I don't understand why many right-wingers appear to a) have such strong distaste about claims like "trans women are women" and b) are so absolutely certain that their beliefs are objectively correct.
It's one thing to have object-level policy positions that are trans-exclusive, eg like thinking trans women shouldn't use women's bathrooms (I disagree), or that they shouldn't be in women's sports (I weakly agree), or that government funding shouldn't be used for gender affirming therapies (I strongly disagree).
It's another to have strong ontological beliefs (which afaict are wrong or at least confused) and then *assert those beliefs as fact without debate and people who disagree with you are laughably wrong*.
I'm not confused that conservatives are wrong about this issue. That's normal! Plenty of people are wrong about plenty of things, and I'm sure they think I'm wrong too. But I don't understand where the *confidence* is coming from. Ontology isn't an easy question and people tend to get them wrong all the time[1], even when there's a clear "truth of the matter."
And in this case most of the debate doesn't even have a "truth of the matter" to begin with. (eg it's hard for me to identify an empirical crux or prediction about object-level reality that'd cause the majority of proponents to predictably update if it turns out True/False). So I don't understand the level of confidence, or the associated meanness.
[1] some sample questions that are much much easier and yet people can reliably either disagree or get them wrong:
I don't see a single argument in your post that would support your point of view. In fact, I can take your post, mirror it along the left-wing/right-wing axis, and it would make just as much (or as little) sense.
For example:
"I don't understand why many left-wingers appear to a) have such strong fondness of claims like "trans women are women" and b) are so absolutely certain that their beliefs are objectively correct. "
Or:
"It's one thing to have object-level policy positions that are trans-inclusive, eg like thinking trans women should use women's bathrooms (I disagree), or that they should be in women's sports (I weakly agree), or that government funding should be used for gender affirming therapies (I strongly disagree)."
Or:
"I'm not confused that liberals are wrong about this issue. That's normal! Plenty of people are wrong about plenty of things, and I'm sure they think I'm wrong too. But I don't understand where the *confidence* is coming from. Ontology isn't an easy question and people tend to get them wrong all the time[1], even when there's a clear 'truth of the matter.'"
My point isn't that you're wrong and they're right, or any similar gotcha. Rather, I want to show you that your beliefs aren't as objectively and obviously correct as you think they are. Dig deeper. *Why* do you believe what you believe, and why might conservatives believe what they believe?
"Rather, I want to show you that your beliefs aren't as objectively and obviously correct as you think they are" lolwut.
I feel like you're confused about my comment. I think you are treating it as if I was trying to advance my own position in a debate, whereas that was explicitly not what I was going for.
I think if left-wingers have extremely strong confidence that their subjective beliefs are objectively correct, that'd be a problem! And in fact I do try to criticize them when they act like their moral preferences have more "truth of the matter" than they actually do.
So I don't find your attempt at symmetry particularly convincing.
> I think if left-wingers have extremely strong confidence that their beliefs are objectively correct, that'd be a problem!
That is already the case. I don't see any indication that left-wingers have less strong confidence in their beliefs than right-wingers, insofar as such generalizations over large population groups make sense at all.
> So I don't find your attempt at symmetry particularly convincing.
Of course you don't. You've made up your mind that your outgroup's beliefs are more wrong than your ingroup's. Which is why the following statement:
"I'm not confused that conservatives are wrong about this issue. That's normal! Plenty of people are wrong about plenty of things, and I'm sure they think I'm wrong too. But I don't understand where the *confidence* is coming from."
sounds perfectly reasonable and self-evident to you, while the mirrored statement:
"I'm not confused that liberals are wrong about this issue. That's normal! Plenty of people are wrong about plenty of things, and I'm sure they think I'm wrong too. But I don't understand where the *confidence* is coming from."
sounds non-sensical and obviously wrong to you, even though they're objectively symmetrical in their reasoning.
Note that I'm *not* saying that all beliefs are equally right or wrong, far from it! It's just that any argument or claim you made in your original post works just as well (or as badly) for your position as it does for the opposite position.
I feel like you're still claiming that I'm making an argument/thought my comment was strong enough to be persusasive by itself, which was not my intent. Compare: "I believe Green is a better color than Blue, for XYZ reasons, and people who think otherwise are dumb" to "I happen to think Green is a better color than Blue, but I don't see why people who think Blue is objectively better than Green are so confident in their beliefs."
-- Conservatives believe in hard money; progressives believe in fiat.
Broadly, conservatives believe in concrete properties. Progressives believe in abstract theories. Conservatives say their beliefs are obvious and common sense, and that progressives engage in wishful-thinking. Progressives say their beliefs are righteous and just, and that conservatives are uncouth bigots.
On a deeper level [0], I think conservatives are pessimistic realists (e.g. doomsday prepping is conservative-coded), whereas progressives are optimistic idealists (utopianism is progressive-coded). In fact, I'd argue that optimism vs pessimism is what fundamentally differentiates conservatives from progressives. (N.B. I think the right-vs-left axis is a separate dimension altogether, which pits hierarchy vs egalitarianism.)
Now let's examine the trans question. Conservatives: "M/F (qua sex) is biologically-real, HRT doesn't erase facts such as big forearms". Progressives: "M/F (qua gender) is socially-constructed, my feelings are of prime importance".
You and I have both read Scott's writings about categories. But from a conservative perspective, can you now intuit how one might conclude that the progressives are trying to gaslight everyone else about aspects of reality that are "obvious" and "common sense"?
On top of that, progressives have really been feeling their wheaties lately. So I'm not super surprised about a proportional amount of kneejerking from the conservatives.
Thanks for your hypotheses! I appreciate the explanation, sorry if my replies come across as rude and you absolutely should not feel an obligation to respond! :)
Firstly, I'm not that interested in "conservative vs progressive" as a an analytical lens on trans issues for this comment, I'm more interested in "conservative vs correct" on this issue[1].
("Broadly, conservatives believe in concrete properties. Progressives believe in abstract theories. Conservatives say their beliefs are obvious and common sense, and that progressives engage in wishful-thinking. Progressives say their beliefs are righteous and just, and that conservatives are uncouth bigots."), I think your generalities are too broad here. Let's go to the examples:
"Sex-realism dovetails into a certain narrative.
-- Conservatives believe in human-nature; progressives believe in blank-slateism. -> I think framing conservatives as "believing in human-nature" seems pretty loaded here. Most progressives will say that they believe in human nature as cruel (eg racism, sexism, whateverism, corporate greed etc) whereas conservatives are overly optimistic about people, especially their preferred groups. Now I think progressives are often wrong here (corporate greed isn't a good explanation for inflation, which is better modeled as very impersonal forces of supply and demand). But it certainly doesn't seem like conservatives have a monopoly on understanding human nature!
-- Conservatives believe in race-realism; progressives believe in racial-fungibility. -> Is so-called "race-realism" really the majority belief among *conservatives* writ large, rather than some weird internet randos?
-- Conservatives believe in moral-realism; progressives believe in moral-relativism. -> But morality is an extremely abstract thing! What does it even mean for morality to have concrete properties?
-- Conservatives believe fetuses have souls; progressives believe souls don't exist. -> Huh? Suppose you're explaining American culture to an alien. You tell him that humans have roughly two factions. one group believes in an immortal soul that can not be measured concretely in any discernible, whereas the other group are materialists. Which faction do you think the alien will guess are the more "concrete" vs "abstract" groups?
-- Conservatives believe in hard money; progressives believe in fiat." Again I think believing in "hard money" (what does that mean concretely, gold?) is more of a weird internet rando thing than a common belief among conservatives, even the libetarian party doesn't talk about ending the Fed anymore.
[1] I will separately be interested in debating "progressive vs correct" at a latter point though I think I understand the left's departures from reality more intuitively.
"one man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens."
Here's an easier example. Consider abortion. Both conservatives and progressives agree in the abstract that "murder is wrong". But their modes of reasoning can nonetheless diverge. Because it's possible to reason that
A) killing babies is murder -> killing babies is bad
B) killing babies is murder
C) => killing babies is bad
but you can also reason
A) killing babies is murder -> killing babies is bad
B) killing babies is not bad
C) => killing babies is not murder
Which syllogism is "objectively correct"? Both! These are both valid syllogisms! And yet they're incompatible! Once you understand this on a deep level, you see this everywhere.
Homework assignment: how does this apply to the gun control debate?
My impression is that *most* of the gun control debate comes down to empirics. Leftists believe that outlawing guns will reduce gun violence, rightists believe that outlawing guns will increase gun violence ("if you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns")
Unlike some of the other questions discussed, this is actually a fairly resolvable empirical question.
These are tactical considerations rather than strategic. I mean, do you honestly believe that "violence reduction" is the motivator behind the anti-gun-control faction?
"What's the best way to reduce violence in the world? . . . . . . . . . I know! by joining the NRA and lobbying for 2nd amendment rights! So many QALY's!" said no one ever.
Humans are not automatically strategic, or consequentialist. Leftists reduce racism via protests in the US, when it's almost certainly the case that the best way to reduce racism would be in places with a higher baseline level of racism, and less antiracist messaging. Prolifers spend almost all of their pro-fetus efforts on reducing abortion, rather than reducing other sources of fetal deaths like early miscarriages, or increasing contraception access and promoting homosexual relationships. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5443340/
> I'm not that interested in "conservative vs progressive" as a an analytical lens on trans issues for this comment, I'm more interested in "conservative vs correct" on this issue
"all models are wrong; some models are useful."
I wrote the game theory essay [0] and also this essay about classification [1] just for these occasions. Ontological statements (including about truth and falsehood) are only useful insofar as they streamline some decision-making algorithm.
Suppose you visit the store to buy bread. The cold and uncaring universe doesn't guarantee that any particular loaf is actually made of bread. It could be adulterated with sawdust, or sand, or asbestos. If you didn't know what went into your bread, you might be inclined to chemically test every single loaf so you don't get randomly poisoned and die like a Victorian. Fortunately, the FDA promises us that the labels that are assigned to the loaves accurately reflect the loaves (up to a certain extent). I.e. accurate categories help streamline our purchasing decisions.
You can also observe that categories are instrumentally subordinate to decisions by noticing that the resolution of name-space collisions depends on how you plan to use the labels. E.g. botanists categorize tomatoes as fruits because they care about anatomy. dieticians categorize tomatoes as vegetables because they care about nutrition. They have different categorization schemes because they plan to take different actions with different consequences.
So what im saying is, framing the trans question at the level of "correct vs incorrect" is a crude level of analysis. They should be thought of, not as ontological statements, but as implicit bundles of policies which help navigate an uncertain environment. I.e. you should be thinking "what pros and cons does this perspective offer?"
> Conservatives believe in human-nature; progressives believe in blank-slateism.
What I'm really getting at is malleability. it's overwhelmingly the progressives who tend to believe that we can all earn 6-figures, if only we just go to college and get STEM degrees and learn to code. To which conservatives (and Freddie Deboer) say "no, not every truckdriver/janitor/hotdog-vendor/etc is infinitely malleable".
> Conservatives believe in race-realism; progressives believe in racial-fungibility.
I'm exaggerating for rhetorical effect. No, not every conservative is openly turbo-racist. But consider, who's more likely to warn their daughters about wandering alone in bad neighborhoods: conservative parents or progressive parents.
> Conservatives believe in moral-realism; progressives believe in moral-relativism.
Moral realists believe in a single, objectively true morality. E.g. lots of people believe "murder is bad" is objectively true. Moral relativists believe morality is more subjective. E.g. your answer to the trolley problem is just, like, your opinion man.
There's a continuum. on one side, things are "real", "objective", "concrete", "tangible". On the other side, things are "ethereal", "subjective", "abstract", "intangible". Moral realism falls closer on the real side than the ethereal side.
you've never seen a soul. but you've also never seen an electron either. The Standard Model of Physics is just that: a model. and it is *extremely* abstract.
contrast this with souls. it may not be tangible or visible, but it's something people nonetheless "sense" directly with their sensory perceptions. E.g. a comment a few weeks or month ago (by Lv50 Lapras? I think?) described a creak, and realized that they probably would have ascribed it to a ghost if they'd lived in a different time period. People see faces in rocks all the time. Ascribing agency and intent to random aspects of their phenomonology is what humans just naturally do. Thus, it's actually quite low in the abstraction hierarchy.
> Conservatives believe in hard money; progressives believe in fiat.
Again, I'm exaggerating. And I very much feel it's conservatives who tend to lean more toward the "chronic-debt and chronic-inflation are bad, actually" side of the monetary-policy spectrum. The goal here is not to paint all conservatives as having extreme beliefs. The goal is to show that their dispositions naturally follow from a certain type of world-view.
Lumping question 1 with the rest is such a grave injustice to lady Mathematics, it's a question that could be answered by - quite literally - a bunch of sand, commonly called a "computer". A bunch of sand with not much sophistication at that, unlike all the others where the primary issue is drawing boundaries and an unhealthy amount of values clash in the mix.
> So I don't understand the level of confidence, or the associated meanness.
I'm not a conservative or rightwing in the most straightforward, US/UK-centric sense you mean, and whatever amount of sympathy or shared values I might have had with them is swiftly being burned to the ground as we speak by their overwhelmingly enthusiastic, uncannily aggressive and marvelously spineless cock sucking of Israel's criminal war, and I'm not a huge fan of the US left either. So I think I'm a good candidate for a moderately neutral opinion on the trans thing:
(1) The level of confidence can be easily explained by the fact (apparent fact? common sense? unexamined view?) that "Trans women are women" is a - in the most straightforward and face-value interpretation - quite wrong belief. You know what I mean by "Straightforward Interpretation", something along the lines of "Trans women are women in the exact same sense someone born with an XX chromosome is". An oft-repeated counterargument is "Eyes don't see chromosomes" or "People can't smell hormone levels", but that is irrelevant; A human-senses-perfect replica of a ten-million-dollar Da Vinci art piece would never be detected by a human either, but nobody will ever say about it "This replica is Da Vinci art". No it's not, it's a **replica** of Da Vinci art. The issue may seem philosophical, and it is, very much so, but it has very real consequences for art fraudsters.
"Trans women are women" can always be made correct with dozens of qualifiers and nuance, but any nuance added to a slogan makes it no longer a slogan, and people are confidently disagreeing with the slogan, not any essay-length elaboration you add to it. Simply put, if you want to change people's unexamined stance on Trans women, you somehow have to change the "folk philosophy" of copying every person unconsciously subscribes to, the philosophy of identity, what do they mean when they say things are "the same" or are "different". Intuitively, things are the same when they're the same "on every level", a naturalized immigrant is not quite a "True" American because there is some level of identity in which they're not American, namely the past identity (which survives in memory). That's what people usually mean when they say that Trans women are not women, there is some level at which a "true" woman and a trans women differ, but at which 2 "true" women never differ.
(2) As for the associated meanness, this is the combined resultant of 2 distinct forces: topic-independent meanness, and topic-dependent meanness. The topic-independent meanness is a measure of how much "unspicy" conversations (e.g. about Universal Grammar in Linguistics, or about String Theory in Physics), things that we intuitively expect to be calm and collected and dispassionate because no one's values are at stake, can still descend into unmitigated shit-flinging if enough people argue for enough time in enough words. People arguing about Star Wars insult each other viciously. People call up the actress who played the wife of a drug lord (Anna Gunn) in a popular TV series and harass her with death threats. So, if you think that **any** topic, any one whatsoever, is ever safe from descending into shit-flinging after enough people invest in it, you're severely wrong.
And then there is the topic-dependent meanness. Contrary to empty fashionable cliches that feminists like to repeat about how "Women's Pain is Invisible", women's pain and struggles are **quite** visible, and people get **quite** passionate about them. Throughout history, if you wanted to whip up people into a frenzy, there is pretty much nothing you could do better than convincing them that (a) $SOMEBODY is making fun of their god (b) $SOMEBODY is harassing, molesting, or otherwise making life difficult for their women, girls, and/or children. With industrialization and secularization, North America, Europe, and massive portions of East Asia have gradually mellowed out on (a), but (b) remain as universal and as passion-inducing as ever. The 2 sides of the trans debate both see the other side as attacking **their** women, and the facts occasionally come up to support either side. This is a second source of meanness, on top of the background-radiation source of topic-independent meanness.
I think I still don't understand #1. There are many other "to be" slogans that are seen as slightly cringe but not obviously wrong ("women's rights are human rights", "I am my brother's keeper"). Also "to be" verbs in English are extremely overloaded, so the fact that there isn't an isomorphism between trans women and women isn't very compelling to me (You can also say "black women are women," which I'm sure some racists will take issue with but I doubt is a particularly controversial position). Like clearly in the cases of those other slogans (and also in everyday usage) there are many times where "to be" is not meant as an identity claim. "I am 10 years old", "Obama is a man."
(Identity claims have to be symmetric. Nobody thinks the state of 10 year-oldness means a specific person, or that Man <=> Obama).
Re Da Vinci art fraudsters, the example seems like a stretch because fine art is famously this make-believe game where people care a lot about things like provenance, but most of the time we (depending on your perspective) either live in reality or at least a pretty different social game.
> the philosophy of identity, what do they mean when they say things are "the same" or are "different". Intuitively, things are the same when they're the same "on every level", a naturalized immigrant is not quite a "True" American because there is some level of identity in which they're not American, namely the past identity (which survives in memory).
Interesting. I think I like your analogy because I think it's a good crux. I disagree with both sides of it. I think I basically disagree that people need things to be the same "on every level" to deploy set membership. For example, saying platypuses are mammals isn't a particularly controversial claim, even though platypuses do not have many of the properties that we usually associate with mammals (eg we usually think of mammals as not laying eggs).
I also find the immigrant analogy interesting, because I expect "Immigrants are not True Americans" to not be a very popular message, to put it mildly. I think most people are smart enough to call BS on that, even though of course there isn't a "truth of the matter" to this particular question. And I agree your average immigrant is meaningfully different from your average native-born American, including on areas that seem fairly central to "Americanness" (e.g. much more likely to have an accent, much more likely to love America, etc).
Similarly, black women are not on average identical to the median American woman, or the median white woman (for example, most American women have paler skin). So I don't think people's current intuitive conception of set membership or "is"ness requires a complete identity relationship.
__
Re your arguments about meanness, I kinda see it but I mostly don't buy this. I do like your topic-independent meanness vs topic-dependent meanness comparison. It's a good thing to keep aware of.
People do seem way more mean about trans issues on a regular basis than most other issues, so the topic-dependent meanness is high. I can buy that some of the meanness is coming from a place of sacred values + fear, especially from female TERFs. But a lot of the meanness comes across as unusually gleeful and delighting in others' misery. E.g. making fun of suicides. I also follow a pro-gaming scene where the best trans female player (this is someone who presents female ~ as far as I can tell, and I think I'm above average for straight men at e.g. detecting things like makeup or having a gaydar.) regularly gets hounded in Youtube comments with people reminding them that she's trans and making sure to "correct" others when they call her by her gender rather than her birth sex. Frankly, these things just don't seem to come from a place of love, or of fear.
Re question 1: yes this was a mistake on my part, in retrospect I should've said "is 1 a prime number?" (which makes it clearer that this is a definitional dispute)
I felt the same way back in 2018 and left IT after 15 years for the trades. I had built my own home a few years earlier so I wasn't a complete stranger carpentry and I had an offer to work with some guys on finishing. It was a slight pay cut (I had previously taken a pay cut working for a non-profit) but my costs were higher due to more travel/eating out, and no benefits. Luckily I ended up working on mostly new higher end homes right away which was nice. What I observed was "Time is money" so being quick but accurate was highly important, there was less interpersonal drama but more "I've never missed a day of work in my life" kind of tough guy toxicity. I think I expected to feel more appreciated but it was about the same. Was also expecting to make more but I was just getting by.
I was laid off in 2020 due to Covid and started working for myself. This is both better and worse. I can set my rates and make a decent wage but I also need to line up work which I'm pretty terrible at. This has led me to be as broke as I've ever been (though not in debt outside a small mortgage). I've looked into going back but it's pretty difficult to get back into IT after 6 years away from it. I could stick with the trades but in many cases the pay working for someone else isn't going to give me any freedom. There's a balance and it's really a series of trade offs changing up your career. Neither is really better but change is often needed, I definitely needed it for my sanity at the t ime.
I thought the part of the Paris Olympics opening ceremony featuring blood spurting from windows, and severed heads, was startling and horrifying - I can't imagine any other country making re-enacted executions a feature of a ceremony about sport and unity. Do the French - e.g. in school curricula - address the violence of their revolutionary history - are there French members here who'd be able to confirm or disconfirm? Thanks for any thoughts.
I just saw something about an OceanGate scandal and assumed it was a scandal of some sort about the ocean, ala the usual -gate snowclone. I didn't realize that OceanGate is their actual name. Pretty ironic in hindsight.
I mean, McKinsey is the epitome of hyping every recent trend only to then pretend it never happened - here’s the new shiny thing, but I’d expect this AI cycle to play out similarly to the communication bubble of the late 90s. Sure Qwest went belly up, but we’re still using the fiber optic cables it laid down. Many current AI players will burn through piles of investor money, but the technology will yield some useful applications.
"California Gov. Gavin Newsom, buoyed by a recent US Supreme Court decision, issued an executive order Thursday calling on state officials to begin taking down homeless encampments.
The move to begin dismantling thousands of encampments throughout California comes after the high court ruled last month in favor of an Oregon city that ticketed homeless people for sleeping outside. The ruling rejected arguments that such “anti-camping” ordinances violated the Constitution’s ban on “cruel and unusual” punishment...."
Yup: thanks to the Supreme Court overturning Martin v Boise, they can finally clear encampments again. I wouldn't be surprised if a year from now people find that the seemingly impossible to solve problem of homeless encampments taking over downtowns and parks was solvable all along, and it was just the 9th Circuit preventing it all these years.
But where are all those homeless going to end up moving to? Seems like a whack-a-mole scenario with human lives. (Not that I think anything else was working.)
The obvious answer is, new homeless camps in places with fewer tourists, reporters, and upper-middle-class homeowners, where nobody will bother them. Down side is, those locations may not have sufficient economic opportunities (e.g. panhandling) to support the homeless population.
I think people will mostly be disappointed. You can break up encampments and force people to move around often, but there will still be the same number of homeless people hanging around and all the other things people complain about, and that's a largely intractable problem for the reasons Scott recently explained.
The real solution is to legalize house building, but a) that takes many many years to make a dent in the problem and b) faces fanatical opposition from most voters.
My theory is that the problem is not nearly as intractable as people think, and has mostly been caused by the 9th Circuits decision in Martin v. Boise. So this is a great natural experiment to see if I’m right!
The homelessness problem was significantly less bad on the west coast, yes.
Check out the graph in this article: homelessness has always been unusually high in California, but note how it starts increasing rapidly starting 2018.
Biden's speech: the best American political speech since when?
I think better than Obama's 2004 DNC speech. Maybe up there with GW Bush's impromptu remarks about 9/11. Probably there are some things Reagan said about the Cold War that match it. But I'm not a political speech connoisseur, and my mentor for them is awful.
The first 20 minutes of Trumps RNC speech was pretty excellent. Shame he can't stop talking once he starts, with the whole thing turning into another of his rally speeches. Which is fine I guess, but 90 minutes is too long for anybody to sit through these days.
It was a good transcript but I'm not sure how much it reflects reality.
> And today, violent — the violent crime rate is at a 50-year low.
The FBI page I looked at only went back to 1985, but the lowest violent crime rate was around 2013. It shot up in 2020 (big surprise) and hasn't returned.
> Border crossings are lower today than when the previous administration left office.
CBP stats show ~2.3 million illegal alien encounters from 2017-2020. This year alone has seen ~1.8 million, with 3 months left to go in the reporting period. So that's a blatant lie.
> I believe my record as president, my leadership in the world, my vision for America’s future all merited a second term, but nothing — nothing — can come in the way of saving our democracy. That includes personal ambition.
I would give Joe more credit for this one if he hadn't stepped aside at the last possible moment, after his entire party did everything short of invoking the 25th to get rid of him.
> In this moment, we can see those we disagree with not as enemies or — but as frien- — as fellow Americans. Can we do that? Does character in public life still matter?
Pretty rich coming from the same president who gave us the "Everyone who supported Trump is an extremist enemy of the state" speech (with marines on stage and comical red lighting, which would have led to months of "Fascist! Hitler!" coverage had Trump done it.)
You get the point, etc. It would have been a great speech, if Biden had actually lived up to its ideals.
> The FBI page I looked at only went back to 1985, but the lowest violent crime rate was around 2013. It shot up in 2020 (big surprise) and hasn't returned.
Generally speaking, if a non-Trump politician says something like that, they do at least have some sort of source for the claim.
