contrarian" thesis; the contrarian thesis (yes, this is how it's typically presented, have cake and eat it too) would be that kids have always had these screens if you are good enough at analogizing things.
Even Tyler Cowen's take on the book was basically that the internet and social media and screens would have been great for him as a chess-playing, grade-advancing non-average kid eager to be in touch with his counterparts around the world, or something.
Which seemed pretty average as argument goes.
I also thought Tyler was making a particularly poor argument against Haidt. Let's try to be better than Tyler here.
I’m confused too.