This analysis shows that after correcting for methodological changes in the definition of rape, 2022 *was* the lowest in 50 years except for 2013 and 2019 being slightly lower. So that's already morally correct, even if it's technically not 100% correct. But as they point out, that's *2022*. Based on the trends, 2023 was very likely the lowest in 50 years outright. So as a present statement, it seems fair to say that violent crime *is* at a 50 year low now.
Looking at the events surrounding the attempted assassination of Donald Trump on July 13, I am left with the impression that Kimberly Cheatle, the Director of the Secret Service, should not have been hounded into resigning her post.
To begin with, Trump is alive. While he was slightly injured by a grazing shot, he was well enough to be released from hospital the same day and continue campaigning two days later. That means the assassin failed. And if the assassin failed, then the Secret Service succeeded. To be sure, it was a result that left a lot to be desired -- two others were injured but survived, and one died -- but the Secret Service succeeded in its core mission of protecting the life of Donald Trump.
Also, we don't yet know why the shooter was able to get so close to the podium with a rifle and fire so many shots before being killed by a Secret Service sniper. It could have been a pure fluke. It could have been a specific misjudgement or a flaw in doctrine. Or it could have been some sort of systemic problem in the agency as a whole. Several investigations (by Congress, by the Dept of Homeland Security and by the Secret Service itself) are underway, and can be expected to provide answers.
Finally, it seems to me Ms. Cheatle's degree of responsibility depends very much on this question. She can't reasonably be held responsible for a specific misjudgement made by some low-level operative. At the other end, as Director she can certainly be held responsible for systemic problems in the agency as a whole. But until we know where on this continuum of error the actual problem occurred, we don't really know the degree of her culpability. And the government should therefore have delayed calling for her head until we all knew for certain who was responsible.
With rare events like this, it's really hard to see the signal, so you need to also look at near misses. Otherwise you're just setting yourself up for a bigger fail down the road.
This is why nothing works in this country. An assassin's bullet is an inch away from killing Trump, and the same assassin ends up killing bystanders anyway. And the takeaway is "the Secret Service succeeded".
DUDE THIS IS HER ONE JOB THAT SHE'S RESPONSIBLE FOR. WTF.
She is responsible full-stop - that's what it *means* to be responsible. That she needed to go through a congressional hearing (where BOTH parties were pissed at her) before resigning, instead of doing it day-of shows how far gone this idea is.
Questions of responsibility for the planning and preparation are legitimately debatable, and ideally would be supported by more information than we have. And I agree that she can't be responsible for the tactical decisions made in the field. But the *aftermath*, that's on her.
The bit where she said "We couldn't put our people on the roof because it's *sloped* and that would be *dangerous", when it was a 1:12 slope and the USSS countersniper team was on a roof with a much greater slope, makes her either a damn fool or a damn liar. Probably lying for no other reason than to absolve the local commander of responsibility and make her team look less inept, but a pathetic coverup of minor incompetence is still a coverup.
I got the impression she was poorly briefed for the questioning she faced from congress. But really, someone at her level should be able to make sure she is properly briefed, even if she has to yank her staff's chain to get it.
Total dumb luck that in no way exonerates the USSS. They let a shooter put rounds on their charge. If he was a better shot or the wind was different or Trump doesn't turn his head, Trump dies. They completely failed in their core duty. And it wasn't something difficult to prevent either, like someone in the crowd nearby with a concealed pistol. A guy with a rifle climbed up on a roof within a few hundred yards, people saw him and notified law enforcement, and he still got to take his shot at Trump.
Cheatle's responses to the investigation were wholly unsatisfactory. She even stated in an interview that the "buck stops with her", she has the final responsibility for the actions of the USSS. This is a pretty common doctrine that the chief executive is ultimately responsible, even if their individual actions are not the issue. Frankly, the whole debacle is a huge embarrassment to the country and she should have resigned on the 13th.
I get the feeling that if something similar had happened in Britain and she were British she would have resigned as soon as practicable. The only reason not to would be that no one else could step into the position, which I find unlikely.
You may not have mentioned me by name. But having read Unsong, I know better than to believe in veridical coincidences. And fortunately, our favorite bugman hath graced us with a cornucopia of primary texts. Probably the most relevant bag of receipts is "Chapter 2: The American Rebellion" [0]. The primary texts include:
tbh, idk how people read stuff from this era without dying of boredom. The sentences just run on, and on, and on, and on. Always comma-spliced to the nth degree.
Incidentally, the specific term "terrorist" qua U.S. revolutionaries is something I actually picked up, not from the bugman, but from a Simon Whistler video. Unfortunately, I've not been able to find it. The topic might have been entirely tangential to the U.S. Revolutionary War. I'm near certain it was Simon Whistler though.
Nothing like going to contemporary sources: the record of speeches in the UK Parliament (both Commons and Lords) are pretty good for this period and they give a sense of the range of opinion (and the arguments given) across the period. A publication called the Parliamentary Register from the early 1800s is probably the best compilation.
Short version is that the war was contested all through the period (and therefore there are people attacking and defending it throughout, which is useful for the historian): the people opposed to it on principle were always a small minority, but as the war dragged on (and especially once it looked unwinnable) the trend of opinion joined them, and the government (who were kind of obliged to support it) were increasingly isolated. Complicating factor: British opinion later largely moved to focus on the war with France/Spain, where the government has more public support, America being conveniently more and more ignored.
I had an instructor in US history from Britain once upon a time, who suggested that the British public, after the visit by Franklin, saw the problem as an incompetent and ineffectual monarch who couldn't be bothered to even pretend to take the problems raised by the colonists seriously; the colonists were ungrateful and wrong but understandably peeved - and that after a small show of force everybody would agree to go back to the negotiating table and put all this nonsense behind them.
Mid-century, US culture seems to have conceived of the work of doctors and hospitals as Medicine (scientific/technological, mechanical, focused on knowledge and control of specific problems). Over the past few decades, we've seen an interesting shift toward instead conceptualizing it as Healthcare (emotional/ relational, holistic, focused on providing overall "support" and "care" for a patient's "well-being").
I can think of a bunch of possible causal factors, including power shifts away from individual doctors and toward systems; the rise of healthcare marketing/ advertising; gender shifts in the makeup of the workforce; and the broader trend toward more emotive rhetoric in the culture at large. But I'm interested in learning more. Does anyone know of good articles or posts digging into this phenomenon?
It might be a shift in emphasis from treatment to prevention. It's my understanding that people nowadays tend to die from things that are hard or impossible to treat but could have been prevented, or at least delayed, by a healthier lifestyle.
(I'm not judging here; I'm currently having a beer at 8:38 am.)
I think there was a very pro-science and tech attitude in general in the mid century. This was the time of Everything Will Be Atomic In The Future (and of course lots of new home conveniences, processed food, etc.)
True, but to my eye the broader culture is just as pro-tech today? Possibly even more so; for instance, normies have pretty well internalized pro-tech marketing memes like "that 5-year-old device is painfully outdated, I clearly need a new one" and "my new expensive tech makes me a cooler, smarter person." And we're notoriously still in the tail end of the "I f*cking love science" fandom era. What would account for the simultaneous shift toward vitalist medicine?
You may want to poke around the recent book-review-contest's entry [0] for "Sadly, Porn". The Big Idea (tm) under investigation is Narcissism. And a subcomponent of the Big Idea is the claim: over the past century, modern society's transfer of agency from individuals to bureaucracy has effected a vibeshift from materialism to therapy. The review also goes beyond "Sadly, Porn" to mention other texts within the "epidemic of narcissism" genre.
N.B. in this context, I'm defining "materialism" as "I want to advance my economic interests by making inventions and being industrious". Whereas "therapy" is being defined as "(no point trying to beat the rat-race, therefore) I need self-care, a renewed focus on mental health, etc".
The book review doesn't really focus much on the therapy angle, at least as I remember. (Though the review is also really fucking long. So maybe I'm misremembering.) I know the therapy angle is part of the genre though because I remember it being a more prominent theme in Christopher Lasch's book "Culture of Narcissism". But I still recommend starting with the "Sadly, Porn" book review, since the writing-style of everything else within the narcissism genre is inexplicably, infuriatingly obscurant. Also, I don't think "Culture of Narcissism" is available online, though the other texts are.
Medicine has to do with your own body, and body and mind are as entwined as it gets. A detached scientist doctor doesn't do much good when a good portion of what you're seeking is a bit of human reassurance.
Last week, I asked about glucose monitoring, as I was worried that I might have prediabetes. I ended up ordering a Freestyle Libre 3, which arrived last night. Unfortunately, now I have the opposite problem, that the CGM is showing implausibly *low* readings.
In particular, the app kept waking me up last night due to low glucose readings, which dipped as low as 53. However, as I'm not taking any medications and don't have any symptoms, it seems extremely implausible that I actually had hypoglycemia.
Now I'm not sure what to do, since it seems like I can't actually trust the CGM readings at all anyway.
One other annoying thing is that the historical graph shown in the app doesn't correspond to what the app actually showed at the time, and I have no idea why.
I'm surprised you went this route. I use this, too, and insurance makes it $20 for 14 days of readings. But that's almost $1.50 per day, and if you only want to take readings a couple times a day, the fingerpricks would be more cost effective in the long run (initial purchase of a meter for perhaps $20, and then a 100 pack of test strips for another $20).
Does insurance even cover this if you just want it for your own information?
It does have its faults, such as not being able to adjust the low glucose level, sound it makes when you reach it, or the volume, and only displaying 12 hours of readings instead of a whole day. Plus, it seems to crash a lot, probably due to a memory leak. Overall, though, I find it to be pretty accurate in my own readings.
I just paid out of pocket ($95). After all, the whole point is that I didn't know whether I had a problem or not and wanted to find out.
I've been thinking about trying to get a fingerprick test too in order to see whether the low blood sugar reported by the CGM is actually real or not. I actually went to CVS yesterday, but the reader said on the box that it required a control solution which is sold separately, and they don't actually have the control solution on sale, so I wasn't sure what to do and left empty handed.
It doesn't REQUIRE a control solution, really. The control solution ought to read a specific amount, probably about 110mg/dl, so if it doesn't, then something is wrong with the meter or test strips. They recommend using the control solution perhaps once a month, but I used it perhaps once a year, since I never had any reason to doubt my results.
I would still recommend getting the fingerprick test combination, as it's likely the results will be accurate (I estimate +/- 10% on readings, as I have gotten that kind of range on the same drop of blood). Ask a pharmacist what total supplies to get. I think you'll need a meter, compatible test strips, lancets (I recommend 32 gauge), a lancing device (which may even come with the meter), and something to clean the site like alcohol swabs. Maybe also a log book to record your readings, for your own information, as I find medical professionals never look at these records.
The pharmacist should be able to tell you which devices/test strips work together.
The sensors generally take a little time to settle in, though 24 hours is usually sufficient. It's also worth noting that the Libre family are intended for Type 1 diabetes so the bands and alerts are calibrated for someone without insulin production. My grandmother, who used the sensor to monitor her own prediabetes also reported quite low readings compared to what a Type 1 diabetic would report. If you're still concerned you could order some testing strips to get a second opinion.
Source: Helped develop (in a small way) the sensor :D
Being the best pizza chef in the world would be a significant accolade. Most, if not all, of the other jobs here would result in the same output from performance whether you are simply qualified for the job or "the best in the world". A piano tuner and "the best" (the quickest?) piano tuner are still going to tune a piano. Someone who can make pizza and the best pizza maker in the world are making two entirely different products.
"Hotel housekeeper" seems like it would also make you really good at regular housekeeping, and "shotput athlete" would come with some pretty good physical fitness buffs.
Also, "Geoguesser player" means you are really good at figuring out where photos were taken based on tiny background details, which is not really a day-to-day skill but lets you do cool tricks.
I grew up next to a sheep farm. Sheep shearer requires lots of wrestling. Sheep can kick painfully with their hooves, and (damn!) sheep can bite! And there's nothing more terrified and hysterical than dumb sheep, except maybe Donald Trump when trying to deal with the Biden-to-Harris campaign backflip.
Yeah, pizza chef doesn’t belong on this list. Way too popular and profitable. It would need to be “eggplant Parmesan chef” or something to fit with the others.
Well, being an awesome pizza chef doesn't make you a good business executive or entrepreneur.
I'm not sure offhand what to most lucrative placement for the world's best pizza chef would be. They could be the hands-on chef in a small renowned pizza restaurant. Or they could be the head chef in a large pizza restaurant, working in the kitchen mostly supervising the work of souschefs, probably producing work that is not quite up to the standards of their own hands-on work. Or they could step further back, and be the training/quality-control officer of a chain of pizzerias, producing good but not nearly as good work. There is definitely a tradeoff there.
You can argue over whether Tony Gemignani is literally the best pizza chef in the world, but he has more awards at major pizza competitions than anyone else (AFAIK), and also has a bunch of successful restaurants in California and Nevada and some other smaller ventures.
If you suck at the other aspects of the job, you get a partner to handle the business side. Though there's no reason, the way this was framed, that you HAVE to suck at everything in the world besides making pizza.
At minimum, you open a restaurant in a high-traffic area of a big city. That's a solid living.
The leap to establishing a big chain is much harder. Though you have much better odds with pizza than almost anything else! That's why I made the eggplant parm comment -- that maybe gets you one quirky little restaurant somewhere but you're not going to be opening locations in Peoria.
Out of curiosity, I Googled and quickly found this guy who did it in South Florida and is moving up the state, with 15 locations. Opened a "pizza school".
Well, the good news is, if you ask around who makes the best casseroles in the world, you'll find there's a consensus. Almost everyone gives the same answer.
It just doesn't seem odd enough to qualify. Baseball is a major league sport, and every team has shortstops. If you want more options, looks for something more oldfashioned or unusual.
How about crackerjack gandy dancer? I was actually a pretty good one at one time. Always the guy to say “we have time to build one more section of track” and all that.
I looked at it as a challenge. I was a skinny adolescent and the work seemed to build me up into a stronger healthier man. Circumstances ended that job before I was 30 though. Not sure how it would have played out long term.
My 60 year old track boss was still pretty lean and mean though. He could drive a spike home with the best of us.
The work was physically difficult but good technique made it a lot easier.
When are we talking about? To take one example, IBM 1400s might still be running in emulation inside some legacy systems, but devops for such systems is unlikely to be similar to the skills expected of IBM 1400 operators.
The time is right now. While a bunch of these options are distinctly oldfashioned, your skillset includes both traditional techniques and modern adaptations, if applicable.
Join us for our 69th OC ACXLW meetup, Part 2, where we'll continue exploring human sexuality by delving into Chapters 3 and 4 of "The Pragmatist's Guide to Sexuality." Our discussion will focus on understanding the factors that cause arousal and debunking common myths about what does not cause arousal.
Discussion Topics:
Chapter 3: Things That Cause Arousal
Chapter Three examines various factors that trigger arousal, breaking them into distinct categories and exploring each in detail. The chapter challenges traditional models of sexual orientation, proposing a more nuanced understanding of human arousal patterns.
Breeding Targets:
Primary and Secondary Sex Characteristics: Arousal is linked to characteristics indicating fertility and sexual differentiation, such as body parts and movements.
Arousal Indicators: Traits like musculature, broad shoulders, and deep voices in males, and breasts, hips, and certain body movements in females.
Sexuality Models: Traditional models like the Kinsey scale are critiqued, proposing that attraction can be to specific traits rather than a spectrum from straight to gay.
Inverse Systems:
Atypical Arousal: Arousal from stimuli generally found disgusting by others, such as fetishes involving bodily functions or insects.
Early Onset: These patterns often appear early in life and are not learned through socialization.
Gender Differences: More prevalent in males, possibly due to different evolutionary pressures.
Emotional States and Concepts:
Dominance and Submission: Significant portion of human arousal is linked to feelings of dominance and submission.
Conceptual Arousal: Emotions like betrayal, transformation, and being eaten can trigger arousal, as can power dynamics.
Neural Crosstalk: Crosstalk in the brain between areas responsible for social behavior and arousal might explain these patterns.
Emotional Connections to People:
Emotional Lowering Threshold: Emotional connections lower the threshold for arousal, making familiar and loved individuals more sexually appealing.
Trope Attraction:
Role-Playing and Stereotypes: Certain stereotypes or roles (nurse, goth, cheerleader) can enhance arousal due to their adherence to specific tropes.
Novelty:
New Experiences: New and unique stimuli can be more arousing due to their novelty.
Pain and Asphyxiation:
Pain and Pleasure: Some arousal patterns are enhanced by pain or oxygen deprivation.
Basic Instincts:
Autopilot Behaviors: Some mating behaviors are driven by deeper neurological systems that do not always generate traditional feelings of arousal.
Physical Stimuli:
Direct Physical Interaction: Physical actions like kissing or touching erogenous zones directly trigger arousal.
Conditioned Responses:
Learned Arousal: Some arousal patterns result from conditioning, such as fetishes for inanimate objects.
Chapter 4: Things That Do Not Cause Arousal
Chapter Four delves into common misconceptions about what causes arousal, debunking myths and clarifying what does not influence sexual arousal patterns.
Limited Impact of Socialization:
The chapter argues against the pervasive belief that socialization significantly shapes sexual preferences.
Evidence shows that societal ideals promoting thinness do not change underlying arousal patterns.
Body Weight Preferences:
Despite societal ideals promoting thinness, studies show men generally prefer women of healthy weights.
Cultural Myths:
Historical examples like the art of Peter Paul Rubens suggest personal preferences rather than societal standards.
Parental Influence and Childhood:
The study finds no significant correlation between childhood conditions and adult arousal patterns.
The myth of the "childhood abuse cycle" is debunked; most abusers were not abused as children, and most abused children do not become abusers.
Social Taboos and Rule Breaking:
The notion that breaking social taboos inherently causes arousal is challenged.
Kinks are often socially taboo, but this is because they are defined by their taboo nature.
Intelligence and Sapiosexuality:
Attraction to intelligence (sapiosexuality) might be influenced by socialization.
Intelligence is processed in higher-order brain functions, suggesting it may not be an innate arousal trigger but rather a socially informed one.
Summaries:
Chapter 3 Summary:
Chapter Three of "The Pragmatist's Guide to Sexuality" examines various factors that trigger arousal, breaking them into distinct categories and exploring each in detail. The chapter challenges traditional models of sexual orientation, proposing a more nuanced understanding of human arousal patterns.
Breeding Targets:
Primary and Secondary Sex Characteristics: Arousal is linked to characteristics indicating fertility and sexual differentiation, such as body parts and movements.
Arousal Indicators: Traits like musculature, broad shoulders, and deep voices in males, and breasts, hips, and certain body movements in females.
Sexuality Models: Traditional models like the Kinsey scale are critiqued, proposing that attraction can be to specific traits rather than a spectrum from straight to gay.
Inverse Systems:
Atypical Arousal: Arousal from stimuli generally found disgusting by others, such as fetishes involving bodily functions or insects.
Early Onset: These patterns often appear early in life and are not learned through socialization.
Gender Differences: More prevalent in males, possibly due to different evolutionary pressures.
Emotional States and Concepts:
Dominance and Submission: Significant portion of human arousal is linked to feelings of dominance and submission.
Conceptual Arousal: Emotions like betrayal, transformation, and being eaten can trigger arousal, as can power dynamics.
Neural Crosstalk: Crosstalk in the brain between areas responsible for social behavior and arousal might explain these patterns.
Emotional Connections to People:
Emotional Lowering Threshold: Emotional connections lower the threshold for arousal, making familiar and loved individuals more sexually appealing.
Trope Attraction:
Role-Playing and Stereotypes: Certain stereotypes or roles (nurse, goth, cheerleader) can enhance arousal due to their adherence to specific tropes.
Novelty:
New Experiences: New and unique stimuli can be more arousing due to their novelty.
Pain and Asphyxiation:
Pain and Pleasure: Some arousal patterns are enhanced by pain or oxygen deprivation.
Basic Instincts:
Autopilot Behaviors: Some mating behaviors are driven by deeper neurological systems that do not always generate traditional feelings of arousal.
Physical Stimuli:
Direct Physical Interaction: Physical actions like kissing or touching erogenous zones directly trigger arousal.
Conditioned Responses:
Learned Arousal: Some arousal patterns result from conditioning, such as fetishes for inanimate objects.
Chapter 4 Summary:
Chapter Four delves into common misconceptions about what causes arousal, debunking myths and clarifying what does not influence sexual arousal patterns.
Limited Impact of Socialization:
The chapter argues against the pervasive belief that socialization significantly shapes sexual preferences.
Evidence shows that societal ideals promoting thinness do not change underlying arousal patterns.
Body Weight Preferences:
Despite societal ideals promoting thinness, studies show men generally prefer women of healthy weights.
Cultural Myths:
Historical examples like the art of Peter Paul Rubens suggest personal preferences rather than societal standards.
Parental Influence and Childhood:
The study finds no significant correlation between childhood conditions and adult arousal patterns.
The myth of the "childhood abuse cycle" is debunked; most abusers were not abused as children, and most abused children do not become abusers.
Social Taboos and Rule Breaking:
The notion that breaking social taboos inherently causes arousal is challenged.
Kinks are often socially taboo, but this is because they are defined by their taboo nature.
Intelligence and Sapiosexuality:
Attraction to intelligence (sapiosexuality) might be influenced by socialization.
Intelligence is processed in higher-order brain functions, suggesting it may not be an innate arousal trigger but rather a socially informed one.
Questions for Discussion:
How do the ten distinct systems described in Chapter 3 contribute to a comprehensive understanding of human arousal?
What are the key misconceptions about arousal debunked in Chapter 4, and what evidence supports these clarifications?
How can the insights from these chapters be applied in educational, clinical, and personal contexts?
We look forward to seeing you all and engaging in a stimulating discussion. For any questions, please contact Michael Michalchik at michaelmichalchik@gmail.com.
A question about trading real money prediction markets for Americans. I've been afraid of trading them because they are technically illegal and I'm afraid of the IRS. If I trade foreign markets using a VPN and make a profit I will owe taxes on them. You can declare "gambling profits" with the IRS and pay that, but I'm afraid doing that will lead to suspicion that I'm doing something illegal, which I would be.
Is there some full-proof way for Americans to trade on prediction markets and pay taxes on the profits and have every step of it be legal?
You could move out of the States. Or you could try Manifold, which is currently trying to exploit a loophole to make some of their markets legally real-money.
Thanks. Supposed "loopholes" have gotten me in huge trouble in the past, which is why I want to be 100% above board with clear laws that everyone understands and agrees upon.
> Buddhism is an outgrowth of Hinduism in the same way that Christianity and Islam are outgrowths of Judaism; indeed, Buddhism is counted as one of the heterodox schools[1] of Hinduism (along with Jainism, the ultra-determinist Ajivika, the agnostic-nihilist Ajnana, and the vaguely LessWrongian Charvaka[2]).
> Hinduism in turn grew out of the Proto-Indo-European religion [3], with the Vedic pantheon having clear parallels in its Greek, Roman, Germanic, and Slavic homologues.
> Central to most Indo-European religions is the theme of //Chaoskampf// [4], a battle between a male god or demigod, usually associated with the sky and storms, and a monstrous dragon or serpent, associated with water and the underworld, thereby bringing order and safety to the world. Examples include Hittite (Tarhunt vs. Illuyanka), Greek (Zeus vs. Typhon and Apollo vs. Python), Norse (Thor vs. Jormungandr), and Hindu (Indra vs. Vritra). But even older examples are known from the Mesopotamian-Semitic world, including Babylonian (Marduk vs. Tiamat), Egyptian (Ra vs. Apep), Cananean (Baal Hadad vs. Lotan), and of course the Bible, which reminds us that Yahweh crushed the Leviathan [5] in the course of creation, and that all the ills of the world are to be blamed on a serpent.*
> By the principle that two cultures that share something sorta similar must be related, it is clear that one of Indo-European or Mesopotamian tradition has to be ancestral to the other. (“But that’s not how it–” Shut up.) The question is which.
> Now, the Yamnaya Culture [6], which is the current best guess for the last common ancestor of all Indo-European cultures and languages, existed in the Ponto-Caspian steppe around 3000 BCE; whereas Abraham is traditionally believed to have lived around 1800 BCE.
> HOWEVER: 1) //Answers in Genesis// ensures us [7] (and if you can’t trust the scholarship of Young Earth creationists, who can you trust?) that probably Abraham was in fact contemporary to the Early Dynastic period of Mesopotamia, so a thousand years older than usually supposed. 2) We have no writing from the Yamnaya culture: the Indo-European mythemes might very well have entered their cultures when the migrations were already in course. The first written traces of Indo-European religions are Hittite tablets dated at the 17th century at oldest; the //Rig Veda//, which tells us the story of Indra and Vritra, is about the same age.
> Since we know that Abraham might have defeated an early Hittite king in battle [8], it’s not out of the question that words of Abraham’s faith may have spread among the Hittites, who had not quite settled in Anatolia yet, and thence to their fellow migrating Indo-Europeans, who had not yet reached their eventual locations. In this way, garbled memories of Yahweh’s creation of the world found their way in early Greek, Norse, and Hindu mythology as well as in the rest of the Near East.
> Therefore, all major Indo-European religious traditions can be considered Abrahamic. Therefore, Hinduism is Abrahamic. Therefore, Buddhism is Abrahamic too.
> * = For some reason, the same motif is also in Japan (Susanoo vs. Yamata-no-Orochi); no idea how to fit that in.
There's an old speculation that the names Brahma and Abraham might have a common source. It does seem unlikely that two separate civilizations would randomly converge on basically the same weird sequence of phonemes for some of their most central religious figures.
On the Indian side, the name Brahma only appears in the post-vedic period, even though he gets retrospectively identified with the vedic Prajapati. So the word might be a later borrowing, not a correspondence at the source.
A related argument you may enjoy is that Jesus's maternal grandparents were bodhisattvas. The immaculate conception of Mary runs counter to the idea that all people are born with original sin. Why was she different? Potentially, because both of her parents attained enlightenment, and thus were able to create life without passing on burdens.
Unfortunately I don't remember all the supporting details, but the high school teacher who argued this claimed evidence for her being from further east, and for Buddhist influence in Christ's teachings.
Some Gnostic theology declared to be heresy by the early Christian church scans as Hindu/Buddhist influenced.
“Abandon the search for God and the creation and other matters of a similar sort. Look for him by taking yourself as a starting point. Learn who it is within you makes everything his own and says, My God, my mind, my thought, my soul, my body. Learn the sources of sorrow, joy, love, hate. Learn how it happens that one watches without willing, loves without willing. If you carefully investigate these matters, you will find him within yourself.”
The idea that Buddhism is an Abrahamic religion is absurd. Even if Ashoka is somehow descended from the mythical Heracles and the Spartans are really related to the Israelite, it doesn't follow that Buddhism is an Abrahamic religion. The Buddha was teaching around roughly same time (give or take a century) that the Jews were exiled in Babylon when the Jews began to regard Yahweh as a monotheistic god rather than a henotheistic god. So, it would be difficult to see how those two traditions influenced each other so early in their development. Likewise, the Buddha didn't care about god worship, and he was one of several Axial Age Indian religious movements that rejected the Vedantic traditions.
Although I no longer identify myself as Buddhist, this sort of speculation has a Eurocentric/ethnocentric tone that I find kind of offensive even not being a Buddhist.
Of course it's absurd, and everything you're saying is correct. I'm not under the impression that it's actually in any way reasonable to classify Buddhism as Abrahamic, nor was the original post. The point of the exercise is to take a deliberately absurd statement and seeing how apparently good an argument one can make for it. I tried to make it semi-explicit with the “But that’s not how it–” intermission, but I apologize if I failed to make it clearer.
That intermission as well as the note on YEC trustworthiness were absolutely clear about the intent of the post - a little too on the nose even, I would say.
YEC is an acronym for "Young Earth Creationist", used to be used online a lot back when creationism was the controversy de jure. Answers in Genesis is the preeminent young earth creationist organization.
Yeah, it seemed odd to me too. I was worried that he was very sick. Now my guess is that he was just being a stubborn fighter who let himself be talked into giving up, but didn't like it and still resents the people who pressured him.
Yeah, I don't recall there being anything in his resignation speech about being unfit or too old, just about "what's best for the country". So I'm guessing that that's the face-saving rationalization that he was presented with.
The story I saw was that what finally pushed him over the edge was being presented with internal campaign polling that showed him massively behind in all of the swing states.
It's clear there has been a coup. We don't know whether the POTUS is dead or alive. This constitutional crisis has been manufactured by the Deep State due to fear Trump will be reelected. It's the only way for them to maintain power. Don't expect there to be an election this November.
Strictly speaking, _I_ can't know for sure. The small scale version of the simulation hypothesis could suggest that I'm a Russian bot who just _thinks_ that they are a human in South Carolina. :-)
Biden hasn't been seen in a week, during one of the most consequential periods in recent political history, suggesting the way we thought things work isn't how they work.
Nancy Pelosi threatened "easy way or the hard way" - this is standard constitutional proceeding? Really?
Biden just returned to the White House from Delaware (below). His doctor has said he's mostly recovered from COVID and he's not contagious anymore. Meanwhile Trump has been MIA since the Harris announcement. Last week, the Cook Political Report spoke admiringly of how competent Trump's brain trust has been (compared to his previous clowns [errr advisors] who lost him the 2020 election). But the Trump brain trust seems to have been taken off guard by Biden's withdrawal. Biden just pulled a George Washington, and all that's been leaked from the Trump side is, "Yeah, we expected this" — but it's obvious that they're still thinking about how to respond.
I'm looking for the personal page of someone adjacent to rationalism, lesswrong and effective altruism crowd. I don't believe he is a completely obscure figure but search engines are completely unhelpful these days.
I vaguely recall him curating a list of what he considered to be some of the most pressing questions, covering topics involving AI, nanotech and so on. Maybe he even put forth some predictions related to those topics but I'm not sure. I believe he also had a strong interest in the ethical treatment of animals and may have been British or at least studied at a British university.
His blog had a Web 1.0 feel to it, possibly featuring a green background. It was definitely not a substack. Does anyone know who I might be referring to?
Open slatestarcodex.com. The blogroll on the left-hand side might contain what you're looking for. If not, open slatestarcodex.com in archive.org, jump a few years back, to the time when it still contained those fun categories like "Those That At A Distance Resemble Flies" or "Those That Have Just Broken The Flower Vase".
What positions would an ASX-approved politician likely take? Almost certainly they would be for legalizing prediction markets but what else? I can see the following as possible issues, but my epistemic uncertainty is high for many of them:
1. Pro prediction markets
2. Anti FDA?
3. Anti AI?
4. Pro plural marriage?
5. Pro high-skilled immigration?
6. Anti tariff and Pro free trade?
7. NIMBY for post 19th century architecture?
8. Pro nuclear power?
9. No idea regarding foreign policy w.r.t. Ukraine or Taiwan
10. Pro vegan/vegetarian?
What else?
Note that my question marks represent actual questions not assertions.
> What positions would an ASX-approved politician likely take?
Scott-approved maybe, but *commenters* on ACX have widely differing viewpoints on most topics. We even have Trumpists here. You're never going to get a consensus on anything.
I'll try to give you an answer if you can tell me what ASX stands for? I strongly suspect it's not the Australian Securities and eXchange commission. ;-)
Ah, is this the new acceptable term? Thanks, I do need to keep on top of "what you can and can't say, even if you could say it ten minutes ago but now you are a monster if you do" terms 😁
That's true. But I actually did homeschool my daughter through 7th grade, and the homeschoolers in my area were mostly of 2 sorts: Fundamentalist Christians; and well-educated parents of exceptionally smart kids who also had a lot of extreme sensitivities and oddities. Second group is a reasonable approximation of ACX. My point is that there are groups of people who arrive at being pro- homeschooling without traveling some my-beliefs-must-prevail path.
If ACX were a sufficiently narrow place that it could endorse a single candidate, I wouldn't bother posting here. I value the fact that ACX is a politically diverse place where reaching consensus is an anti-goal.
(On your list I would be weakly in favour of 1 and 8, and some version of 5, not particularly keen on the others while also not keen on the exact opposite.)
I was more or less responding to Scott saying he wants to put together an ASX local ballot for other cities and states. So it's really trying to guess what Scott would favor not what the community of readers would.
Well, if Hulk Hogan is going to be Mr. Trump's Secretary of State, he'll need to improve his wardrobe. From what I've seen, he's as careless as Fetterman.
There are many Cabinet positions I think The Nuge would be an excellent fit for. Education, Homeland Security, HHS, so many crying out for Uncle Ted to put them in a Stranglehold, I'd want him to Wango Tango through each one for ~3 months. Pretty sure the before/after headcount would be exactly like Elon Musk's housecleaning at Twitter.
State Department, diplomat, not so much. White House Press Secretary would be fun, but the tag team of Tucker Carlson and Vivek R already have that locked up.
I continue to wonder how many nerds have an irrational fondness for Ted Nugent due to reading You Awaken In Razor Hill, despite having nothing in common socioculturally otherwise. (Scratchfever would be a great First Pet name though.)
I saw Hogan walking around a Minneapolis lake back in the 90’s. (Think of the beginning of the old Mary Tylor Moore show.) He was walking with a very blonde woman counterclockwise around Lake Calhoun and I was running around it clockwise.
As we approached he cut such a ridiculous figure I had a hard time keeping a straight face. He gave me a pro wrestler scowl in return.
I'm impressed. That's almost like meeting the pope! My sister, a conservative in Democratic Minnesota, is constantly stressed over the political theatrics. In addition to homey Garrison Keillor, they had TV wrestler for governor for a time. She doesn't put out political signs on the lawn.
Yeah the whole governor Ventura thing was wild. He didn’t do anything crazy during his single term in office though and I think the guy has a good heart. He’s very happy that Minnesota legalized cannabis recently and made a point of being around when the bill was signed into law.
Do people enjoy repetitive physical exercise? I find strenuous exercise to be painful — and it's not the "feel the burn" lactic acid burn, it's like thorns in my major muscles with a pain level of about 3 on a scale of 10. Oh, I force myself to get through the pain, but I've never experienced the endorphin high that people talk about. But after 15 miles on my bike or 10 laps in the 50-meter pool, I'll feel nauseous for 15 to 20 minutes after exercising. After the nausea retreats, I feel pretty good. Do other people experience what I've described?
Repetitive, not really. I like variation, and goals that let me focus on what I'm doing and why. If I'm just doing the same thing repeatedly, my brain eventually tunes it out, so my performance suffers, plus I get bored.
Somehow I can usually manage to work alongside the "good" pain, though.
If you're doing what appears to be very light exercise, and you're having symptoms that only show up when doing heavy exercise under e.g. heatstroke conditions, then that seems out of normal range.
There are conditions (like thyroid problems) that feel like all-over fatigue that lasts for years and are easily cleared up with iodine, just as an example. I'd suggest a blood workup. Something's up with your system and it'll help you out to know what.
I mean, I don't. It's fine, I just add weight until I go to failure durring my willpower window.
Aerobic exercise is harder; I have to play games there to keep myself entertained. I run with the dog or practice falling and rolling in the park or I do heavy bag sprints because they all are just entertaining enough to avoid complete boredom.
You're not supposed to do that. You push through the burn, not actual pain, actual pain is a sign that you're doing something wrong and could injure yourself.
I really enjoy work-related exercise. Had a job stocking shelves, lots of squats and low-effort arm movement, and it was a great time. Temp job unloading delivery trucks, great time. Not so much exercise for exercise's sake, that's always been tolerable at best.
That's the common wisdom. But I can't move at much more than a gentle walking pace without feeling pain after a short number of repetitions — say a minute or so of aerobic exercise. And it's not the lactic acid "burn" because the pain stops when I stop moving (and the burn will remain after the workout, and is less intensely uncomfortable than the pain). So I'm faced with the option of not exercising at rates that work my cardio, or enduring the pain. I've been enduring the pain for over forty years now. AFAICT it hasn't done me any physical harm. But I just wanted to check to see if people *really* get any pleasure out of exercise.
Weightlifting is very enjoyable and calming. Like, very often my brain will get too loud and have too many conflicting thoughts. If you put 200 pounds on a metal bar over your chest, you can't think any thought except lifting this heavy bit of metal up and down without crushing your ribcage. Add in some nu metal at max volume and it's very zen.
Cardio sucks. Cardio always sucks and people who like cardio are liars or mutants. :)
What's your experience with weightlifting? I empathize with beowulf888, lifting weights hurts. Isn't that the point? No pain, no gain, pain is just weakness leaving the body, and all that? Why do you think most people don't exercise as much as they should, because they don't have time in their schedule?
I enjoy outdoor biking quite a bit. On hot summer rides I get pretty dehydrated. I can’t seem to drink enough water during a ride. Post long summer rides are about the only time I really like the taste of beer. A couple of weak American lagers really hit the spot.
I don’t get the same buzz of euphoria that came from actual long runs. I gave that joint pounding activity up a long time ago.
Running to physical limits usually involved a degree of pain. I’ve never experienced any nausea or anything approaching actual pain while biking though, just ordinary fatigue.
Wintertime indoor turbo trainer rides are just tedious.
Whether I enjoy it depends on my mood and what the exercise is, but I've never felt anything like thorns in my major muscles! The pain part for me isn't pain, precisely, it's the unpleasantness of pushing back against reluctance to go fast, dislike of being out of breath and/or fatigued. If I'm enjoying the exercise, or am listening to energizing music I like then the painful craving to stop and rest shrinks a lot, or occasionally goes away completely. And I don't feel nausea after -- just feel sweaty and fatigued. I'm pretty sure that what you're feeling is quite unusual.
I just started biking again after a year+ hiatus to let my hip heal up (tendonitis). But when I was exercising previously, I'd do 12 to 15 miles my mountain bike (mostly flatland trails except for a couple of hill climbs) two to three times a week. And I'd swim a kilometer at least 3 times a week until I messed up my shoulder (rotator cuff issue) a few years back.
I'm up 9 miles on the mountain bike (approx an hour) two to three times a week. And I swim half a klick (with a lot of rests) in the pool 3 times a week (and my shoulder seems to be behaving). I haven't gotten my old form back, though. Which is frustrating.
But I felt the nausea during my previous exercise regimens. And I'm feeling it again now after restarting workouts. And I've come to (re)appreciate how unpleasant physical exertion is. ;-)
But what about the level 3 pain feeling of thorns in your muscles? I don't understand why more people aren't commenting on that. I don't think I or anyone else I've compared notes with feels any muscle pain at all, except of course if they are sore from yesterday's exertion or have an injury. I cannot think of a single time I have felt that. Even when I push a muscle to its limit -- for instance, doing my absolute best to crank out one more rep, and failing because the muscle is exhausted -- I don't feel pain, just that "ugh, exertion" feeling really strongly. Oh, and about runner's high. Yes, I've felt especially peaceful and contented for a couple hours after a heavy workout -- I'd say I feel it about 10% of the time after heavy workouts -- and it's a very pleasant feeling. I wouldn't think of calling it a high, because it's not ecstatic and there's no buzz -- but it's a recognizably different state.
I begin to feel this pain in the muscle groups that I'm using after a certain number of repetitions — and they either have to be quick repetitions or repetitions against resistance for it to manifest itself. So I'm pretty sure it has something to do with the oxygen uptake (or lack thereof?) in my tissues. People say, "Well, that's the burn you're feeling." But I also can feel the lactic acid burn after a certain number of repetitions, and yes that feels like a burning sensation. But this other pain feels like something stabbing my muscles, but, unlike the burn, it goes away immediately when I stop the repetitions.
There were two times I didn't feel this sensation...
After having two of my wisdom teeth out the dentist prescribed me a three-day supply of Percocet. I went running on the third day on Percocet. I felt the burn, but not the pain. So this pain can be mediated by opioids. I'm not sure I want to become an opioid addict just so I can exercise comfortably, though. ;-)
And now for the inevitable LSD story (sorry, if people get bored of these) — I went on a run with some friends while tripping. I'm usually the slowest of the pack, but the psychedelic made me feel "in tune" with my body. I had the impression I was moving perfectly, not only did I keep up with the pack, I didn't feel either the pain or the burn. And I had what seemed like an endorphin high the entire four-mile run. It was a memorably pleasant experience. The next day I had no stiff muscles.
Yes, I think you must be right -- something to do with oxygen uptake, my guess is that the thorns hit in spots in the muscle where amount of oxygen falls below some threshold. That's game of you to have pushed through it some many times. I'm pretty certain it's unusual, but if it meant there were something weird wrong you'd know by now, so probably just a bodily idiosyncrasy. Just for the record, here's what I feel when my muscles are out of oxygen: There is one long steep hill I can elect to ride up on the way home, and unless I'm near being in my best shape, I am forced to walk the last bit. What forces me is that I can actually feel my leg muscles run out of oxygen -- my legs get numb and tingly, and will not obey my demand that they push hard. And of course I am very out of breath by that point, too. The state is very unpleasant, but there is no actual pain. I'm pretty sure my body is doing the typical thing, & yours is the quirky one.
I experienced a runners high once, but it was after a 5 hour hike in the mountains where I realized I needed to get home sooner than expected and so really pushed myself to move fast for half of it. I was extremely exhausted, but I did feel very happy and at peace for a while afterwards. So I think to try to reach that high you have to really, really, reaaaaally push your limits.
I run for 15-20 minutes every day and it feels terrible every time. It does feel good to be able to run farther and faster over time, but the running itself still sucks.
Yes, that's almost exactly my experience (well, minus the nausea). I've never experienced a runner's high despite being a competitive swimmer for many years. When I'm in shape the first few minutes of a workout can feel good in a "it's nice to be moving" kind of way, but once I burn off the first few minutes' worth of energy it's always just an unpleasant slog. But it's worth it because a hard workout always makes me feel great for the rest of the day.
>And ideally you shouldn't have muscle *pain* at all I don't think
This is pretty foreign to my experience: the only way to exercise without pain is to walk, if I'm running or jogging for longer than three minutes my body is going to hurt and I'm going to want to stop; which is what I did for years and years. Now that I'm jogging every day I hurt less then when I started, but my muscles still hurt.
So I'm an intern working on developing an iOS app (no, I'm not going tell you what it's for) using SwiftUI (which is practically mandatory if you want to make an Apple ecosystem app of any sort), and suffice it to say there are a lot of things about SwiftUI that I am already starting to dislike. In no particular order:
- SwiftUI is very verbose. It's more verbose than React or Svelte (which I also know), and *much* more than HTML.
- A View has to be declared as a struct, which are supposedly immutable, but to add state (which is also practically required), you tag properties with "@State" instead, which seems like a hacky workaround.
- The entire library is closed source (despite Apple's rather extensive set of documentation) so we don't really know what actually goes underneath the hood.
- There are few opportunities to add print statements which are my favorite way of debugging things. In particular I don't think they can go into the `var body: some View` statement.
I like "immutable by default", and you have to go through extra hoops to make it mutable, so the lazy solution would usually be to use immutable over mutable. The more immutable parts you have, the easier the dataflow becomes, i.e. you always know where a value was initialized, and you don't have to guess if/where it may have been updated.
youth suffrage, that is the elimination of age requirements for voting. Knowing full well it will in many cases mean parents of young children get extra votes, I think that should be a bigger part of various groups agenda. I will leave aside the first principle arguments and just point out that it would be a very large systematic offset to the increasingly entrenched gerontocracy. Therefore any group that thinks that one of the main challenges to enacting their agenda is the number of older voters should consider youth suffrage as a potential remedy.
But aside from a few public intellectuals I don't see it in the mix. There are some scattered efforts to reduce the voting age to 16 in some places. Why doesnt for example, the group that wants free day care add this to their agenda, realizing if they get it, the free day care will in turn become easier to get.
It strikes me as weird that (18yo) kids can be sent to war by a government they've never voted for. Based on that principle alone I'd like [voting age] = [minimum draft age] - [maximum term length].
"Why doesnt for example, the group that wants free day care add this to their agenda, realizing if they get it, the free day care will in turn become easier to get."
That's not the youth vote though, that's the parents' vote and they're the older voters.
As to what kids would vote on, aren't there youth parliaments and the like? Something I was never interested in, so even if I could have legally voted at 12 or whatever, I wouldn't have done (so I suppose my mother would have used my vote in my stead).
The parents interested in free day care would be mostly younger than 45. Thats not really the older voters i had in mind. And yes I am assuming the parents just takes the vote in many cases. And note i myself do not support free day care, but i think the group that does should also talk about youth suffrage.
Against gerontocracy, perhaps a maximum voter age? Should a 90-year-old vote, although he won't suffer the consequences of his decision a few years or decades later?
(I'm not really in favor of this... Impossible to find a good Schelling point.)
So for the first five or so years of my kid's life, I get to argue with my wife about what to do with the extra vote.
After that, the kid will start asserting their own right to do what they like with the vote. And the kids will be targeted with political advertising non-stop because they're the most susceptible voters. The average kid sees one ad for a toy and immediately wants it more than anything else in life, how are they going to react to a nonstop barrage of advertisements telling them that one party wants to give them ice cream and the other one wants to drown their puppies?
They'll vote the way their teachers tell them to vote: "Now class, global lack of sweaters for penguins is the most pressing issue of our day, so I want you all to consider the poor cold penguins. Wouldn't it be lovely to give them nice warm sweaters?
By the way, my cousin Bob is running for the Penguin Party and the next election is June 19th. Remember our last civics class on the importance of voting and how it's only by voting that change happens? So if you think penguins should have sweaters - and only horrible mean selfish wicked people don't think that - then you could vote for Bob if you want, but I'm not *telling* you to vote for Bob".
Or they'll vote against what authority figures tell them, because f*** you, I hate washing the dishes.
It is hard to find a Schelling point - some 25-year-olds are idiots and some 14-year-olds are completely rational - but I think the current solution of matching up the draft age with the voting age is sensible. I could probably be persuaded to lower it to 16 or 14 on the grounds that a 14-year-old may well find themselves drafted by the time a President they vote for is out of office. (But let's be honest, most 14-year-olds think going to war would be an adventure anyway).
It's not so much that 16-year-olds lack the experience and knowledge needed to make an informed vote, though that is indeed a problem.
The big problem is that 16-year-olds are legally required to spend large parts of their day in an environment where they are subjected to government-approved propaganda. And yes, it is indeed propaganda, which a distressingly-high proportion of teachers are eager to subject students to.
Parents who are well-off may be able to avoid this by sending their kids to private schools, or by home schooling, but that's not an option for everyone.
So the effect of "youth suffrage" is to entrench the current governing ideology.
I don t associate private schools with a lack of propaganda. In the UK they churn out young Tories. As for home schooling, religious instruction is one of the main motivations.
I think I know what you’re getting at here but the kids seem to be fully aware that dad continually repairing a decrepit VW van and mom throwing pots are just engaging in lifestyle LARPing.
They both seem to be well adjusted socially and pretty sharp. If they learn enough to do well on their SATs I think they’ll be fine.
Absence of propaganda is certainly not guaranteed in private schools. Nor are parents guaranteed to instruct their children to think for themselves. But at least one might expect some diversity for these non-government options, rather than a uniform indoctrination in the government's ideology.
And as bad as it often is now, one can expect the level of indoctrination in schools to greatly increase once the students can actually vote.
You're making an assumption about the political direction the kids will break in, but I think once you start considering which kids will actually vote, things get considerably more muddled.
I am not taking any particular assumption about which way they would break here, though I do have my own opinions, but I imagine different interest groups might believe kids or parents taking their kids vote would break in their way, and therefore see youth suffrage as serving their interests on net.
Apologies, I misread your final paragraph to imply that the daycare groups should expect the youth vote regardless, whereas I now suspect you meant that the youth vote would affiliate with them, both before and after getting the vote, as some sort of reward for supporting their suffrage?
Sorry I admit to making one assumption about that in the post above. What I meant is that I am not making this post thinking kids (or their parents) would break in a high level red vs blue direction. But I think there are specific issues for which youth suffrage would shift the median vote in such a way to make those issues more politically viable. Furthermore, precisely because its not clear they would break in either a red or blue direction youth suffrage would be a more reliable way to boost those specific policies without worrying about the overall red/blue balance.
In the red camp, there is a group of people who want to reduce or eliminate public pension, but its politically toxic. They convince their party to flirt with the idea anyways. A group of voters who have 0 interest in preserving pension would make this policy less toxic and much more likely to advance completely irrespective of whatever policy preferences the new voters do actually have. So that group should take youth suffrage seriously
In the blue camp there is a group who want more government support for parents. I think its very likely that on net youth suffrage increases the number of votes for any candidate who promises that, in either party, primary or general, because parents would be more likely than any other group to vote for them and would heavily influence their kids votes. So that groups interests are served by youth suffrage.
But with youth suffrage, the gain in votes from parents exercising the vote on their children's behalf would be counter-balanced by the kids voting in their own names now that they're 13 or whatever, who will be vehemently opposed to giving parents more power or support from the government.
Remember when you were 14 and convinced your parents were brutal tyrants stopping you from doing what you wanted? 😀
I think my main assumption here is some form of the median voter theorem. Issues actually matter, and the voters interest's drive what the parties build their platforms around. They are self-interested, but rationality varies.
I'd say it hasn't made much progress for two reasons.
1. Entrenched interests. Who benefits if you lower the voting age? Depending on how low you go, probably Democrats. So automatically Republicans will be against it. Lowering the voting age last time required amending the Constitution, so it is exceedingly unlikely Democrats would be able to push it through on their own, even if they wanted to.
2. It sounds bad on paper; it's literally expanding the franchise to the least experienced and least educated demographic in the country. And how are you going to stop parents from casting their kids ballots? (Though Republican's might be in favor of lowering the voting age, provided that parents get vote for their kids until they reach the age of majority. Which makes some sense, they get to decide everything else about their kids lives until then anyway).
1 the world of politics is not limited to republicans and democrats, For one it is global, for two within parties their are many factions that pull those parties in different directions, surely there are some factions who believe their policy interests are more likely to gain traction with a large group of new voters
2 is getting into the first principles bit. And I agree there are arguments against this, but I think it it is defensible enough on paper that a group that saw it in their interests practically speaking should take it more seriously.
And who benefits? They don't need it in blue states, they're already blue. They don't want it in red states, that would help the blues. And in purple states you'd need both sides to co-operate.
> They don't need it in blue states, they're already blue. They don't want it in red states, that would help the blues.
I think kids tend to inherit the political orientation of their parents though. (In other words, blue parents tend to have blue kids, whereas red parents tend to have red kids.) So I don't think this is actually as valid of an objection as you might think.
Though I don't think Pew has polled under 18's on their political affiliation, the data we have is a nice trend that says, under age 70, the younger you are the more likely you are to vote blue. So even if it was the case that under 18 you suddenly get a lot of kids who will vote red, you can understand why the reds think otherwise.
I think you're conflating two things as one thing: 1) gerontocracy, which is old people in most positions of power, 2) the interests of young people being weighed too little in policies. In any case I'm not entirely sure lowering the voting age would cause either a reduction in the average age of elected officials or policies that benefit young people.
Re your example, I'm not sure why 16 year olds voting would make it more likely that you get publicly funded daycare (note I used publicly funded instead of "free" for a reason).
In democratic terms, rule by the people, the voters rule, not the actual elected officials. So I would argue a gerontocracy is in place if the voters are composed largely of older people
Perhaps I put those 2 sentences close together. The point about 16 year olds, is that the only organized youth suffrage efforts are milquetoast. A voting age of 0 I would assume raises the political power of people with young children, many of whom might want free daycare. I am not advocating for free day care, so I describe it in the terms that the interest group would describe it, I understand the underlying economics.
I'm now imagining the hissy-fit the childfree would throw: "just because they spawned some rug rats, they get four votes while I only get one? this is not democracy!"
It sounds like you would be opposed on first principles, but could support it due to its practical effects, is that fair?
Thats kind of my point. If many people would be happy with its practical effect, why isnt more of a thing.
As for this general reasoning as to why kids shouldnt get to vote, its basically identical to every past resistance to increasing suffrage right? The argument might be right, it might be more right than every past case. But the past expansions happened anyways I think largely for practical effect reasons. Is it just that kids are the one true use case of a people who shouldnt be allowed to vote that the practical effects dont matter? I am skeptical.
The thing that bugs me most about Kamala is the way that reality is about to shift around her. Right now (or at least as of yesterday) most people seem to agree that she's a fairly unlikeable politician with no real achievements and a weird cackle, who achieved her position through a combination of failing upwards and [something else].
But culture is downstream of politics, and in particular culture is downstream of the short-term electoral needs of the Democratic Party, which means she's about to be beatified, canonised, and then deified in rapid succession. The things that people think they believe about her this week will be gone by the end of next month. She will be "America's cool aunt" or something, and the greatest politician of her generation. Her many flaws will be no more mentionable than Biden's senility was one month ago.
And for those of us left out of this rapid cosmic retcon, it will all seem very jarring.
Assuming this is serious, I disagree. My mental model of the average American voter is not "morons". That term was previously applied to people with IQ 50-70. It seems weird to try to claim that the average American has the aptitude to be an unskilled worker and no more. Isn't the average American in the IQ range 95-105?
Ah, sorry, I was paraphrasing a line from Blazing Saddles. In all seriousness, I think something like having an awkward laugh is the kind of thing that turns away prospective voters. I think it's one of the vibes based parts of politics.
Last I heard, Trump is saying "the deal was with Biden, not you -- if you want to debate me we gotta renegotiate" and demanding that it be on Fox News.
Trump's logic was solid, he knew that Biden was out of it and would look terrible no matter the debate conditions, so he set out a blanket offer to debate anywhere, any time, under any format, no matter how rigged.
Now the opponent has changed, his strategy should change too.
I can't blame Trump for wanting to ensure he isn't at a disadvantage, though I saw nothing wrong with the moderation of the previous debate. If the moderation is performed the same way, I see no reason to object. But can he be sure it WILL be just as fair? I can understand his doubts.
Would Fox News be favorable to Trump? I don't think they will favor Trump, and certainly seem unlikely to favor Harris.
Those who actually want to compare the candidates want a fair debate. Biased moderation will more than likely skew opinion toward the non-favored candidate. I think it's in everyone's interest for the overall venue to be neutral, and therefore Trump may grit his teeth and accept at least one ABC debate.
If they managed to retcon her pratfall run at being AI Czar, I'd take that bit of reality distortion happily. More realistically, waiting to see how my fellow San Franciscans and other Californians fall in line (or not). Once I see hopefully-former #Defund advocates glossing over her prosecutorial record...well...there have been a lot of those kinds of moments over the last fourish years. Sad how fast one gets used to being jarred.
Whats the theory as to why Biden endorsed her and not say the governor of Pennsylvania. He basically had the option to endorse who ever he wanted, and and he went with her.
1. He earnestly thinks shes great. Thats why he chose her as VP in the first place
2. He earnestly thinks she should get a chance for essentially woke reasons.
3. A la I, Claudius, he kind of wants his replacement to fail, out of bitterness of being forced out.
4. He is senile
5. It seems safer, legacy wise, even if its EV isnt so great.
6. Biden doesn't think Kamala Harris is "great", but he knows and trusts her. He doesn't really know any of the other contenders very well, and he's not at a place in his life where he wants to have to get to know new people in a high-stakes environment.
7. Biden knows that not everybody is just going to do what he tells them to.
Kamala Harris was already the Schelling point for a Biden replacement; she's the Veep, and there's nobody else in the Democratic Party that really stands out. For a significant number of Democratic voters, that's going to count for more than "the senile guy told us to vote for Gretchen Newsom" or whatever. So if Bidenendorses Kamala Harris, half the party supports her because she's the obvious choice and half the party supports her because Biden endorsed her, which adds up to the whole party supporting Harris. If Biden endorses anyone else, half the party supports Kamala Harris and the other half supports whoever Biden nominated, and the party is divided going into peak election season.
He's the President, she's the Vice President. If he leaves, she's already officially signed on to take his place.
She's already been out campaigning in this election, as the Vice President.
If she loses, she'll take the least damage because she was forced by circumstance into trying in the first place. If someone else loses, they and Kamala will both be heavily damaged, because the Party thought Kamala was so bad they junked her in favor of a rando who still couldn't make the cut.
This where I think its important *Biden* endorsed her, not some version of the party establishment. I agree if Biden was blocked somehow at the convention, or if he dropped dead, inertial reasons would basically force them to make her the 2024 nominee. But Biden had some wild card optionality here and he chose not to exercise it. So I am interested in the Biden's internal reasons for making that choice.
1. He knows Kamala. I don't know how close they are, but he probably has more interaction with her than any of the Democratic Governors, Senators, or Congresspeeps.
2. She's already on the ticket. Those 90+ million dollars in the Biden-Harris war chest will be easy to transfer over to Harris/VP-X ticket. The Rethuglicans say they're going to challenge this with the FEC, but the FEC is split 3 to 3. Good luck with that!
3. Biden wants to avoid a convention fight for nomination that could split the party. Notice that Biden and Harris were already calling delegates before the announcement was made. Reportedly everyone has fallen in behind her and Harris has the nomination tied up. Harris is well-liked by the party. And Dems had been urging Biden to give her a larger portfolio to groom her for the 2028 election. Well, she just got a larger portfolio!
4. Harris has better name recognition than all except a few other Democratic pols. Gavin Newsom, Chuck Schumer are the only ones (off the top of my head) that have similar name recognition as Harris. And Bernie Sanders. But Bernie is older than Biden and he's not really a Dem — plus he's already endorsed Biden was quick to endorse Harris.
5. Harris will get the black vote and probably the majority of the women's vote.
6. Although she's 59, Harris comes off as much younger. So, now Trump's cognitive decline will stand out. As for the other potential candidates, Schumer is in his 70s. Newsom is a few years younger than Harris, but his candidacy wouldn't play well outside of California. It will be fun watching Harris debate Trump (if he doesn't chicken out). She's sharp, and as a former prosecutor she's already made it clear that his criminal record will be a talking point.
6. This race is a total train wreck, and Harris was the only one willing to risk her political prospects in 2024, instead of waiting for 2028 when Trump's gone and they can run a normal campaign.
As a voter, I rather wish he would do that. As it stands, Harris has only been covered quite lightly by the news media. And most of the coverage that they've done has been horse-race coverage, not policy coverage. It would be at least somewhat helpful to see what she actually does as president.
Are people who were shilling for someone else now going to start shilling for her? Of course. She's a presidential candidate of a major party. Lots of folks who formerly didn't have a vested interest in her success now do.
Does that distinguish her in any way from other Presidential candidates? No, of course not.
The things that people who liked her three months ago liked her for are still mostly going to be the things that are put forward about her as positives moving forward. If those are different than the things people thought about her four years ago (which was about the last time I seriously thought about her), that wouldn't be shocking.
I'm not really complaining about the fact that a bunch of Democrat voters are going to decide to support her.
I'm complaining about the fact that the supposedly-neutral arbiters of American culture are about to rearrange the way everyone thinks in order to make Kamala more popular. They're not going to make Kamala cool, they're going to change the definition of cool until it matches what Kamala is. Watch as her out-of-place laughter and dancing become unbridled joie de vivre. Watch as her ridiculous catchphrases start to seem like deep wisdom. Watch as people start to drastically use the word "unburdened" in their day-to-day speech. Watch as the silly things that Kamala believes become the things that everyone has always believed.
The whole culture will shift thirty degrees askew to benefit her, and it will seem like it has always been that way.
I guess that might apply to people whose cultural center of gravity are the top politicians of the day and their battles. There's a big world and a lot of culture beyond that!
->Watch as her out-of-place laughter and dancing become unbridled joie de vivre. Watch as her ridiculous catchphrases start to seem like deep wisdom. Watch as people start to drastically use the word "unburdened" in their day-to-day speech.
This makes me realize you must be on a completely different cultural channel than I am. I'm unfamiliar with any of the above tropes about Kamala. The only Kamala trope I know is that she's been basically hidden away and silenced the past 3.5 years. I mostly picture her as the most obnoxious grandstander during the Kavanaugh hearings, but that doesn't seem to be what you are talking about.
ADDED: I did just hear CNN say that Kamala's social media team is trying to flip memes about her on their head... something about a coconut tree comment and turning it into a positive message. But if that's what you mean, we aren't talking about "supposedly neutral arbiters" but about Kamala's social media team.
>it's that if you disagree about her awesomeness it's because you hate her gender or her skin color or her immigrant parents.
Jeez, I don't find that most people are that stoopit. I have said to at least a dozen people in the last week that Harris is just unimpressive as a person, and I think every single person I spoke to was a democrat. Several sighed and nodded. Not one of them came back at me with anything implying I was prejudiced against one or more of her demographic credentials. Maybe a silly woke undergrad would have. Seems to me you're caricaturing your opposition.
Yeah, it'll be political campaign mudslinging. You, a Democrat voter, saying that privately to other Democrat voters before the campaigning starts? Sighs and nods.
Republican campaign/Republican voters saying it during the campaign? Anti-immigrant racist sexism!
What I'm wondering about as straws in the wind is some of the online stuff I've seen about her past as Californian DA, e.g. one X/Twitter thing about "Kamala put lots of poor black people in jail; Kamala is anti-trans because she put trans women in men's prisons".
Will that run at all, or will the trans activists suddenly find themselves being told to sit down and shut up and get with the party line?
If by "beatify" you mean "the media is going to push stories about literally any possible candidate who's not Kamala to preserve the potential drama of a contested convention," then yes, I suppose the media is beatifying Kamala.
(My Bluesky timeline is currently busy laughing at the NYT editorial saying that Biden should choose Mitt Romney to woo the Nevertrump Republicans.)
Yeah, that is *never* going to happen. Is the NYT suddenly getting a rush of blood to the head or what? They're starting to run opinion pieces that would never have seen the light of day before this.
A couple weeks ago she was trailing Trump by 2.9 points in the polls. So less likable than Trump at least, by a bit. We'll see what the polls say now that she's likely to actually be the candidate.
Her being unlikeable is... irrelevant, as long as she wins? The Presidents job is to manage the administrative state. Posing for cameras and giving speeches is a distraction from that job.
I have no idea how competent she is at managing bureaucrats but I genuinely couldn't care less about her charisma.
Charisma matters when you're on the campaign trail mixing with the hoi polloi. Hillary may have been competent (citation needed) but she had the charisma of a bucket of wet sand, and that made her attempts at "I'm just folks" fall flat on their face.
Dull but competent is fine when it's behind the scenes promotions for the administration. When it's "grab the voters by the ballot box", it matters if they like you or think you're a finger-wagging schoolmarm.
That's what Ludwig II of Bavaria thought. In his last years, he still managed the administration, signed papers and so on. But he disappeared completely from the public, set no foot in the capital, gave no speeches, skipped the Corpus Christi procession; he was only sitting in his castles and planning to build more castles. So he was wrongly declared insane (and even after being imprisoned in Berg Castle, they still gave him papers to sign, which he did)
>Her being unlikeable is... irrelevant, as long as she wins?
That's like saying speed is irrelevant as long as you cross the finish line first.
>The Presidents job is to manage the administrative state. Posing for cameras and giving speeches is a distraction from that job.
In a practical sense I think that's exactly wrong. Having a charismatic president that's able to sway public sentiment is the single most powerful political force in our system.
"most people seem to agree that she's a fairly unlikeable politician with no real achievements and a weird cackle, who achieved her position through a combination of failing upwards and [something else]."
I know what you mean and you may well be right but what do you mean by "most people"? I'm guessing (based on nearly zero evidence, I fully admit, so I might be totally wrong) that your peer group isn't composed of median democratic voters and you're not an avid consumer of CNN/MSNBC type media. Mine isn't and I'm not, but I'd be surprised if the anti-Kamala sentiments you're describing are widespread in that milieu.
(Don't get me wrong, I don't think she's a strong candidate.)
They thought she was a cringe nae nae baby/fucking pig Copola harris they heard the news, but now they will think that she is a sober, steady hand to guide the tiller of the state (at least until the election is done).
I know this because they are me. I think that.
My actual opinion is that she is an unremarkable centrist other than having the brain injury that makes you a cop without even wearing the uniform, and that the wrong types of people are gonna be REALLY mad about her getting a shot.
What does that mean? I mean it makes sense that Democrats are extremely happy that Harris will be the candidate instead of Biden and that they would rally behind her with enthusiasm. I was no Harris fan in the past, but given she will be up against Trump, I'm rooting for her like hell.
Or does "this is fully underway" mean something other than Democrats are understandably very happy today? It's not that we think Harris is suddenly the favorite. It's more like when your team is down 1-5 but now you've come back some and it's 3-5. You cheer loudly because now the score is closer and maybe your team will even win. That would be the normal reaction of a typical fan even if the players who scored are 2nd-stringers and you don't have any stars left on the field.
That you automatically assumed they were talking about Democrats helps prove their point. Melvin and George were referring to how the ostensibly non-partisan tastemakers of society will now suddenly forget all of Harris' flaws and beatify her, and you respond with "of course Democrats will rally behind her with enthusiasm".
I read it, namely how you seamlessly substituted the media, experts, and the rest with Democrats. It proves his point, ie "But culture is downstream of politics, and in particular culture is downstream of the short-term electoral needs of the Democratic Party..." The partisanship is so embedded that you didn't even see a distinction between them.
Dude. I asked George a question. It was about what he meant by:
>Yeah talking to my daughter today, this is fully underway already.
Now maybe George meant his daughter said she was witnessing something to the effect of what you are saying. It seemed plausible to me that George's daughter was suddenly excited about Harris and he took that as a sign of something to the effect of what you are saying. As George hasn't responded it's not clear what his daughter said and whether George took his daughter to be a witness to the phenomenon or a product of the phenomenon or something else.
You jumped in to say my question has loaded assumptions embedded in it, but I didn't make any assumptions in it. I did offer a possible meaning for what he might have meant, but asked if that possible meaning was correct. You could have told me, assuming you knew what George meant: "No, he means X, Y and Z".
But here you are continuing to respond in a way that isn't at all responsive. You haven't helped me one bit in understanding what George meant.
Meh....I'm no Harris fan, nor is my brother who's lived in SF for 30 years. But you're overstating the case. Matt Yglesias has just posted some thoughts which seem pretty common-sensical:
===
Harris has a number of fundamental problems:
- Her approval rating is bad
- Her instincts as a candidate in 2019-2020 were often off-base
- Her whole career as a politician in San Francisco and California didn’t involve trying to appeal to swing voters
- Her electoral record, while fine, is not impressive relative to the partisan fundamentals
- She is tied to Joe Biden’s unpopular administration.
To win, Harris needs to find ways to moderate her image, and critically, she is going to have to be allowed to do that by her supporters.
Donald Trump is in many ways a bad politician and a bad candidate. His numbers are terrible, his manner is off-putting, and his record is plagued with scandal. But his “be allowed to do that” score is off the charts. If it’s convenient for him to start saying nicer things about electric cars in exchange for Elon Musk’s money, he does that. If it’s convenient for him to pretend the Republican Party isn’t deeply committed to banning abortion, he does that.
Every progressive I know recognizes that these Trumpian stabs at moderation are good for Trump, and that it’s good for the left to try to expose them as lies. The progressives who recognize that need to see the symmetry here.
Without knocking Harris too hard, she is clearly not an optimal candidate. Democrats have the option of running a ticket featuring the popular governor of Michigan plus the popular governor of Pennsylvania, which would be a very good way to win.
It appears that neither of the governors in question is interested in challenging Harris, and I can’t imagine anyone else being a formidable challenger. I think that this is a little bit short-sighted on their part. I get that from where Gretchen Whitmer is sitting right now, she has the inside track on the 2028 election. But these political moments pass quickly.
The good news for Harris is that her basic political problem — she is perceived as more liberal than the average voter — is extremely fixable.
She needs to fix that by saying and doing some things that help make her public image more moderate, ideally things that are either true (“some people belong in prison and it’s that simple”) or lacking in policy substance (“my parents moved to this country because it’s the greatest place on Earth, and I think my party and our school system need to get back to teaching kids patriotism”). But it also wouldn’t hurt to throw people a bone on a relatively unimportant policy issue (Bitcoin?) or two that demonstrate separation from Biden.
If Harris does the right thing and moderates, a big question for the left will be do they let her get away with it (as the right has let Trump say whatever he thinks he needs to say on abortion) or will they spend the whole final stretch of the campaign whining (they way they did with Hillary)? I think the Biden formula of prioritizing unity over all else basically failed, but he was right to perceive that dissent from the left hurt Clinton. Progressives need to decide if they want to win.
"In 1990, Harris was hired as a deputy district attorney for Alameda County, where she worked for several years and also served on two state boards. The appointments were made by then-California Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, with whom she had a brief relationship. During that time, she made many connections that would later help propel her political career."
The 'brief relationship' with a man thirty years her senior lasted long enough to get her a foot on the ladder:
" In 1994, Speaker of the California Assembly Willie Brown, who was then dating Harris, appointed her to the state Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and later to the California Medical Assistance Commission"
"Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, continuing his rush to hand out patronage jobs while he retains his powerful post, has given high-paying appointments to his former law associate and a former Alameda County prosecutor who is Brown’s frequent companion.
Brown, exercising his power even as his speakership seems near an end, named attorney Kamala Harris to the California Medical Assistance Commission, a job that pays $72,000 a year.
Harris, a former deputy district attorney in Alameda County, was described by several people at the Capitol as Brown’s girlfriend. In March, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen called her “the Speaker’s new steady.” Harris declined to be interviewed Monday and Brown’s spokeswoman did not return phone calls."
What's even more fascinating, though, and something I did *not* know is that Kamala is every bit as tied in to the wealthy, socialite SF circles as Gavin Newsom. So I wonder how that will play out with the narrative of "daughter of immigrants, raised by a single mother":
In the summer of 1999, in the monied Napa Valley north of here, a bejeweled bride rode sidesaddle on a speckled horse into what the press would label “the Bay Area’s version of an outdoor royal wedding.” The lavish nuptials of Vanessa Jarman and oil heir Billy Getty—replete with red carpet, hundreds of flickering votives, and “a fair amount of wine,” according to one deadpan attendee—featured a 168-person guest list stocked with socialites and scions, philanthropists and other assorted glitterati.
This coterie of the chosen included, as well, a 34-year-old prosecutor who was all of a year and a half into her job in the San Francisco district attorney’s office. And she wasn’t just some celebrity’s all but anonymous plus-one. She was featured in the photo coverage of the hot-ticket affair, smiling wide, decked out in a dark gown with a drink in hand.
“Kamala Harris,” the caption read, “cruised through the reception.”
Well before she was a United States senator, or the attorney general of California, Harris was already in with the in-crowd here. From 1994, when she was introduced splashily in the region’s most popular newspaper column as the paramour of one of the state’s most powerful politicians, to 2003, when she was elected district attorney, the Oakland- and Berkeley-bred Harris charted the beginnings of her ascent in the more fashionable crucible of San Francisco. In Pacific Heights parlors and bastions of status and wealth, in trendy hot spots, and in the juicy, dishy missives of the variety of gossip columns that chronicled the city’s elite, Kamala Harris was a boldface name.
Born and raised in more diverse, far less affluent neighborhoods on the other side of the Bay, Harris was the oldest daughter of immigrant parents, reared in a family that was intellectual but not privileged or rich. As a presidential contender, running against opponents who openly disdain elites and big money, she has emphasized not only her reputation as a take-no-prisoners prosecutor but also the humbleness of her roots—a child of civil rights activism, of busing, “so proud,” as she said at the start of her speech announcing her candidacy, “to be a child of Oakland.”
Her rise, however, was propelled in and by a very different milieu. In this less explored piece of her past, Harris used as a launching pad the tightly knit world of San Francisco high society, navigating early on this rarefied world of influence and opulence, charming and partying with movers and shakers—ably cultivating relationships with VIPs who would become friends and also backers and donors of every one of her political campaigns, tapping into deep pockets and becoming a popular figure in a small world dominated by a handful of powerful families. This stratum of San Francisco remains a profoundly important part of her network—including not just powerful Democratic donors but an ambassador appointed by President Donald Trump who ran in the same circles.
...“A well-qualified prosecutor with a lot of ties to the Pacific Heights crowd, Harris should have no trouble raising money,” the San Francisco Chronicle noted that November, and so it was: By the close of the calendar year, Harris had raised $100,560—nearly 23 percent of which came from the three ZIP codes of Pacific Heights. It’s a roster of early donors that reads like a who’s who of the city. “That crowd really got her started to be taken seriously,” Buell said.
“… Kamala Harris, an Alameda Co. deputy D.A. who is something new in Willie’s love life,” Herb Caen wrote in his column in the San Francisco Chronicle on March 22, 1994, making public her romantic relationship with Willie Brown, who was still married (albeit long estranged), 30 years older than Harris and by then approaching a decade and a half into his unprecedented reign as speaker of the California State Assembly. “She’s a woman, not a girl,” Caen continued in his signature three-dot style. “And she’s black …” Beyond the wince-worthy language, it’s hard to imagine in that time and space a more spotlit debut.
Caen, for his part, was at the tail end of a nonpareil, nearly 60-year career. Six days a week, he two-finger-typed a thousand or so of the most-read words in San Francisco. “If he put your name in boldface, you’d get calls from everyone you knew saying, ‘I saw you in Herb Caen today,’” Jesse Hamlin, one of his former assistants, told me. “If your name wasn’t in there, you weren’t anybody,” longtime local press agent Lee Houskeeper added. In his columns, Caen called Harris “attractive, intelligent and charming.” He called her a “steadying influence” for Brown. And in December of 1995, when Brown was elected mayor, Caen called her the “first-lady-in-waiting.”
It’s hard to think honestly about the origins of the rise of Harris without grappling with the reality of the role of Brown. He helped her. He put her on a pair of state boards that required not much work and paid her more than $400,000 across five years on top of her salary as a prosecutor. He gave her a BMW. He helped her, too, though, in a way that was less immediately material but arguably far more enduringly important.
“Brown, of course, was the darling of the well-to-do set, if you will,” veteran political consultant Jack Davis, who managed Brown’s mayoral campaign, told me. “And she was the girlfriend, and so she met, you know, everybody who’s anybody, as a result of being his girl.”
“I met her through Willie,” John Burton, the former San Francisco congressman and chairman of the California Democratic Party, said in an interview. “I would think it’s fair to say that most of the people in San Francisco met her through Willie.”
“He was the guy that put her right in the ballgame,” said Dan Addario, the chief investigator for the district attorney whom Harris ultimately would topple."
If this is all "no big deal" for Kamala, then it's no big deal for Trump that "he got his start with daddy's money" and the rest of the whinging that the left has been going on about, including Hillary's "not a real billionaire".
That's the main impetus behind the Orgy of Vengeance: what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, and now your goose is cooked.
And Kamala getting her start because she dated the guy with connections, so she was able to hang out with the richies who funded her initial forays into politics, undermines any image she seeks to project of "I'm African-American child of immigrants who was raised by a single mother".
As that Politico article states, she may have based her campaign headquarters in the poor(er) sections, but she mixed and mingled and raised the money and influence amongst the white wealthy:
"Harris, whose campaign did not respond to a request for comment for this story, put her headquarters in the Bayview, a poor neighborhood six or so miles south of Pacific Heights and a world away, and she would earn the backing of a swath of the city’s black, Chinese and LGBT leaders. But in January of 2003, she also was on the cover of the Nob Hill Gazette, the monthly paper of record of San Francisco society—one of the faces in a collage of people deemed to be the crème de la crème."
Pushing as your talking point "my opponent believes in tax cuts - for the wealthy!" has less sting when you're a big pal of the wealthy yourself, and depending on their continued help and donations. Not very working-class to be breezing around Getty weddings, now is it?
I think the biggest issue is that I think the Democrats appear to be planning to make this a "prosecutor vs felon" thing, in the mistaken impression that will not immediately turn into an unmitigated disaster.
(1) is true and bad. (2) is, in my opinion, 'he said/she said' and definitely politically motivated - recently learned that the guy who bankrolled Carroll to take the case is a big Democratic donor, whose mouthpiece shot off a remark about how the assassination attempt could well be a Republican false-flag operation and (3) is the same kind of murky association that a lot of famous/celebrity people had at the time. Never mind the probably fictitious accusations of "he raped a 13 year old" which was something trotted out, excited a lot of people, then when it began to be investigated went nowhere - and which I am now seeing referenced again on social media as absolute truth.
The "convicted felon! on 34 counts!" stuff makes me laugh more than anything else. Oooh, he paid off hush money to a hooker out of the wrong bank account! What a major crime!
The "owned by big banks" thing doesn't sit well with "he tried defrauding the poor big banks with his fake mortgage application" case taken, again, by NY. So which is it, Kamala? Not to mention that you have deep pocket rich donors who may or may not be on the boards of banks, among other things.
"I got shot at while the police stood by and did nothing, just let it happen. They come after me over and over for made-up crimes, everybody knows they just make things up about me ..."
Yeah that doesn't have the potential to backfire on them massively. Granted that requires somebody in Trump's campaign to be competent, and I have yet to observe competence on anybody's part.
Also you're overlooking the degree to which Harris leading with this line of attack represents clear focus and energy as a campaigner; and "if you're playing defense you're losing, always play offense"; and it has the large virtue of being organic to the candidate (she really was a prosecutor and then an attorney general). Starting from 100 days to an election it's very strong campaign-tactics choice, miles better than anything the Biden campaign had come up with in literally years.
If it was 200 or 300 days to the election then the Trump campaign would have time and space to make this approach backfire on the Dems in the ways you describe. But (a) it's 100 days out, and (b) there is little indication that either Trump himself or the people working for him possess that kind of agility or tactical adaptability. They have the couple of hammers that they're used to and will keep swinging them the same ways they're used to.
It looks offensive because it is going after Trump, but that's basically just political campaigning in general. As a campaign strategy, it's a defensive rearguard action to shore up voting blocs she should, in a normal election year, already have.
“Progressives need to decide if they want to win.”
I think we… know? the answer here? Of course they won’t want to win, it’s terrifying to lose your identity as the oppressed, and with it your reason to exist.
Luckily most Democratic voters aren't progressives. (Evidence: Joe and not Bernie or Beto or Warren won the 2020 primary.) Matt is of course trying to persuade his progressive readers to behave a certain way. But it's really Harris who needs to ignore the progressives however they may react and move to the center on the campaign trail.
Agreed. The problem is that the election is going to be tight, and every progressive in a key state refusing to hold his/her nose and vote for Harris is a vote she will have no room to lose.
Correct. So long as he delivers liberal tears, all else is just details at best. That's always been the case, and Trump's superpower is that he intuited it and has stuck with it regardless of all other distractions.
Keep this sort of disillusion in mind the next time the national media converge on a narrative that seems implausible to you. The news has very little relationship to truth anymore, it's mostly politically-driven propaganda. And yes, I do think that's a relatively new thing. At the very least the ideology that drives the narrative is objectively worse than it used to be. I'll buy the argument that the public discourse has always been a fairy tale to some extent, but I'll counter that at least the old stories had useful pro-social goals.
I don't think one can become a member of the Senate from California by falling upward. She got there by being very good at playing the game of politics.
Many didn't like her regular grandstanding in the Senate or her performance in the 2020 primary. Well, those things are behind her now, and most voters who decide elections don't remember those things. (And she wasn't bad in every primary debate, she just seemed to give up in them after she wasn't emerging as the obvious winner.)
That said, no, she's not some star politician or spectacular orator. But this is a game of lesser evils. Trump is very unpopular with the American public. Biden managed to become even more unpopular than Trump. Harris may plausibly be less unpopular than Trump. That's all she's gotta do.
It is, supposedly, the only video game that can be prescribed for ADHD. In my (informed but non-credentialed) opinion, it's not particularly good at anything. And it costs $99/month.
Does this price reflect the (ridiculous) costs of FDA approval? Is it massive rent-seeking allowed by gate-keeping? Or is it structural insurance fraud?
Huh. From the landing page it's pretty clear that... "it's a generic endless runner indistinguishable from a thousand free-to-play mobile games being sold at 10,000% markup" would be mean, presumptuous, and judgmental. So let's say instead, they clearly aren't marketing to a heavily enfranchised gamer audience.
Look, I'm already talking myself out of even reading this thing, because the methodology doesn't look any more credible than all those supposedly double blind RCT studies that find evidence of ESP or whatever.
Some theories in no particular order.
1) The researchers and/or company are well-meaning people who managed to produce a false positive finding via generic social science fuzziness
2) Grift
3) They accidentally discovered an anti-treatment. The game is nothing special, but the "digital control" given to the non-treatment group somehow makes ADHD worse, or at least is notably less helpful than the median video game. This would be sort of surprising, since the control per the paper is apparently some sort of word search game which at least sounds vaguely education-coded
4) Calvin's Dad Effect. The game sucks, and that's the point. Having to sit down and focus on a thing you hate somehow improves executive functioning in what previous generations called "building character"
Is it just me, or are Calvin and Hobbes references increasing lately? Not that I'm complaining, I love that comic, but I'm seeing more Calvin & Hobbes memes, and "Calvinball" and "The Noodle Incident", coming up in various places to reference their respective themes.
Has anyone here switched from a white collar job to the trades? After leaving the military as an officer, I’m working for a big gov contractor working from home… I get paid lots of money but do absolutely nothing useful. I live in a rural area so getting a local white collar job is basically impossible.
I really like working with my hands and building things and am considering a plumbing apprenticeship. Salary will drop about $100k at first then probably cap out near a $50k drop. I have no debt besides a mortgage so should be able to live off what I’ll make plus dip into savings as needed for the first few years. Sending money to retirement will take a big hit, but apparently the Union pension is worth several thousand a month so I’m not horribly worried about that.
I find my tradesmen friends to be incredibly intelligent in ways that I am not when it comes to fixing/building things, which I highly respect and is highly respected in my rural area. I find this to be a great opportunity to have a career where I’m continuously learning and have first order effects on the world.
Thoughts? Am I romanticizing trades too much? Am I discounting the value of a high salary despite a useless job?
Demand for plumbing seems to have strong regional variations (you might find higher demand in an urban area), and might not be as rewarding as a more specialized field like heat pump installation/maintenance: involves both plumbing and electrical, likely to see increasing demand over time, and reputably is less well understood so someone motivated should be able to stand out as unusually competent. Similar comments seem to apply to A/C and heating systems.
Wouldn't the best of both worlds be working your way up to owning a plumbing business?
That would mitigate the physical toll AND the financial toll (with plenty of headroom for making more than you are now), and you'd be doing stuff that's actually positively impacting the world. And the bigger you grew your company, the more positive impact out in the world and the more financial upside for you, so pretty win / win.
Just wanted to put that out there as a signal boost to **Ajb's** suggestion.
I mostly don't regret leaving my comfortable-but-utterly-bullshit desk job for blue collar work*...took a 75% haircut on pay, which definitely sucks a lot. Only recently got back up to making half the original amount, after 6+ years of trying way too hard to never miss a raise or bonus. It feels really good to Actually Do Something Meaningful though. Tangible, immediate feedback, surprises every day (I don't exactly like dealing with customers, but they certainly keep things...interesting), much more interesting peers, always more parts of the job to learn. Honest work for honest pay; not feeling guilty whatsoever about cashing paychecks. "I earned this, by the sweat of my brow!" People actually noticing a lot when I'm not there, rather than being some faceless cubicle drone interchangeable with any other. That is - because so few, ah, ACX-grade people work in my industry, it's super easy to stand out with what would be an utterly banal office performance.
That being said...the non-mostly part is, well, it's hell on the body. Sooner or later almost everyone gets planar fascist, carpool tunnel syndrome, sciatica...even "just" concussions, or thrown backs, or the myriad cuts, scrapes, and contusions take a toll. My hands are always sandpaper, and that's frankly embarrassing for a lady. It's frequently kinda depressing the level of constant background aches and pains I deal with - White Collar Me wouldn't have been in this bad way until well into 40s or 50s. And, not gonna lie, not having a frivolously high salary anymore to make trivial inconveniences disappear via money...it's a hard adjustment. Good to pick up those frugal habits, for sure, but those days of "I'll subsist on food delivery for a week just cause I'm feeling lazy" or whatever are firmly in the rearview.
d20/d20 hindsight, I think it woulda made the most sense to keep the bullshit job and seek meaning elsewhere. The classic 80k Hours path, FIRE, whatever. Never gonna get that rate of pay again with so few qualifications - at minimum I'd need to bend the knee and pay credentialism fealty to the higher ed racket. It was a steep price to pay for freedom and fulfillment. (Sure, you can't really put a price on those - but it was hardly Pareto-optimal.)
*not literally trades, but strongly in that same cultural milieu (and tax bracket if one seeks promotions), so I think it still applies
Sometimes I unconsciously intentionally misspell things for the same reason Scott occasionally does the the the thing. Intentional in that, if I do notice the error later, I often won't bother correcting it. I'd like to blame it on Unsong rubbing off on me, but realistically it's probably old 4chan habits. The shitposting trolls were annoying and often destructive, but darn if they weren't occasionally great at levity. Always get a kick out of the occasional pedant who steps in with the "Acktually, it's spelled ________" schtick too. I know! Missing the forest for the breeze...
I recall having a brain fart and saying something like “I wonder if it’s the beginning of old timers disease,” and some humorless coworker said, “You know you are saying it wrong, it’s Alzheimer’s.” Oh boy, remind not to try get a laugh out of that guy.
Yeah I feel you. I just did the math and the lifetime loss of earnings would be ~$1M (in future dollars)… which is a lot. Could buy a real nice house right before retirement with that. But I just bought a house on a couple acres that’s not bad… I’m not sure an upgraded house would bring me that much utility, but I believe switching jobs would bring me a *lot* of utility.
In any case I could still retire with ~$2M in today’s dollars at age 62, providing plenty of cushion for myself and likely future family.
At the end of the day—to me—the question is “How much money/goods is enough?” because if I can meet that level, there’s no need to decrease utility in other aspects (work, community value, etc.) to get above that level.
Yeah, as much as Death Is The Enemy(tm), the whole...how's it go..."you can't take it with you" mindset is rather clarifying. Different with dependents like family or whatever (I've heard some argue sincerely that they plan on leaving nothing behind for heirs, which seems...weird). And of course the marginal utility of money doesn't sharply plateau until a fairly decent level. Still, as long as one makes it past the...finish line without undue hardship, that's Good Enough.
(Plus, honestly, even if immortality were on the table...I'd rather die and be reborn to experience that Good End from scratch. Not carry on with this degrading bag of bones which is of no particular consequence.)
You will get fucked by customers, fucked by bosses, and fucked by crew. There is a good chance you will retire late and crippled. You will not accrue capital at the same rate you are at your current job, you and your kids will be poorer than you would have been.
That said: your current job probably does nothing for anyone; your standard MBA exists as a dead weight parasite on the corporate organism for 7.5 hours out of an 8 hour shift.
You are the only one who knows If the psychic pain of that is too much for you.
I just know from the software industry and not white-collar generally, but customers, bosses, and crew can screw you in any job. The question is - what are the odds for your specific case.
LoL! But there might be some trades that are exceptions. I have a friend with a PhD in biochemistry. He quit academia and became an auto mechanic. He was able to buy a house and raise a family on what he made from being a mechanic (although his wife worked, too — but that's true of most families these days). He retired a few years ago and his son with an MBA took over the business. He enjoyed his work. It didn't cripple him. And he made a better living than he did as an assistant professor.
I went from a field engineer for the state gov (basically a useless redundant administrator) to a heavy equipment fleet mechanic. I’m basically at the bottom of the totem pole now, making roughly half the money I was. At the risk of overselling it, I’ll start with the bottom line: it’s sort of worth the pay cut, but just barely.
The upside is I work a 4x10 schedule and don’t have to worry about anything after I clock out. My coworkers are people I actually like, and I’m blown away by how much general knowledge/intelligence they have about things not related to the job. They’re laid back, more fun to be around day after day, but also hard working when it’s called for, in a way the government workers I knew just weren’t. The work can be dirty and frustrating, but that lends to sense of satisfaction at the end of the day. On my days off, I have full access to a shop and tools/equipment that a hobbyist could only dream of.
That being said, it’s a 50% pay cut, which is a shitload. If you get on it as a career track, eventually it catches up pretty well as you gain experience, but as someone doing it relatively short term (3-5 years) it’s a substantial sacrifice. Basically it’s not like “this job is so great I don’t care what I’m paid”, but you do get some perks in exchange for the pay you sacrifice, and I’m glad to be in a position where I can take the cut, enjoy the perks, and use it as an awesome learning experience.
Thanks for sharing the experience… I’d expect mine to be similar. I’d be in it for the long haul so would eventually catch up on some wages as a journeyman/master plumber.
As to your point about your co-workers… I joined my local volunteer fire department and it’s wild how much more adept those dudes/girls with mostly no college degrees are at most things, compared to high(ish) IQ folks I work with currently.
Check out Shopcraft as soulcraft by Matthew Crawford - a physics and philosophy graduate who decided to leave his bullshit white collar job to become a motorcycle repairer.
How long would you need to work as a plumber to qualify for a pension? How does that compare to how soon you'd be able to retire if you continued working your current job and invested the difference in take-home income?
I also think there are probably more options for local white color jobs than you think, or at least there will be once the job market warms up again in a few years. Even if there's absolutely nothing local, odds are your current position isn't the only full-remote position you qualify for.
I’d need to work for about 30 years to have a pension worth about $1M in today’s dollars. On top of my other retirement sources would be more than enough, but much less than what I’d end up with in my current role.
I could probably get a different white collar office job at a bank, but for a pay level at about what a journeyman/master plumber would make. Of those two options I’d rather be a plumber.
And I absolutely hate working from home (only started <1yr ago)… I’m fairly extroverted and would very much prefer to work in office.
I can't speak to what the job is actually like , but one issue, I think, is personal injury. Even if you aren't macho and use PPE properly, there's still a risk of making an error (or someone else doing so) and ending up with a lifechanging injury; especially doing the learning phase without the fast recovery of youth.
One way of mitigating that is to eventually employ other tradesmen and become the business owner and project manager (good trades businesses eventually max our their capacity with word of mouth and stop needing to tout for business). A few years ago I employed a builder to fix my house. He was in his eighties, still running his business (not actually doing the jobs himself, obviously) but still wanted to work and appeared to enjoy it. N=1, of course. Did a good job, too.
I agree… bodily wear and tear is probably my biggest fear outside of money. Though you’re right… there are ways to mitigate that. I also do feel like the health increase from being generally more active cancels out some of the edge risk.
I am in a similar position. I live in rural OH while working a SV tech job. I've done a number of building projects and developed some skills in various things, including building a few houses with family members, and my nearby family is mostly in the trades.
Like you, I really wanted to shift into something more hands on. After experiencing a few projects, my advice is to be sure you really, really like it before making any moves. The trades have just as many ridiculous barriers to entry, red tape, and weird edge case problems as tech (probably more so). What you end up with is a job that's just as frustrating as a tech job, but pays less and requires much more effort.
Best thing you can do is stack some cash while working the office job, that will give you many more options to find something you like if you decide you can't take it anymore.
Was going to say more or less the same. A tech job (if I understand right that that's what you already have) is already a trade, you're just building stuff in virtual space. I don't see how putting pipes or fixing toilets can be any more interesting once you're past the novelty.
I'd strongly suggest keeping your high paying job as a money maker, thinking of it as a combination of "playing with legos" and "paying the bills", not asking emotionally more of it (which is not easy, it means not making it a condition of your sense of fulfilment), and making sure you have plenty of time and energy left do the things you actually like.
I’m not really in a tech job… more like a tech governance/policy role. Anything my team or I build (policy, white papers, etc.) is thrown around by the bureaucrat government customers for months in meetings and rarely (so far never, but that may change eventually) implemented.
People in this forum will often talk of mission jobs, like working on clean energy, AI safety, factory-farmed-meat alternatives, efficient charities, etc. If you did have a sense of mission that should give you a direction and a good reason to abandon a boring job that pays well. But if your first choice of an alternative job is plumbing, my guess is that you're probably better off keeping your existing job as a decent worry-free money maker, and seeking fulfilment in your free time. Of course that only works if you can keep your work confined its working hours and forget about it the rest of the day.
On a previous open thread I asked about Donald Trump (haven't really changed my mind too much but I appreciate learning how much of a media bubble my side/others might be in).
So another question: why are some people here pro-monarchy? Is a lack of belief in democracy? What are the best arguments for it?
#0: Uncle Ben's Adage: "With great power, comes great responsibility".
This is best-practice for negotiating any sort of contract (including a social-contract). I.e. when you grant someone rights (aka power; options; privileges), it's generally a good idea to reign them in with obligations (aka responsibility; guarantees; promises). A CEO for example, typically has an enormous amount of power over a company. But they're also under an enormous amount of stress, because they have a duty to stakeholders to perform. And a monarch is just the CEO of a security company. A monarch gets a special name though, because governments are unique among other types of business in that they trend towards monopolies on violence.
Now, do Modern Liberal Democracies follow Uncle Ben's Adage? Negative, goat-rider. *In theory*, the government is supposed to be responsible to "The Will of the People". And the executive/legislative/judicial branches are supposed to reign each other in with "Checks and Balances". *In practice*, everything is done by committee. Committees are quite adept at obfuscating: A) who *actually* makes decisions; and B) who is held *nominally responsible* for decisions. In other words, committees decouple power from responsibility. I like to think of this as "decision laundering". Although Moldy likes to use a "leaking nuclear powerplant" analogy.
(Sanity check: when was the last time something incredible was accomplished by a committee?)
(Sanity check: Some years ago, I was gifted a book for Christmas (I think?). I think it was called "Accountable" or something. It had Obama's face on it. IIRC, the synopsis on the backside said it basically compared Obama's campaign-promises to what he'd actually accomplished. In order to "keep politicians accountable". I've still not opened it. Imagine that every person in the U.S. were forced to read this. Do you believe this would realistically improve the U.S. government in any way? Surely, all those corrupt politians would be FINALLY voted out of office, if only the populace read "Accountable"... right?)
#1: The Fundamental Theorem of Freedom: "Someone is always the sovereign".
I.e. someone is always in charge. I.e. someone is always at the top of the hierarchy. I.e. someone is always the originator of decisions. In a monarchy, the monarch is sovereign. In a modern liberal democracy...
Who's the sovereign in a democracy anyway? "Surely, it's lies with the citizens. Because the citizens tell the government what to do. Right?" In theory, yes. In practice, no. "Then it must lie with the executive branch? Or perhaps the legislative or judicial branch?" Consider: what particular entity do heads of government lose sleep over. Is it... "The People"? Nay, if you listen to them, the source of their anxiety is actually "The Press". I.e. the Fourth Estate. It is, in fact, the Fourth Estate which tells "The People" and "The Government" what to think and feel. It is The Fourth Estate which is the highest power in the land. It is the Fourth Estate which is truly sovereign. They may not be on the government's payroll, but that doesn't mean they don't work for the government.
I think this perspective offers quite a bit of explanatory power. Maybe it sounds hyperbolic to you. But consider: The Press is the very heart of the Big Three modern ideologies: Modern Liberal Democracy, Fascism, and Communism. They were all Nationalistic movements. And Nationalism could not have taken off without the advent of the printing press and all the propaganda that entails. The Press isn't just a component of Modern Democracy, it's the sine qua non.
(Sanity check: suppose you awoke next morning and decided to run for president. Is this realistically feasible? I mean, if you're the bestest and most qualified candidate, surely the Vox Populi would put you in office... right? [0])
In sum, the branch with the *most* power has the *least* responsibility, since those who've bought into the civic religion called "Nationalism" are unable to recognize The Press for what it really is. Some of the conservatives are slowly realizing that their "democratic" institutions are not what they seem, though they still have a ways to go.
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FAQ's:
> But Lord Acton said that "power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely".
Um... no.
A) Power per se is neither inherently good nor evil. It depends on the person wielding it. And does not the line between good an evil run through the heart of all men?
B) Virtue without power isn't actually virtuous. It's just weakness. I.e. being a good person doesn't mean being a useless wimp. It means actually making things better. Which requires agency. Which is a synonym for power.
Yes, you should definitely be wary of people who have lots of power. Yes, it carries temptation. But to say "all concentrations of power are bad" is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
(Sanity check: I've worked under a variety of bosses, and very few of them I've thought of as "diabolically corrupt" in any meaningful sense. What percentage of people you've met in meatspace, who held positions of power over you, were meaningfully corrupt? I acknowledge this varies by country.)
> But what prevents a monarch from royally fucking things up (and/or being generally tyrannical, as some other commenters ITT suggest)?
Nothing. It's the monarch's prerogative to royally fuck things up. You can't give someone the power to make things better without necessarily giving them the power to make things worse. 'Tis a necessary evil to bite the bullet. Cest la vie.
> Ok, but then why is Monarchy better than Democracy again?
No plan survives contact with the enemy. Things can and will go wrong. But at least with a monarchy, you know exactly who to blame when things go wrong. Whereas with Modern Liberal Democracy, when things go wrong, you won't know who to hang from the gallows since the bureaucracy is so byzantine and kafka-esque. It's a matter of engineering sane feedback-loops. And in a Modern Liberal Democracy, not only are the incentive gradients opaque, but they're also often myopic.
> Doesn't this whole Monarchy thing kinda reek of Fascism?
Do you remember watching The Lion King? Remember how repulsed you felt when Simba reascended Pride Rock? Like, did Nala even get a vote? And remember Aragorn from the Lord of the Rings? Do you remember literally crying and shaking with rage toward the end, when Frodo bent the knee to the newly minted King of Gondor? Of course you don't. Because you didn't behave that way at all, did you. Because you compartmentalized it away from your Western education, despite the West's insistence that "autocracy = literally Hitler". I.e. you've been fed propaganda about a basic Jungian Archetype. Feel free to take a seat and stew in the cognitive dissonance for a while.
History is written by the victors. You know who wasn't a victor? The Fascists. The West's insistence that anything and everything it doesn't like is fAsCisM is an allergic reaction to WWII. I.e. the West is still beating a horse that's been dead for almost 80 years now. "Better give it another 10 billion whacks just to make sure." Let's see if you can figure this one out on your own: might there be any advantage in reanimating the dead corpse of one's mortal enemies?
And as I've opined before [1], the Third Reich wasn't just an autocracy. It was an unintentional *compromise* between democracy and autocracy, which resulted in the worst of both worlds. So actually, Fascism is relevant after all. But not in the way you think.
> Okay but, doesn't this still seem rather... radical?
From a historical perspective, it's advocates of democracy who are the radicals. Monarchy is the default. Meanwhile, the founders of modern liberal democracies were nerdy terrorists. E.g. whereas the U.S. sees its founders as brave heroes, the Brits see the U.S. founders as clones of Ted Kaczynski.
> So what you're saying is... you're rooting for God-Emperor Trump?
IDGAF about Trump. He's just a mortal man with pros and cons. The MAGA fans, the Libs, and the Progs have way overblown his importance. I'm tired of hearing about him.
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There's more going on (much of which I don't quite understand as well as I'd like to). But this is probably a good start, for now.
I just...never really managed to shake the childish ideal of the Benevolent Dictator. Yeah, tons of problems, hasn't worked well in practice, inevitable succession concerns, Seeing Like A State epistemic issues, etc, etc. But like...watching the wages of "democracy" for the last decade or so has really made me question the whole endeavor. Are we really capable of so little? Is our polis truly so benighted? It's sort of like the endless Rationalist obsession with game theory - if only everyone was better at cooperation and coordination, we coulda beat Moloch yesterday! If only, indeed...
"Best worst system" is just not much of a basis to believe in something anymore, at least for me. I think that's part of the monarchical appeal too - part of the strength of a governing system is whether it inspires self-recommending belief, if not actual hope. One of Matt Yglesias' takes that really resonates with me is his assertion that it was a huge mistake for the left to cede "patriotism" and its associated rah-rah feelgoods. Just like that old saw about the most fervently pro-American citizens being recent immigrants. My family didn't come here to be ashamed of putting up the stars and stripes in our yard, dammit! If it takes a monarchist (or a Trumpist, or a "far right-winger", or a -phobe) to appreciate that sentiment, then, yeah, I'm gonna be more sympathetic to them than I would be otherwise.
I'm pro-Monarchy in the weak sense of supporting the Constitutional Monarchy in Australia/Canada/UK and whatever other corners of the world Charlie Battenberg still reigns in.
Every system needs a failsafe. In any system based on separation of powers, there needs to be someone with the authority to step in and resolve disputes between different arms of government by sacking everyone and starting again. But this is too much power to give to a politician. The trick is to give all these "reserve powers" to the monarch, who has to follow a centuries-long tradition of not actually using them.
Countries without a monarch need to muddle through this kind of issue without a failsafe, which leads to bad outcomes. Recently the US figured out that the power of anyone to sack a President who is incapable of doing the job but not quite incapacitated doesn't really exist, it's an edge case not quite considered by the 25th amendment.
I'm all for absolute monarchy, as long as we can hold a national plebiscite every five years. If the monarch loses the plebiscite we get to behead him.
I'm gonna say that it's because a) 'benign dictator' is the best possible system and b) people who make this argument never imagine the monarch being the politician they hate. If you ever encounter a real person like this then just determine their political leanings and ask "so you'd be fine if the monarch was <most hated politician in opposing party>?"
Pro-monarchy, is adjacent to pro-Caesar, some strong man to take control and make the trains run on time. When people get sick of the BS tribalism of democracy they can start to think positively about such a thing.
I don't know if this is a joke or pure desperation, but if anyone thinks a monarchy is a cool solution to a country's problems I'd invite them to read on the recent history of Nepal.
Nepal is a parliamentary democracy, isn't it? What happened in Nepal? Or we talking the transition to parliamentary democracy back in the 20th Century?
Yeah, I mean the last 20th century transition. To summarize the to the point of caricature, they had a hereditary monarchy, at some point the king was reasonably good and well-liked. Shit happened, there was a new king, and he was such a nasty piece that a decade-long civil war ensued to get the monarchy out and stabiliize the country again. It seems like a good case study of what can go wrong when you concentrate power on a basically single random person.
It was just curiosity. I was initially very against the idea, and don't really think what people have commented so far really changed my mind at all, but I now understand the position better
There is no way to guarantee a monarch will be a good one: effective, making the country safer and more prosperous. But if there were, such a monarch would, of course, be a good idea. How could one object, especially as I worded it?
Different people may have different definitions of "safe" and "prosperous", though, and also some will win more or lose more even if the country as a whole benefits.
And as Cardinal Richelieu said, "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." No one is perfect.
I don't think I'm pro-monarchy, given my country's history, but yeah I'm torn.
I mean, I'm a Tolkien nerd which we have now established, thank you Rachel Maddow, is near-as-dammit Fascist. Also I have a purely sentimental hankering after the Stuarts. I even like Charles I, and Charles II was great fun. James II, we don't talk about.
Not necessarily my views, but I can see the appeal. Letter of Tolkien from 1943:
"My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) – or to 'unconstitutional' Monarchy. I would arrest anybody who uses the word State (in any sense other than the inanimate realm of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights nor mind); and after a chance of recantation, execute them if they remained obstinate! If we could get back to personal names, it would do a lot of good. Government is an abstract noun meaning the an and process of governing and it should be an offence to write it with a capital G or so as to refer to people. If people were in the habit of referring to 'King George's council, Winston and his gang', it would go a long way to clearing thought, and reducing the frightful landslide into Theyocracy. Anyway the proper study of Man is anything but Man; and the most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity. And at least it is done only to a small group of men who know who their master is. The mediævals were only too right in taking nolo episcopari as the best reason a man could give to others for making him a bishop. Give me a king whose chief interest in life is stamps, railways, or race-horses; and who has the power to sack his Vizier (or whatever you care to call him) if he does not like the cut of his trousers. And so on down the line. But, of course, the fatal weakness of all that – after all only the fatal weakness of all good natural things in a bad corrupt unnatural world – is that it works and has worked only when all the world is messing along in the same good old inefficient human way."
Just recently finished reading The Last Ringbearer, so Tolkien's beknighted world been on my mind as well. Funny how fiction with Good Kings is "fantasy" and Bad Kings is "dystopia" (or maybe scifi). Talk about subconscious political desires...everything woulda been just fine if noblesse oblige hasn't gone extinct.
The original Nazis liked Tolkien's work, but it was not mutual. Tolkien himself called Hitler "that little ignoramus" and hated the whole movement - there's a famous letter draft (whether it was ever sent is unclear) in which he reacts in as much cold fury as a professor was allowed to show at the time to the question of whether he was of Aryan heritage.
If the modern far right reads his works without understanding the main point - which is very much incompatible with fascism - so much the worse for them.
Anarchy doesn't work efficiently. For one thing, might makes right in such a government. For another, people with different opinions can make nothing whatsoever get done, such as when some people work to build a road and others think the same place ought to have farmland. Someone must make a decision, which will be good for some and bad for others, in order to get a group of people to work toward common goals.
Oh...we would really like to appoint one supreme executive who can fix really difficult coordination problems with executive fiat while also being directly accountable to voters. Like, imagine if the president actually ran the country the way everyone thinks he does. That.
Like that homeless thing Scott just posted about. Homelessness is really complex and there's lots of factors and different legal barriers and interest groups. Wouldn't it be nice if the people of America could just, like, vote every four years for one person with absolute authority who could force every state, county, and city agency to change their behavior and escape this horrific equilibrium? Like, I like committees...but it would be really nice to just appoint one guy in charge. Because whatever we're doing now ain't working.
Are there dangers to this? Absolutely...but there's also dangers to increasingly oligarchic system of different agencies, NGOs, and corporations only coordinated through, like, vibes and news reports. And we're closer to the oligarchic dangers than the monarchical ones at the moment.
Plus, it would be way more democratic in a real sense. Like, I'm smart, and to the best of my knowledge, if I want to solve homelessness in my area, I need to do a lot of research and figure out which NGOs are involved and which races are important and how these agencies interact with relevant laws and, like...I got stuff to do. Wouldn't it be nice if there were, like, two candidates: Jim Bob the evil heartless Republican who will throw all the homeless in jail and Susan-Peterson who will give all the homeless foot rubs and tents. And then we could just, like, vote for Jim Bob or Susan-Peterson and whoever we elected could actually just go do the thing, be it throw everyone in jail or give them foot rubs. Wouldn't your vote matter a whole lot more?
>Oh...we would really like to appoint one supreme executive who can fix really difficult coordination problems with executive fiat while also being directly accountable to voters. Like, imagine if the president actually ran the country the way everyone thinks he does. That.
I really have a hard time seeing this perspective. If, say, betting markets are far better at predicting outcomes than expert individuals, why would one think an individual would be better at determining an optimal course of action than a group of people? It seems to me the problem with large bodies of decision makers is a coordination problem that technology might solve, but the vagaries of any individual decision maker that can lead a country to ruin is nearly impossible to eliminate.
I like the idea of a robust governing body, not nearly as vulnerable to physical/mental illness, narcissism, impulsivity. The problem, to me, is our archaic means of coordinating timely decisions and actions from such a body.
>why would one think an individual would be better at determining an optimal course of action than a group of people
The population is still determining the course of action by voting for a leader with a clear agenda. Having a powerful executive lets policy get pushed through the otherwise impenetrable web of competing gridlocked stakeholders.
I mean honestly I think a strong argument could be made that the best form of government is "Democracy most of the time, but then an absolute Monarch for 4 years every couple centuries to clean out the pipes." This might be the best possible justification for Trump and is probably what his supporters intuitively think, deep down.
>The population is still determining the course of action by voting for a leader with a clear agenda.
I understand election as a key condition to recent proposals in favor of a more powerful, single-person executive, but I don’t think wise governance is as much a matter of imposing an agenda as it is evaluating and reacting to unpredictable, complex circumstances. And I think multiple people have the potential to do this more reliably than a single person.
A cabinet’s unelected and beholden to the president not the people. They’re presidential advocates. I’m not sure how any of this jibes with your premise that “the population is still determining the course of action.”
I’ve had moderate hearing loss since my 20’s. I picked up a pair of the new OTC hearing aids for $200. After getting used to them I came to really like them.
Does anyone know if the ‘real’ hearing aids that go for $4,000 and more are a significant step up?
I’d done a contract job for a hearing aid company automating their product testing a few years ago and came away thinking that the industry was pretty much a scam, spending lots of money on lobbyists to keep OTC products off the market and allowing their high profit margin hearing aids remain the only choice. Don’t get me started.
4K? My mom's first set of hearing aids cost 6.5K! However, Costco sells some first-rate hearing aids for about 1.5K. You just need to purchase a Costco membership which is something like $60/yr.
Thanks for encouraging this. I made a new appointment for testing there today. The prices are pretty reasonable. They do a real fitting there along with the audiogram. Good thing. I have unusual small ear canals. Non of the rubber ‘nipples’ that came with my OTC aids seem right.
This happens to be an area I know something about from the tech side of things.
The vast majority of the 4k cost goes to the audiologist cartel, nothing new there.
But there are interesting details from the tech standpoint:
20 years ago: the microphones for these things were literally hand-matched, there was no mass-production tech that allowed mass-produced accuracy. Also, the super-low-power processing required for these things was very cutting-edge and expensive.
Now: I cannot emphasize enough how much the smartphone is a juggernaut of innovation and cost reduction that bleeds into the least expected areas. Microphones are made by the billions, with intrinsic matching that needs little further testing; if needed, the extra testing is still automated so adds pennies, not dollars, to the product cost. The low-power processing is cheap and ubiquitous, and commonly-used Li-ion rechargeable cells are rapidly replacing old Zn-air prime cells for hearing aids.
What I'm driving at is that the performance of these $200 OTC hearing aids is no worse than that of $4000 ones from a decade ago. For any moderate hearing loss they should be just fine. For anything more advanced, there's still some value in going to the doc and having a fitted set of aids that will run into the 4-figures.
But - and here's the sad part - the extra expense adds very little in the end. This is because advanced hearing loss is fundamentally impossible to "correct" the way we correct, e.g., advanced myopia with fitted lenses. Once hair cells are damaged, the game is up.
So I think it's awesome that people with moderate hearing loss, the ones who benefit from hearing aids the most, can how have these for 1/10 of the cartel price, and enjoy their life.
Did I mention that these OTC ones actually look decent, too, not like misshaped globs of flesh that traditional hearing aids were "designed" to look? :)
Interesting stuff, thank you. My contract job was a few years ago about when the hearing aid company was just beginning to enable Bluetooth pairing with smartphones. I sat in meetings where people would talk about the project with ‘that company in Cupertino.’ It was somewhat under wraps at that point so they wouldn’t say the company’s name.
Yeah the idea of "everybody is carrying this powerful processing unit with 2...3...4 microphones in it already plus the two by each ear, can we do something with it to improve hearing" was totally floating in the air even a decade ago. Now every tool needed to calibrate these things is an app. I think direct augmentation still runs into latency issues, but it will be fixed at some point.
I am doubtful because of the inherent economics of small electronic devices, and none of the OTC reviews I see mentioned the hearing aid manufacturers bringing anything less than their A-game. I don't know about a $200 unit, but I would be surprised if the OTC high-end like $900 was noticeably worse than audiologist-exclusives (and if that is the case, I would expect it to be a temporary thing).
The main caveat is that if you have more than moderate hearing loss (if you need a 'power' unit), it seems like all of the good OTC manufacturers stay away and just won't serve you. If you buy one, the built-in hearing test will kick you out and tell you to return it. So you're stuck with going to an audiologist before you will be allowed to purchase one of them. (I am doubtful that this is necessary but no one has hacked/jailbroken OTC hearing aids that I've heard of to test this.) At least you can still go to Costco and buy one of their $1,500 hearing aids instead of going to an audiologist to buy the $3,000+ ones...
I've definitely read somewhere reasonably trustworthy that the expensive ones you get from doctors are not much better than the OTC ones, but I don't know for sure that's accurate. But your question reminded me of an experience that gave me a glimpse into the world of hearing aid prescribers. My mother started needing hearing aids when she was 70 or so, and as her hearing worsened they helped less and less. But she could still hear people quite well in a phone call. Didn't even need her hearing aids then. So she and I came up with the idea of buying one or more microphones that people talking to her could use, with wires running to headphones that she wore. Seemed like then and then she would finally be able to hear conversations well. (This was 30 years ago, when there was less tech around.) She said she didn't give a damn how conspicuous it made her, and that if it worked she'd happily use the setup even in public places. She just wanted to be able to hear friends and family without straining.
So I called up the doc who'd sold her her multi-thousand dollar hearing aids to ask how we could get a set-up like that. Was willing to pay him to find or prescribe the right equipment, even if insurance wouldn't cover it. It really did not occur to me that he'd refuse -- but that's what he did. There was an astonished silence after I'd gotten out the basic idea, and then, as I was filling in the details, he started launching objections, interrupting me over and over to do so. And none of them were valid, and many were insulting me and my mother. They were things like "your mother has $4000 worth of medical equipment in her ears and she's still complaining, and now you want to spend *more* money in the hopes of making her happy?" "everybody complains about their hearing aids," "you think this amateur idea of yours will work better than medical devices?" "you'll have wires running all over the place." He declined even to tell me where I could look for appropriate microphones, etc. WTF? I'm pretty sure my mom's and my plan would have worked, and pretty sure he knew that. It was like he was reacting to a horrible glimpse he was getting of a future where he wasn't the hearing assistance gate-keeper. (Plus there was some male-female stuff getting activated. This unwelcome idea was coming from someone with no MD *and* no cock?!?!)
So I'm all for you getting OTC stuff, and think there are probably simple way to tweak it if you need to.
I wasn't actually asking him to build the set-up or to tell me where to buy things. I was asking more general questions, such as whether the microphones in hearing aids had some special characteristics that we should try to replicate, and whether he knew why it was easy for my mom to hear voices on the telephone. Was it just that they were close to her ear, while other sounds were somewhat blocked by having the phone to her ear? I made clear that I was open to anything from him writing up specs for a company that could build what we wanted (and of course being paid for doing that) to me paying him his usual hourly rate for advising me as needed while I saw to getting the actual hardware.
Looking for feedback on an idea. Please include whether you consider yourself religious and in what sense:
“To someone who believes in God, God is the realist thing there is. Thus, what ‘reality’ means to a materialist atheist or agnostic, is the same -concept_ as ‘God’ to a theist. The difference being the name, as well as the properties associated with the concept, and the relationship the person has with the concept.”
>To someone who believes in God, God is the realist thing there
Theism is more than one thing (etc). There are certainly theisms along those lines.
>Thus, what ‘reality’ means to a materialist atheist or agnostic, is the same -concept_ as ‘God’ to a theist.
Its the the extension of "most real". That doesn't mean they actually understand the word "real" differently, they just differ about what exemplifies it.
..people can disagree about who is the Most Beautiful..the extension, whoever exemplifies beauty the best ..without disagreeing about the intension , the "dictionary meaning".
Lukewarm theist raised conservative. When I think of what is "real" I think of what materially exists, is observable, etc. Under that interpretation I don't know any theists who would agree with your statement. "God is reality" sounds like something from Spinoza, which is generally considered heresy.
But skimming the replies below I gather you mean sometime like "base reality". That is, in explaining where things came from, an atheist might stop at the big bang, while a theist might say the big bang was made by God. That sounds like Newton's "first cause" argument, and in that case I guess many theists might agree.
Personally I would not: "the big bang", "fluctuations in the quantum foam", "it's all a simulation", "an infinite chain of simulations", etc. are all explanations of where reality came from. But there is to me what feels like an entirely different category for question: why there is anything to explain at all? There is no way to answer that question, but the question remains is why I am still a lukewarm theist. I admit it's a not a very defensible position.
Somewhere between "non-religious theist" and "very heretical Christian".
I'm not sure if I'm understanding your position, so I'll rephrase in my own preferred manner, and you tell me if it's wrong: instead of seeing atheists as "believing in a certain natural reality" and theists as "believing in that natural reality and ALSO believing in this additional supernatural thing called God", it may be better to see atheists as "believing the foundation of natural reality is unconscious, contingent, lacks intentionality or purpose etc" and theists as "believing the foundation of natural reality is in some sense intentional, necessary, and conscious, among other things, and calling that foundation God". (Obviously those "other things" will depend on what properties that particular theist takes God to have.)
If that is what you're saying, then I do agree, for the most part, regarding my own theology at least. Three points though:
First, I would go further and say that the difference between "a unified ultimate reality that is conscious" (theism) and "a unified ultimate reality that is unconscious" (pantheism) doesn't really seem meaningful to me. They're both right but they're also both wrong. If there really is a unified ultimate reality with some kind of necessity and intentionality, then being the foundation of everything it's also the foundation of all human consciousness in the first place, and thus is something conscious beings can relate to *as if it were a conscious being itself, in some sense*. But describing this reality (God) as actually being conscious feels like an absurd category error. And so does describing God as not conscious.
Tl; dr pantheism equals theism, and insofar as it purports not to it's incoherent
Second, my agreement with your characterisation of God is a big problem I have with most Christians (and probably other monotheistic faiths but I'm much less familiar with them). Christians frequently anthropromorphise God to an absurd degree. As if God is a man in the sky, who feels human emotions, like anger and love, and is a "person" who you can have a "relationship" with. Among other problems, this (1) is primitive, almost pagan, and is philosophically incoherent to an the extreme, (2) makes an easy target for atheist mockery for those reasons, almost as if you're taking the atheist strawman conception of God and actually proudly believing in it, and (3) seems even blasphemous, insofar as that's a useful word, since it treats God as something far far lesser than what anything called "God" should be.
I generally refuse to refer to God as "him", not for sexism reasons (though those are also valid objections) but because it encodes this ridiculous anthropromorphism.
Third, I think this foundational understanding of God is the main reason various arguments for God's existence are entirely persuasive to some people and seem completely stupid to others. Because of *just how fundamental* the concept of God is, you can't use less fundamental facts about reality to either prove or disprove God, to someone with the opposite view.
I think "these two concepts are the same except for the name, the properties associated with the concept, and the relationship you have with the concept" is a vacuous statement - it would be true for any two concepts. The properties are how you define a concept, if you change those then it's not describing the same thing.
"Cats to a cat lover and dogs to a dog lover are the same concept - the best pet. The only difference between cats and dogs is their name, the properties that their owners associate with the ideal pet, and the relationship the person has with their pet."
I can see how this works for cats and dogs - but by using this term “the best pet”, that _concept_ does seem to be shared between lovers of different pets. I do get your point though, which is that the properties and names associated with a concept are what make the concept what it is, not merely its position in some concept graph.
Atheist here. 'Real' is a binary proposition. Something is either real or it isn't. 'The realist' is therefore a meaningless conjugation. God is viewed by the faithful as being the _most important_ thing that's real. That's not the same thing as being a different category of reality.
Things that didn't happen are unreal, but not equally unreal. Things that could have happened but didnt, counterfactuals s are more real than impossibilities. Physical actualities --facts, for short-- are more real than physically possibilities. Physical possibilities are more real than physically impossible conceptual possibilities. If you toss a coin and it lands heads , it could have landed tails, but not have turned into a vase of petunias.
Social construction.
Money, marriages and mortgages exist only because society deems them to : they are not fundamental physical realities. Gold is a natural kind. The US dollar is not a natural kind, but is more real than monopoly money.
Virtuality and simulation.
In the simulation hypothesis , it's precisely the facts that the simulators cause us, and can terminate us on whim,...whereas can do nothing to them,...that makes our world the simulation , and theirs the more real. (They may also be unable to rule out being simulated).
Fiction.
A fictional character in a real book is less real.than a real person ,but more real than fictional character in an unwritten book, or a character that doesn't even exist in a fictional universes, such as Sherlock Holmes' wife. Of course, there can be fuctions within fictions, leaving to many gradations of reality.
Maths.
Even from a fictionalist perspective, some numbers are realer than others: the irrational square root of two can be considered more real than the rational root.
Physics
Quantum mechanical measure could be considered a real (actually, complex) valued level of realness.
In my view it's simple equivocation. People don't use words in precise ways.
In any case your example doesn't really illustrate the principle. 'Social reality' isn't non-binary, it's just vaguely defined. If you were able to have a precise and objective definition of whatever you meant by social reality then that thing would either exist or not exist. The only reason it feels non-binary is that it's an imprecisely defined term so you can squint and make it look like whatever you want.
That amounts to.than saying there are a wh ole bunch of binaries In a whole bunch of contexts. So long as there is more than one context, the overall picture is nonbinary. Its like the way there are more than two binary numbers, even though there are only two binary digits.
Agnostic here. Because that's the only rational response to unfalsifiable propositions — i.e. creator vs no-creator or god vs no-god.
In my worldview, the reality that we perceive is mind-dependent. I'm a Kantian (transcendental) idealist in that the human mind shapes and structures experience, and while we can know the appearances of things, we cannot know things as they are in themselves independently of our perception. Actually, I should call myself an exponent of the Middle Way, because this is what Nagarjuna posited seventeen hundred years ago (if I've understood him correctly).
I would never accept that God with a capital G is the most real thing there is, because, for all we know, the entity that created our universe could be nonexistent now (i.e. dead). Unless of course the universe is functionally the mind of God. But that begs the question of whether God with capital G has a perception mediated by its god-like qualia. And if it does, what sort of filtering does it god-like qualia do?
Sure, but I don't think 'degree of certainty' is really a synonym for 'degree of realness'. If it were then OP's claim would be exactly backwards: God is probably the least certain thing.
Thank you, this is a good point. I will translate “realest” into “the root cause in a causal model” for more technical audiences, since that’s what I mean.
Sure - do materialist atheists believe in first cause as well? I don’t think they’d use the term “prime mover”, but to what extend does “the big bang” play the same role?
To a certain extent, the Big Bang is as much a religious hypothesis as it a scientific one. Of course, astronomical measurements indicate that the universe is expanding (presumably from some compact state), and the background cosmic microwave radiation suggests that there was a high-energy event far in the past. The expansion rate suggests that the universe was a compact object about 13.5 billion years ago. The cosmic microwave radiation can be accounted for by when matter condensed from the previous plasma of the early universe (about 380 thousand years into the expansion (that is if time ran at the same rate it does now) — hydrogen appeared and high energy photons were released. Those photons have since cooled to a relatively (but not perfectly) distributed background of microwave radiation.
Combine those two observations and you've got the "Big Bang". Of course, there's now a huge amount of evidence that this event happened — but why it happened or how it happened is all speculation. The energy states of the early universe before 10^12 seconds (~30K years) after the bang are outside the experimental range of our instruments (like CERN's Super Collider). So we cannot experimentally verify what happened before that time. The data suggest that there must have been an initial expansion from a point source and that during that initial expansion, there was no matter nor energy until the universe was about the size of a watermelon. Then somehow, it went through a phase transition where the inflation energy mumble mumble mumble turned into quarks and gluons and the three plus one fundamental forces appeared. But the history of the universe before 10^12 seconds is all theory, sort of the mathematical equivalent of theology. ;-)
A cosmologist could no doubt talk convincingly about how theories of the universe before 10^12 seconds *are* science. But I'd argue that if you can't falsify a theory it's not real science.
And of course, what was there before the Big Bang is all speculation. And some like Stephen Hawking that the question of a before is nonsensical. There was no before because time appeared with the universe. I think this is cop out because it really doesn't explain anything. I am more sympathetic to Lee Smolin's view that time exists independently of the universe. But that's all speculation and should be taken with a grain of quark-sized salt.
This is a part of the question! I don’t know how to answer from the perspective of someone who holds believes I don’t have.
Having said this, I think this position as stated is more aligned with Catholic theology and a lot of Protestants might see it as being pantheism, for example.
Well, the Vendantic schools (and I hope I'm not oversimplifying or mischaracterizing them) have the concept of Brahma, who is characterized as a creator god, but my understanding is that Brahma is identified with the force of creation. Brahma is continually creating new things and events, while Vishnu preserves them, and then Shiva destroys them. As such Brahma may be considered to be the first mover of this Universe, but I gather that some Vedantic cosmologies posit a multiverse, and every universe has its own Brahma.
I admit that most of what I've learned about Vendantic philosophies comes from Buddhist philosophers who were arguing against them. So, my understanding has inherent biases. If someone can improve upon my knowledge, I'd welcome some education here.
Christian. I think the idea as phrased is too vague to have an opinion on. I don't know what you mean by things being the same -concept- but having different properties, this sounds contradictory.
If we take predictive processing as a given - that our brains operate based upon predictive models of our future experiences, then two concepts are “the same” if the occupy the same point in a similar concept graph (of course, similar is doing some work there.)
So in this case, if you have a root concept to that predictive graph, it would be “the concept that influences or causes others but doesn’t receive any causal inputs”, ie the root of the causal graph.
So it's a question of figuring out causes retroactively?
I think I'm going to say 'disagree'; the God experiences I've heard of always start with God telling someone to do, or more often not do, a thing, and then events happening to drive the point home. God says "stop running heavy equipment," and the next time the guy runs heavy equipment his windshield is hit by progressively larger pieces of wood until one shatters the windshield and hits next to his head (and then he still didn't stop because he's stubborn as hell).
It's very important that that "do this/stop doing this" impulse be there first, which materialism doesn't cover. If that's not there first, I generally don't attribute the event to God.
Replying before I read other replies. Committed Theist, Non-Denominational Christian.
I think what you're describing is more like Pantheism - that the universe itself is God. My understanding of God is that he has thoughts, pursues goals, and works intentionally towards those goals (and within that has lots of very specific attributes, like being benevolent and loving, not lying, etc.). I don't think it would be accurate to ascribe those attributes to a materialist god, as described.
I do believe that an atheist or other materialist can value something as an Ultimate, similar to how I value God. Whether that's a moral value or material condition, or just existence itself. That's close enough that I can see what you're aiming at, but don't think there's enough overlap except in a very vague sense.
I agree with what you’re saying, once we start using the phrase “material reality” - at that point I think we’ve invoked a set of ideas now distinct from the idea of the root cause or initial source of all being. I would agree with the notion that i am articulating pantheism if I used the word “the universe”, but from what I can tell, “realty” means something subtlety different from “the universe”; chat gpt says that “reality” is broader in scope, encompassing _all_ that exists, whereas “material reality” seems to be synonymous in scope with “the universe”
Yes, I think you're phrasing things right. For a materialist the universe is equivalent to everything that exists, but to a theist the universe may refer to the thing that God created, which is not everything that exists. C. S. Lewis discusses this distinction in his book "Miracles":
"What the Naturalist believes is that the ultimate Fact, the thing you can’t go behind, is a vast process in space and time which is going on of its own accord. Inside that total system every particular event (such as your sitting reading this book) happens because some other event has happened; in the long run, because the Total Event is happening. Each particular thing (such as this page) is what it is because other things are what they are; and so, eventually, because the whole system is what it is. All the things and events are so completely interlocked that no one of them can claim the slightest independence from ‘the whole show’. None of them exists ‘on its own’ or ‘goes on of its own accord’ except in the sense that it exhibits, at some particular place and time, that general ‘existence on its own’ or ‘behaviour of its own accord’ which belongs to ‘Nature’ (the great total interlocked event) as a whole. Thus no thoroughgoing Naturalist believes in free will: for free will would mean that human beings have the power of independent action, the power of doing something more or other than what was involved by the total series of events. And any such separate power of originating events is what the Naturalist denies. Spontaneity, originality, action ‘on its own’, is a privilege reserved for ‘the whole show’, which he calls Nature.
"The Supernaturalist agrees with the Naturalist that there must be something which exists in its own right; some basic Fact whose existence it would be nonsensical to try to explain because this Fact is itself the ground or starting-point of all explanations. But he does not identify this Fact with ‘the whole show’. He thinks that things fall into two classes. In the first class we find either things or (more probably) One Thing which is basic and original, which exists on its own. In the second we find things which are merely derivative from that One Thing. The one basic Thing has caused all the other things to be. It exists on its own; they exist because it exists. They will cease to exist if it ever ceases to maintain them in existence; they will be altered if it ever alters them."
Religious here, this seems uncontroversialy accurate to me. I could imagine people quibbling on the wording (such as defining what "the realist thing there is" means) but certainly the theist believes God is real in the same way an atheist believes the material universe is real.
I (atheist) feel like this is something a lot of religious people might SAY they agree with, mostly because it seems to mean something superlatively positive about God, but in practice I think only the most fervent believers actually appear to think it.
I think you’re right. Many people claim to believe there is an all powerful, all loving being, but it’s rare to find people who consistently act as if this were true. I think people are saying what they think they ought to believe, rather than accurately describing the mechanism that governs their actions.
'Real' is a binary. Things are real, or not. The pencil on my desk is real, the paper it's sitting on is real, the desk below is real. There are no things that are partially real.
I don't think you can rank things such that any single thing is 'most real' or the 'realest'. So the statement makes no sense at all to me. I think even a Theist would say something like 'God exists and is greater than his creation, but he's not MORE REAL than his creation.
You don't think Shakespeare is 'more' real or on a higher plane of reality than Hamlet, seeing as how Hamlet depends on Shakespeare in order to exist, but Shakespeare does not depend on Hamlet in order to exist?
In the simulation hypothesis , it's precisely the facts that t he simulators cause us, and can terminate us on whim, where can do nothing to them, than makes our world the simulation , and theirs the more real. (They may also be unable to rule.our being simulated).
Sure - if reality is binary, and there aren’t orders or degrees of realness, I don’t see understand what “reality” itself means or refers to, and hence I would think it’s not real.
The stack of papers on my desk is real. As is the pencil, and the desk itself.
The book report my child said he wrote, but actually didn't, is not real.
If Trump says that 90 million illegals snuck across our border during the Biden administration, but in fact only 5.2 million did, then 5.2 million illegal entries were real, and 84.8 million are not real.
Harry Potter is a real character in a real fiction series, but is not a real person. Tax accountant is a real thing a person can be. Wizard in the sense of the Harry Potter stories is not a real thing that a person can be.
Note that these are beliefs. If I'm wrong (There is a book report! Wizards exist and can wield the fundamental forces of the universe!) then those things were real the whole time and I was just wrong. The book report wasn't more or less real than my desk because of my beliefs about its existence, or its lack of completeness, etc.
>Harry Potter is a real character in a real fiction series, but is not a real person.
That 's an intermediate level of reality right there. A fictional character in a real book is less real.than a real.person ,but more real than a fictional character in an unwritten book. The US dollar is not a natural kind, but is more real than monopoly money.
I think I get what you’re saying here. But what process do you use to determine what’s real or not? Can you show how that process leads me to believe reality is real?
I think there's a slight difference, in that I presume a materialist accepts the physical universe as the most real thing, and themselves as part of that universe, but all running along the same lines under the same discoverable physical laws. So that, in one sense, there isn't a difference of kind between a star and a human, both are arrangements of matter and energy that come about in obedience to the laws of physics (or maths at the deep ground level of what substrate underlies the universe at the Big Bang or before).
For (Christians) God is ultimate reality and the reality we have around us is contingent reality. God is not the same kind of thing as us (which is why, for example, Dawkins' arguments about 'God can't exist because God would have to be really complicated but really complicated things only come later on in the timeline of the universe not at the start' don't work for religious believers).
This sounds correct - once we start using a phrase like “material reality” we are being more specific. But in both cases, the worldviews involve a root cause; the differences are, what you call that thing, what the intermediary steps are, between it and our day time day lives, and then (more importantly, imo), how we relate to that thing.
I think our wiring pushes us in the direction of believing that the universe makes sense, that there is some entity or some priniciple governing the universe. My guess is that we mostly apply to the universe the model we are wired to have about other people and the things they make and do, which make sense to us even we object to them. So yeah, there are a lot of things that we'll accept as the governing entity or principle, and "god" is one of them and "reality" is another.
This sounds right to me and reminds me of Martin Buber’s I/it vs I/thou distinction, with the difference between thesis and atheists is theists using a “thou” relationship with being itself, as if it were a person, whereas atheists relate to being as an “it”
I'm an atheist. I think there's a lot of meaning hiding within the word "properties".
Imagine if I claimed that, to someone who believes in God, He most perfectly embodies the nature of all things, and He is therefore (among other things) a better dog than any other dog. Therefore, an atheist's beloved pet dog is the same concept to them as God, the only difference being the associated properties (properties which include actually being God instead of an elderly Labrador).
I suppose the rejoinder from a religious person would be that yes, God is in all dogs, but He encompasses a lot more than dogness, and so the atheist's dog is obviously not the same thing. But that's my problem with the first idea! I'm an atheist because the properties of God that fall outside the bounds of observable reality - omniscience, omnipotence, making women out of ribs, and so on - seem to me to be the definition of God. What is left if you remove all the bits of God that require actual faith, all the bits that are supernatural, and pare Him back to being just a bunch of atoms banging around? Those aren't just properties to be handwaved away, they're the core of where our beliefs differ.
I think what you’re doing is conflating a space of ideas - theologies - with a specific understanding of one element in that space - ie whatever understanding you have of that one form of Christianity.
Your idea that it’s all “just atoms banging around” is ultimately based on faith, too. You’ve never seen an atom, nor do you personally know anyone who has. You believe atoms exist and make up all things (except for subatomic particles and fields of force and photons &c &c) ultimately because that helps all of your experiences fit together into a coherent singular narrative. The search for this narrative following a specific methodology is the scientific method, but the idea that one such narrative exists can’t be justified by evidence. Materialists think this single narrative is an equation that we haven’t yet found, but for which we seem to have a few good working approximations. Theists say, it’s a person acting intentionally.
Of course they're both based on faith. My objection isn't to other people having different faiths or accepting different axioms. It's to the rhetorical technique of A) redefining what God means such that He exhibits none of the supernatural properties that make atheists doubt Him, and then B) claiming that atheists believe in this redefined "God".
I don't believe God remains conceptually the same when you take away His Godly properties. I don't think there's any reason to make that redefinition other than to be able to then claim that atheists believe in God. I also think it does a disservice to the faiths of the people who believe that He is capable of concrete earth-level miracles and has a personal relationship with them.
Thank you for clarifying, and yeah that does make sense.
The purpose of the rhetorical device - for what it’s worth- is to downgrade the question of “existence of some extremely specific thing” to a question of “does reality actually work this in general cause-and-effect way.”
Lots of people will claim that if you life as if God is real and try to do the right thing even if it hurts, your life will grow better in numerous ways, and in particular you will feel more calm and at peace. And this is a kind of experiment a person can actually do!
Of course some believers will reject this description and say it’s all about the afterlife, etc etc - but by doing this translation i wondering if I can get people to be open to running the experiments themselves.
Okay, but then He contains all reality in His intellect but doesn't embody it, in which case my atheistic concept of reality has nothing to do with what's going on inside His (metaphorical) head.
That could possibly work for a Ground of Being kind of "God", like the Eastern traditions that emphasize its absolute neutrality, or the God of e.g Spinoza. Doesn't work so much for the typical monotheistic God with its character-like personal will.
Personally I speculatively believe in the first, strongly disbelieve in the second.
Can you help me understand why it doesn’t work for the second? I would say that the “the law of physics” seem to be a secular interpretation of “the will of God”, in that it works as the unspecific answer to any question of why something happens.
Those two things are only equivalent if you believe that the only thing God wills is for the laws of physics to continue functioning in a normal manner, in exactly the way that you would expect them to function if there was no intelligence at the helm and the universe was an uncaring collection of atoms.
And sure, there's nothing wrong with that belief - Deism has a long history behind it, and some people like the idea of a God who crafted a beautiful universe but doesn't otherwise interfere with it. But it's a pretty narrowly constrained concept of God, and if you asked most mainstream religious groups if they believed in Deism, they would probably say no.
> I don't think you can honestly equate a narratively rich person-like God with reality, because it amounts to saying that reality itself intervenes in history, wants things to go this or what way, and occasionally shows itself with a human form in some specific place and time to talk to this or that guy.
I think this is exactly what Abrahamic religious theologies, taken literally, amounts to a claim of. The name “I am who am” seems to me like a direct claim of this: “I am existence itself.”
I don't know, to me "I am who am" sounds like an assertion of the speaker's existence, or at most like some kind of "you can't fathom who/what I am". A voice from the deep beyond claiming to be beyond the puny human's ability to understand or pigeonhole. But you're probably not the first who read "I am existence itself" into it.
The thing about semantics is that there is no rational limit to how far it makes sense to extend the meaning of a word. It's not like rationally discussing some logic once you've agreed on the definitions. All I can say is that too me it sounds too confusing to use the same word "reality" for the abstract space where stuff happens, and for a distinct entity doing stuff.
So if someone says the Abrahamic God is real, I can understand the claim. It might be right or wrong, but at least I know what they are saying. But if they say it is reality or existence itself, and then it turns out to do and want stuff, I can only answer that I'm not sure what that even means.
This has been a problem Christians have intellectually been dealing with for hundreds of years. Aquinas includes it in his "Summa Theologica". On the section "Whether we should call God a 'person'" he writes "I answer that, "Person" signifies what is most perfect in all nature—that is, a subsistent individual of a rational nature. Hence, since everything that is perfect must be attributed to God, for as much as His essence contains every perfection, this name "person" is fittingly applied to God; not, however, as it is applied to creatures, but in a more excellent way" and "It may be said that God has a rational "nature," if reason be taken to mean, not discursive thought, but in a general sense, an intelligent nature. But God cannot be called an "individual" in the sense that His individuality comes from matter; but only in the sense which implies incommunicability."
Well first let's be clear that your question is about semantics. We're not discussing whether various ideas of God are credible or not, just whether it makes sense to equate them with "reality".
My answer here is that the analogy works as long as your idea of God is abstract and neutral enough like a kind of Ground of being, or even more secularly, as you say, the laws of physics. But classic gods have lots of specific narrative content that is important to their followers. The Abrahamic God is so named because of the specific belief that He gave specific instructions and made promises several millenia ago to a guy called Abraham. See also how Christianity insists that its God is "personal". More generally, having a will, intervening in history and playing favorites among humans is classic fare for all kinds of gods of various human cultures. The gods of the ancient Greeks, Sumerians, Aztecs and others also did it.
I don't think you can honestly equate a narratively rich person-like God with reality, because it amounts to saying that reality itself intervenes in history, wants things to go this or what way, and occasionally shows itself with a human form in some specific place and time to talk to this or that guy. Just in terms of semantics it seems like too much of a stretch for the word "reality".
My impression is that religious believers who answer your question in the positive are playing a bit of a game of motte and bailey. The narrative stuff is extremely important to religious identity, but it's also hard to defend in the wider scheme of things, so they will mostly retreat to the motte of God as "reality" with a few extra general properties. Either that, or they're really more spiritual than religious and are just choosing to mostly ignore the narrative content of their religion.
There's nothing about a God that would prevent it from doing or wanting stuff in general, and plenty of belief systems have it that way. But the original post was about whether it would make sense to equate God with "reality". Which seems to me like a modern semantic concern btw, As I was saying just above, just in terms of how far you stretch a word, I find it way too confusing to use the same word "reality" for the abstract space where stuff happens, and for a distinct entity doing stuff.
Indeed, Eastern societies traditionally did not develop the idea of "laws of nature" because they didn't believe in a "typical monotheistic God with its character-like personal will". Laws of nature only make sense if there is a lawgiver, after all.
Atheist, and this basically reads like a slightly modified ontological argument.
Religious people, by and large, *don't claim to know what god is*. Words like "inscrutable" come up a lot. Trying to shoehorn religious views into a framework which takes a definitive logical approach is, ultimately, trying to make god legible; reasonably certain most of the strongly religious people would take this as, well, I'm going to call it heretical, but they'd probably have a very specific word for the specific kind of wrong they'll say this is.
I have articulated this to numerous religious people of varying stripes, who have agreed. I haven’t yet found a religious person I’ve shared this with who has disagreed.
I suspect these claims of inscrutability can be translated as doubt that we’ll ever have the “true laws of physics” that make make accurate predictions (or at least calibrated uncertainty) in all cases.
I have gotten that same prediction - “religious people won’t accept this” from both atheists and people who consider themselves spiritual or faithful but skeptical of organized religion.
Due to the one-way-mirror one-way-glass character of unequal internet anonymity I'm sorry that I won't be able to personally engage with any responses to my mission statement in this precise space.
Unfortunately I need to apply this to potentially non-anonymous interlocutors as well, due to the nature of the medium..
Anyone who would like to, is invited to discuss this on my substack, youtube, or privately via WhatsApp or Email.
Washington State has all our state executive offices on the ballot (including a ridiculous 28 candidates for Governor) and one Supreme Court Justice but no statewide measures.
In the 2020 presidential election, Joe Biden received over 81 million votes, the most popular in U.S. history. Three years later, his disapproval rating is the highest in US history, even surpassing Trump's, according to FiveThirtyEight.
Does this indicate that the U.S. political system is failing to produce capable leaders and becoming more and more a 'shotgun marriage' between people and the nominees? what are your thoughts on long term implications of this?
>Does this indicate that the U.S. political system is failing to produce capable leaders
Vote count and leadership capability don't necessarily correlate. There are plenty of capable leaders in Congress who would make better presidential candidates than the two current nominees, but the political system has not incentivized their progression towards this goal. The leaders do exist.
Joe Biden's vote total and approval ratings in 2020-21 reflect the belief that he would be a one-term president who would restore normalcy after the Trump Years and not rock the boat. He didn't explicitly promise to be a one-term president, but I think most people understood that to mean that if things were going well, the party couldn't find a decent replacement, and most importantly if his health were still up to it, he was keeping open the *option* of a second term, but really that wasn't going to happen.
Joe Biden's recent approval ratings and polling numbers reflect the growing understanding that he is a stubborn, senile old man who can't possibly serve out another term in the Oval Office and needs to step aside before we have to invoke the 25th Amendment. Now that he has in fact stepped aside, I expect public opinion of him to recover substantially.
You may be right that the US political system is failing to produce capable leaders; the absence of strong challengers to either Trump or Biden this year may be evidence of that. But Biden did a pretty good job of doing what he was elected to do, as a transitional leader, and public opinion now is not evidence that anyone made a mistake in 2020.
If I'm reading Sam correctly and being charitable, I think that's part of his point. No individual made a mistake, but the system produced a bad result.
I think we would all agree that Biden and Trump, and Clinton in 2016, were bad candidates. Not just unappealing to their enemies, but unappealing to everyone. That they are the top results of a complex system seems to indicate that the system itself is having problems. I don't think this was the case in 2012 or more years before that. Mitt Romney may not have been perfect, but he fit within the Overton Window and would probably have made a good president.
We could talk/argue about why we've gone the way we have (my money is on elites separating from voters and losing their confidence, but there's lots of theories here). But ultimately, we can see that there's some kind of problem since at least 2012 in both parties.
Biden has been an unusually effective president. More effective than Obama. Tell me why you think he was a bad candidate.
On the negative side he hasn't been able to stanch the flow of illegal immigrants, but in his favor Biden issued an executive order that suspended protection for asylum seekers without a "credible fear" for requiring asylum, allowing for immediate deportation of unauthorized migrants. And he's increasing the size and number of immigration courts. But the economy is booming. He's pushed through more federal judicial appointments than (I think) any President to date. Employment is high. Inflation has recently fallen back to normal. The stock market is going strong. Internationally, he's countered the Russian threat by arming Ukraine and strengthening our ties to NATO. He's rebuilt the State Department's foreign service ranks after Trump decimated them. The dollar is strong internationally, and US manufacturing is up.
FWIW, I was also pleasantly surprised by Biden's term as well.
For example, when Biden talked about bringing bipartisanship back on the campaign trail in 2020, I assumed that was either naive or calculated empty talk as I expected Republicans to stonewall everything like they did under Obama. However, he somehow managed to pass a large number of bipartisan bills anyway.
Then there's the economy, where people predicted a recession every month for years, and every month, it stubbornly failed to materialize. Meanwhile, prime age labor force participation is going up and up, unemployment is very low, inflation is moderate and rapidly falling, inequality is falling, etc.
Basically the only *bad* thing Biden did was run for reelection. I mean sure there's individual policy stuff that can be nitpicked, like the rise of protectionism... but well, have you seen the other guy?
I'm starting to get annoyed by this little talking point: the most popular evah!
Yeah, because fifty years ago there weren't eighty million votes to get. In fifty years time, there might (or might not) be one hundred million votes to get, and whoever gets them then will be "the mostest evah".
*Somebody* has to get the most, *somebody* has to get the least. How many votes did Washington get? Is Biden better than Washington?
Well, at least this does leave the field open for "See? Biden was a way better choice than Hillary, he got so many more votes than she did!" 😁
>Yeah, because fifty years ago there weren't eighty million votes to get. In fifty years time, there might (or might not) be one hundred million votes to get, and whoever gets them then will be "the mostest evah".
Agreed. Such measures should be scaled by the number of eligible voters.
( The similarly irritating financial equivalent "biggest deal/bankruptcy/scam" ever should also be scaled, though here it is less clear whether GNP, money supply, or largest corporation's sales should be used as the scale factor. )
Well, isn't the high number of votes Biden got caused by turnout and population growth more than approval? A disapproval rate (% of the population) should probably be compared to the % of the vote Biden got, which was 51.3% — more than anyone achieved in some recent elections, but nothing record-setting (Obama '08 got 52.9%, Bush Sr. got 53.4%, and Reagan '84 got 58.8%).
No...in retrospect, I think the majority of Democrats really wanted what Joe Biden was selling in 2020: a return to normalcy. 2016 was insane, the entire Trump presidency was madness from their perspective, and they wanted things to go back to normal. People, especially Democrats, very genuinely wanted that and if Biden had delivered, I think he'd have gained decent Republican support.
Instead, America seems crazier than ever. Covid is over but between overseas wars and inflation, America feels less secure. Biden certainly didn't tamp down the culture war, if anything the hard left seems further radicalized over things like Gaza. And, finally, Trump is back and likely to win in 2024; even if he doesn't, the Republican party is now formally defined by him, figures like DeSantis and Vance who are the future of the party are much, much closer to Trump than someone like Jeb Bush.
Biden promised a "return to normalcy". He didn't deliver.
"Instead, America seems crazier than ever. " I agree. The complete public u-turn is fascinating. I think the US public is in a state of frenzy and panic. A worrying unstable state. some of it might be on our major political parties for leveraging 'fear campaigns' and stirring up public panic.
For slightly more data, If you look at https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/biden-approval-rating/, which compares Biden's approval ratings to those of the other post-war presidents, you see that presidents have on average been getting less popular.
"Biden got more votes running in an election in the present than did other candidates running in the past when there were fewer voters" is such a vacuous statement that nothing should follow it.
It's the same argument for the same reasons as "Well Trump may have got the votes of the Evil Slaveholder Electoral College, but Hillary won the popular vote, so in fact really *she* is the president and not him!"
I don't think that's the same argument at all. There's no relevance to Biden getting more votes than Obama or Washington or anyone else *in a different election.* There is at least arguably relevance to Clinton getting more votes than Trump *in the same election.*
I probably know the arguments you might give for why in fact it's not relevant that Clinton got more votes than Trump (e.g. that if the popular vote is what matters then candidates will campaign differently), so we can probably skip arguing on the merits. My point is that estimating popularity, legitimacy, etc. based on votes between candidates in a single election is *totally different* from an argument that tries to estimate popularity across multiple elections in which the candidates being compared weren't opposing each other.
Voter turnout trended downwards from a high of 63% in 1960 (admittedly assisted by more than a few corpses in Chicago that year) to a low of 49% in 1996, and has been trending upwards ever since, hitting 62% in 2020. I guess you could track it to the "it doesn't matter who I vote for" cynicism of the 1990s slowly being replaced by the "omg the other guy is literally Hitler" credulity of the 2020s.
I'd say that was part of it, but a bigger part was that COVID forced everybody to pay attention to politics that year. I'd hazard a guess a not-insubstantial number of voters voted against the incumbent entirely because they were forced to pay attention to politics, which, from their perspective, is the biggest possible political failure.
Illinois does not tend to have very many ballot initiatives (usually a few "advisory" ones which are non-binding and bear no weight - so far I think there are 3 on the ballot this year). There are usually a few competitive races in the suburbs / collar counties but in Chicago the primary tends to be a far more competitive race.
I think people who agree with me that the FDA are quality regulators who do their best will really like the following concept:
An additional pension that can be inherited representing an expected 10% of their income will be created. A panel will estimate the net quality adjusted life years that the FDA is responsible for on a ten year average. Starting at zero, the special pension will rise towards 10% based on any future improvements in the FDA's QALY effect
There are two options here. The FDA is operating at an optimum point of net social benefit and the special pension program will be canceled after this is discovered and replaced by a flat 5% pension for their success in doing good work. Or there is room for improvement - if not in the quality of people - then in the quality of processes and incentives. Not only will significant social benefits be possible, the FDA's employees and their inheritors will have the potential to earn the full 10% for bringing their QALY effect towards the optimum level
The FDA has been approving drugs with questionable benefits and definite dangers (like brain swelling). I don't think they're doing a good job, merely a necessary one. I suspect either regulatory capture or "bribes" (possibly not as the term bribe is legally defined).
In that case a legible QALY metric would be very useful. If the FDA is approving too many drugs too easily they will have to become more prohibitive to improve their metric and grow their special performance pension. It will be quite hard to game the metric rating as the methods would be open and subject to scrutiny unlike opaque government relationships
This will also allow observers to calibrate their impressions of the FDA's performance. If their QALY metric is negative or positive it would be great info even if they don't directly respond to the incentive
The incentives experienced by the companies as a result of FDA regulation are very significant and not market related where I would expect market incentives to overall tend towards providing things people want to pay for
That's not an argument against the FDA per se, but rather that the most significant non market incentives seem to stem from the FDA, so the FDA should also experience a very quasi market incentive to ensure the incentive they pass on is not perverse
To summarize: the White House staff went out of their way to cover up Biden's mental decline, and the mainstream media was reluctant to probe the issue vigorously since they skew leftward by something like 9 to 1.
The other issue is that people *tried* to get him to drop out and allow a real primary back in 2023, and Biden absolutely insisted on staying in. You saw how hard it was to get him to drop out, even *after* it became very obvious he had no chance, imagine how hard it would have been in 2023.
As I think I might have pointed out here previously (though it might have been elsewhere), no competent leader in Biden's shoes would have announced he was not running in April of 2023. He is almost certainly more pro-Ukraine than any potential replacement of any party, so such an announcement would have sent the message to Russia that need only holdout another two years and their prospects will improve. Not to mention that he would have all the problems of a lame duck with two years left in his Presidency.
I've seen this claim before but it confuses me because it seems to take for granted that a replacement Democrat would be less pro-Ukraine than Biden, but doesn't provide any evidence for that..
Edit: To be clear, the claim is not that another Democrat would be unusually soft on the issue, but rather that Biden is unusually hard. Note also that, unlike Biden, no prospective Democratic candidate seems to be particularly focused on foreign policy.
That seems kinda thin. In particular, another Democrat having higher odds of winning seems like it would easily outweigh them being a little less hawkish, such that on net Russia's expected position after the election wouldn't necessarily be any stronger after Biden drops out.
1. We are talking about April of 2023. Why would one think another Democratic candidate would have higher odds of winning, particularly so much higher that it would "easily outweigh" the advantage?
2. More importantly, this is a bit off topic. You asked for the evidence that Biden is more pro-Ukraine than likely Dem replacements. The evidence seems pretty clear.
A competent leader who knew his health was declining such that he would not have been able to properly serve another term, would have opted out of the race last year. Yes, the Joe Biden of 2020 would have been better w/re Ukraine than any plausible candidate in 2023, but the Joe Biden of 2020 wasn't available and the Joe Biden of 2023 should have known that.
And presidents who are likely to be succeeded by their hand-picked successors, don't necessarily suffer lame-duck issues.
>Yes, the Joe Biden of 2020 would have been better w/re Ukraine than any plausible candidate in 2023, but the Joe Biden of 2020 wasn't available and the Joe Biden of 2023 should have known that.
That makes no sense. I didn't say "better." I said "more pro-Ukraine." Not the same thing.
>And presidents who are likely to be succeeded by their hand-picked successors, don't necessarily suffer lame-duck issues.
And your evidence fot that is what? Given that Presidents being succeeded by a member of their own party is very rare (G HW Bush is the only one since about 1880; Johnson and Truman took office when their predecessors died in office) let alone being succeeded by their handpicked successors, you have no data to base that claim on.
>That makes no sense. I didn't say "better." I said "more pro-Ukraine." Not the same thing.
Right. Biden/2025 will be more pro-Ukraine than whoever we wind up with actually sitting in the oval office in 2025. Biden/2025 will be more pro-Ukraine than anyone we plausibly *could* have stood up in 2022 to occupy the oval office, barring fantasies like a Mitt Romney unity ticket.
Biden/2025 will be the most pro-Ukraine guy in the nursing home. And that is worse than being a meh-on-Ukraine politician in the White House. It should have been obvious to Biden and his inner circle in late 2023, and I'm pretty sure it was obvious to Vladimir Putin, that in 2025 Joe Biden was going to be the most pro-Ukraine guy in the nursing home. OK, posh Delaware estate with the best home health care as he and his ghostwriter work on his memoirs. Whee.
The only thing that ever could have helped Ukraine in this regard, is to find the most pro-Ukraine candidate not named Joe Biden to go up against Donald Trump in 2024. And that should have started many months ago.
We are talking about how the world looked in April of 2023, not now. And not in late 2023. That is what I said. There was no guarantee then that the war would still be ongoing in Jan 2025, but Biden wanted to increase the likelihood of the war still being ongoing, the way to do that would be to announce he wasn't running. Hence, since he didn't want that, he would have been stupid to say he wasn't running.
What he should have done in late 2023 is a separate question.
I don't see her as a viable candidate, but I love to point out at times like this that, when you have a unique position in the world like VP or president, that person's life is pretty much always going to be a set of bizarre good and bad luck stories. To get to a bigger-than-life place you need to have gone through more than an average life. That's my theory. I wonder if I'm wrong?
Yeah. I mean, you dont have to go any further than her opposition to find an even larger set of weird things leading to him. Though talking about Trump almost feels like cheating, with how much of an outlier he is in general.
Yea. There are several historical examples of that of which the wildest might be Harry Truman. Others include Coolidge, Harding, Carter, and several during the 19th century -- including Abraham Lincoln! All are examples of extreme randomness being essential to the guy ending up in the White House. And of hardly anybody besides the guy and his own family viewing such ambitions to be plausible until pretty damn close to the moment they came true.
Ulysses S. Grant - before the Civil War, failed businessman, failed farmer, and burgeoning alcoholic. Civil War - best general on the Union side (yeah, I know, fight me on that). Post-Civil War - president (and bedevilled by scandals, poor man, because he trusted people who took advantage of him and the opportunities to enrich themselves by getting a share of the spoils).
Oh yea Grant is a great example. As of age 35 he literally couldn't afford a home for his own family (was living off his in-laws). Then he was POTUS before turning 50. And then dead from cancer without reaching 70. One of history's all-time wild rides through life.
Who might have run if the Democrats had set up a mini-primary system to find Biden's replacement?
In 2020, the major Democratic candidates were Biden, Sanders, Gabbard, Warren, Bloomberg, Klobuchar, Buttigieg, Steyer, Patrick, Bennet, and Yang. Not sure how many of those are credible contenders in 2024. And there are presuably a few others who should be considered, including Newsom.
A mini-primary or a real primary? I think people are suggesting that there should have been a real primary campaign.
I've no idea who would have won. I think that at least two thirds of the time, the person who seems like the early favourite start manages to flame out once they're put under scrutiny, so I don't think there's that much point in speculating who'd have won a possible primary. I do think it's unlikely to have been Kamala, given how poorly she did in the 2020 primaries.
I think that's one reason for the doubts around Kamala. Whether or not the fix was in for Biden in 2020, when she ran in real competition against others, she did very poorly.
The suspicion has to be that if she goes up against competition this time round, she'll lose again.
One thing that has always puzzled me is how inconsistent LLMs are. Every time I have a good experience, it immediately gets falsified.
For example, a couple weeks ago, I tried using ChatGPT to extract some data from an html file for the first time to save the effort of doing it by hand, and it worked amazingly well. Today I tried to do the exact same thing with the same page, and no matter what I tried, I couldn't get it to work.
So far, the only use I've found for LLMs that they can consistently handle is translation, and even then, they do occasionally make hidden mistakes.
What's puzzling about it? LLMs basically take in text, classify it (decide "what is this asking"), then run it through a system that probabilistically guesses the series of next words through more and more context. Sometimes it guesses right the first time and it looks like you're dealing with something brilliant. Sometimes it doesn't and you don't.
In college I made effectively a mini-LLM (though it wasn't called that at the time). What ChatGPT has on my college project is two things: gigantic amounts of data (so it covers more cases) and a huge amount of programming to deal with more inputs/cases. Of course there are some things it can't do. It probably neither has the data nor programmed casing to make it work.
When Sam Altman talks about ChatGPT being close to AGI he's basically talking his book. I don't even think ChatGPT style general LLMs are the future. Instead I expect what will matter is a number of smaller but more consistent models that do one thing well. Basically DoctorGPT and if you ask it to write code it will say, "Sorry, I'm DoctorGPT. I take in symptoms and give probable diagnoses." ChatGPT might stay in the middle as a "good enough" option or we might end up with something that routes your request to the appropriate model instead on the interface end. Depends on the economics and attention economy really.
LLMs will definitely be a component of any AGI. But the word "component" needs to be emphasized. LLMs do not, and cannot, understand what the stuff they're dealing with refers to. (Perhaps a version of the same technology could, but not one specialized for handling text.)
This is one of the reasons to use the API. If you have the same HTML extraction task, you can set the temperature to 0, and at least then you know the resulting error is not due to mere random chance in sampling but the LLM is 'genuinely' screwing up; and you can start experimenting with adding examples or rewriting the prompt. As it is with the chat interface, any given error could absolutely be a mere fluke of the RNG ('have you tried turning the chat session off and then back on?'); and you can't set it, because usually a chat interface for a LLM is an excuse to dumb it down and simplify it - why worry the user's pretty little head over scary 'hyperparameters' like 'temperature'?
Ohhh that's a good hint. The chat interface is so comfortable though. I guess it's time to search github for some kind of user-friendly interactive front-end for the Api...
(Posted this last time. Doing so again for those who may have missed it.)
I've published a book. Or rather, republished. The short memoirs of Thomas Brown has been out of print in the over 260 years since its original publication in 1760. Thomas Brown was a 16 year-old soldier in the French and Indian War who was severely wounded and taken prisoner . He endured three years of "uncommon sufferings" and wrote his brief personal narrative when he returned home. It is an exciting, if horrifying, drama of human suffering and stoicism in the face of danger.
I know early American and frontier history isn't normally something that has much crossover with this community, but I hope you will consider purchasing a copy and learning about something unique that you would not normally have been exposed to.
Our small team put a lot of work into this little passion project of ours.
Also, like everyone else here, I now have a substack. It'll mostly exist to complement whatever work we're able to do with the "publishing company." If you're interested in learning about something completely different, I encourage you to subscribe.
I try to figure out in what sense there is a future.
My ontological starting point is that time is real, but not a thing, in the strictest sense of the word, that is, time is not a physical thing, but instead there are physical things like animals, societies, atoms or electric fields, and those things change.
That they can change is what makes them things in the strictest sense. (According to Mario Bunge and I agree.)
Their changing is what constitutes time.
So a thing's past is the ordered sequence of all the states it was in.
That it once had been in some now past state is a fact. It's a factual matter. I don't call propositions about or descriptions of facts facts.
So what is its future?
I think it's the ordered sequence of all the states it will be in. And of course, once it reaches any of those state, we don't count that one as belonging to its future anymore but pretty quickly to its past.
Now I wonder weather it is alright to say that it is a fact that a thing will some certain day be in some certain state. For example: me, in a state of death. I am pretty sure that will happen.
I think that a thing's past is pretty real -- because the states of the thing were real because they were states of it -- but is its future as real as its past?
I know about this block universe idea but I don't think it's a good one. As I see it, the fact that events can happen in different orders relative to different things, and clocks, like all things, go faster or slower through their states, depending on motion, only means that, well, time is relative (to things), so each thing has its own time but lawfully relative to each other.
That does not mean that we are embedded in some real thing described by the manifold that is called space-time. That manifold is just used to calculate when which event (change of a thing's state, not event as a point of the manifold) will happen relative to which thing.
Also, with General Relativity one cannot savely calculate all events, because a quantum event might happen that changes the course through space of a thing. For example by splitting it so one part goes more left, one more right, preserving impulse.
Which, coincidentally, is another concern of mine regarding the future. Things have *real* possibilities regarding how to chance at any time.
It is trivially true that what will happen with a thing will happen with that thing, but is there more to its future than that?
> I try to figure out in what sense there is a future.
I'm nine hours in the future relative to the you that posted this comment. I wish I could give my answer to them, but failing that, I can tell you that their future exists and hope you learn from their mistakes.
> I know about this block universe idea but I don't think it's a good one. As I see it, the fact that events can happen in different orders relative to different things, and clocks, like all things, go faster or slower through their states, depending on motion, only means that, well, time is relative (to things), so each thing has its own time but lawfully relative to each other.
Relativity is a point in favor of a block universe. If the future is fundamentally different from the past, and someone moving towards Andromeda thinks that an event that happens there is in the past, but someone moving away thinks it's in the future, then one of them would have to be wrong. The block universe just treats it as all there, not all that different from how something to the left and to the right exist.
The "past states" of a physical object don't exist in a material sense. They're a conceptual way of making sense of the current organization of material reality. Same with the future states. They don't have a material existence.
This depends on what interpretation of quantum mechanics you subscribe to. They're all, by definition, compatible with everything we know about the universe...but they're as different as many worlds and predestinationism (and those aren't the only two).
Einstein subscribed to the "block universe" view (based on relativity rather than quantum theory) which CAN be interpreted as a version of predestinationism, but I'm not sure that's the only interpretation.
FWIW, I subscribe to an expanded multi-worlds model where you will not only end up in every world that you could end up in, but also all the pasts you could have had you did have. I violate quantum theory in that when two universes transition to identical states I merge them in my model, but there's no way I could do the math to see whether this is reasonable.
"but also all the pasts you could have had you did have"
That's a fun idea.
I sometimes imagine if maybe, when I find out about something existing since 20 years without me knowing of it before, it got retconned into reality by my interaction with the relevant things in the now :)
Yeah, I do that too, but that's not quite the concept. What I'm talking about is the mirror of the multi-worlds futures, into the past, so we have as actual pasts all the universes that could have transitioned into us here and now.
The reason this doesn't feel quite correct (to me) is that it feels as if there should be some way to specify the strength of a connection, such the the sum of all the connection strengths would equal 1, but the "more probable" transitions would have a stronger weight.
Talk about things changing runs into its own problems though. Are your *things*, ordinary objects like a chair, or only primary subatomic particles? In the first case your ontology is violently ignoring physics for common sense appearances, as in "a chair changes", plus you run into the problem of defining when a thing starts or ends: is there a specific moment of time when a rotting chair ceases to be a chair?
What do you mean by "violently ignoring physics for common sense appearances, as in 'a chair changes'"?
I know it's hard to say when a thing has changed so much that it has become another one, or when exactly one thing is or is not another one's part, but apparently everyone can deal with that sufficiently. You, for example, know that that rotting chair, whether it's still a chair or not, was that chair that wasn't rotting a year ago.
Please correct me if I'm reading you wrong, but you seem to be trying to philosophize about what time is, in an ontological sense. But your starting point for it are human-level "things", and how they change. This seems like something a classic Greek or Indian philosopher ~2500 years ago could have said. My two points are that:
- The starting point for an attempt at philosophizing about time nowadays should probably be modern fundamental physics, whose basic objects are (IIRC) particles, forces and the geometry of spacetime. How macroscopic objects change derives from those, so it can hardly be the foundation of our understanding of time.
- Plenty of pre-scientific already problematized the notion of "things" and their continuity over time. If there is an inescapable element of convention in the identity over time of a macroscopic object, that makes them quite unsuitable as a foundation for an ontologic understanding of time. And unlike the first objection, this line of thought was already known since ancient times.
It seems the first step is noticing there are several distinct things we refer to as time:
A relationship between distances
A relationship between the rates of change of distances
The set of distances that have been and will be
A relationship between this set of distances
A relationship between the rates of change of this set of distances
It seems as if there are at least three distinct phenomena that we think of as "time", then. Relationships between distances - it took light three hours to arrive here from there.
Rates of change - a photon crosses a particular distance every second
The set of distances that have been and will be - the photon was three light hours away from us, now it is next to us, and in three hours it will be over there instead.
Physics primarily concerns itself with one and two; it doesn't really address the future or the past, excepting insofar as these pertain to the relationships between distances (i/e, light cones).
Insofar as it does talk about the future and the past, it tends to say things that don't make a lot of sense to most people - like, there is a particularly obvious interpretation of general relativity that says that the big bang is still going on, right now, at the edges of the observable universe. (That is, distance is equivalent in some sense to time-history; the future gets weird there, because it is pointed in some sense inward).
The right-wing conspiracy people I keep an eye on believe Biden did not actually withdraw, and the announcements made by his staffers are part of an internal coup intended to try to force his hand.
Somewhat less plausibly, they believe he is being held prisoner until he either agrees or "dies of COVID".
This is an entertaining election year, I'm rapidly running out of popcorn.
Tonight I read reports (stories? rumors?) of Biden having a "medical emergency" in Las Vegas last week -- emergency orders sent out to the hundred or so LVPD and other local LEO to clear his motorcade first 2 miles to a hospital, then that suddenly changed to the airport and Air Force One took off back to DC/DE.
The author claims to have verified the radio traffic with several local LEO who were part of the group tasked to help the SecSev with logistics. He points out that all the movements of the Pres. motorcade and AF1 are verified, and that a planned speech at MGM was scratched, and that POTUS has not been seen since.
Take his conclusions -- that we're in a live-action version of the movie, "Dave" -- all in a high-sodium way. But the habeus corpus issue is becoming too important to ignore.
I want to emphasize that all of this uncertainty and suspicion could be quickly and easily dispelled with some honesty and transparancy, yet it is not, and all the red flags are piling up in a heap on the field. (Like the head of USSS has no record or backup of radio and message traffic around the Butler, PA event. Really? Was is on a Windows machine that got Clownspiked?)
BRetty
PS -- "Dave" was a pretty good movie. I would certainly take Kevin Kline as POTUS over any in the field -- and Tulsi Gabbard is a pretty fair version of Sigourney Weaver's regal presence, if we shift the plot to make her VP not first lady. Actually, that makes it better -- imagine the icy rage if the handlers wanted to use a body double/puppet rather than elevate VP to POTUS!
Why, if they are saying such obviously ridiculous things, do you keep an eye on them?
There are plenty of perfectly serious right-wing publications or authors or sources you can follow who are not *obviously* delusional. The Economist, at least if you want a very British perspective.
Might I suggest that they know they are lying, you know they know they are lying, and you're really just entertaining yourself with something approximately as serious and important as Cartoon Network at 3am?
Because about one out of three obviously ridiculous things this group of people has said has turned out to be true, and another one out of three turned out to be, in retrospect, not in fact as obviously ridiculous as the statements appeared to be at the time.
I mean, the official story is that he is isolating due to covid. And it's further quite reasonable to suppose that this might actually mean 'he's nearly incapacitated and in rather bad shape', since covid is known to hit people his age pretty hard.
Anyway it's an interesting theory; more plausible than many conspiracy theories, since you only need a handful of people to pull it off, and the fait accompli would be a pretty forcing move even if someone wanted to try to call bullshit on you later.
There's also the point that Biden's signature on the document appears to be a bit off.
The conspiracy folks appear to be moving to "It didn't work, Biden refused to go along with it, and so they killed Biden, and are preparing to blame his death on covid."
>Maybe the most banal explanation for tweeting a departure from the presidential race without a swift public-facing follow-up is that Biden is too pissed at everyone to be normal. "Fine, I'll endorse her, but only via tweet. You want a noble Oval Office address, Jack? Bleep off."
It's not, actually. Nobody worth paying attention to is claiming that his short-term memory has degraded to, or even near, the point of "do important thing that required a lot of thought and discussion, then forget that you did it."
And a month ago nobody worth paying attention to was claiming that he had any cognitive issues whatsoever.
I watched a loved one die descend into dementia and die, and my impression is that Biden is much, much further gone than most people seem to believe. Granted every case is different, but when the signs become impossible to ignore, you're not just looking at a single failure, but a failure of multiple cognitive systems; he's not just failing to be able to be consistently "with it", he's no longer able to -pretend- to be with it.
>And a month ago nobody worth paying attention to was claiming that he had any cognitive issues whatsoever.
That's simply nonsense. Nate Silver, Ezra Klein, and a few other center-left commentators had been banging the drum about this for months, along with right-leaning pundits not all of whom have reputations for trafficking in baseless smears. This was a matter of some controversy among serious people around the end of last year, although it largely died down after Biden mostly held his own against the hecklers at the SOTU.
Go back and read what they were writing at the time they were writing it. Nate Silver, at least, was -not- claiming that Biden had obvious cognitive issues, he was saying that he had obvious issues with voters who saw him as too old, and he hammered on this over and over again. And while he wasn't even saying Biden had obvious cognitive issues, he was still receiving widespread condemnation as somebody who wasn't worth paying attention to.
It seems unlikely...but the lack of any press conference is strange. I'm not sure a recorded video would cut it, given deepfakes.
I really hope Biden does give a press conference on this soon. The maximally suspicious / worst case scenario would be that he dies in the next few days, without ever having given a press conference or spoken to anyone outside a small circle of insiders about this. In that latter scenario, the `palace coup' would start to seem disturbingly plausible.
Without giving credence to lunatics, it really is odd that there was no press conference or Oval address. You'd think anyone with a sense of history would understand the importance of an address to the nation for an event so significant: the sound and sight of the speaker making the announcement in a sense become part of the collective memory. I wasn't born when LBJ withdrew from the 1968 election, but I can hear that snippet from the speech in my head, in his exact words. It won't be quite the same with a Twitter post.
Well, the simplest explanation is that he's really sick. Sure, if you just have a cold they can give you some meds and get you sorted out for a ten minute speech ... but if you're on a ventilator drifting in and out of consciousness, not oriented to person place and time ... well, they're going to let you rest and see if you recover.
If he is that sick, is he (a) competent to make a major decision (like dropping out of a presidential race) and (b) shouldn't the 25th have been invoked (at least temporarily)? Who makes the decisions in the situation room, if decisions need to be made?
The reporting that is coming out today does not suggest that this was the case at all. Tne reporting could be wrong, of course, but it would require that a whole lot of prominent people, many of whom wish to continue to have careers for years to come, be willing to lie on deep background and risk the massive hit to their credibility with the press should the story (which involves an alert and oriented Biden having discussions all weekend with staff and powerful Democrats) eventually be exposed as untrue.
"the story (which involves an alert and oriented Biden having discussions all weekend with staff and powerful Democrats) eventually be exposed as untrue"
I regret to say that I don't find that implausible, given that a lot of what was going on behind the scenes with Biden probably involved exactly that. I think the simplest explanation is that Joe and/or his close circle don't feel like co-operating with the gang that forced him out, kicking and screaming, over his continued insistence that he was the nominee.
When it comes time to officially hand over to Kamala at the convention or whatever, he'll turn up and do that for the sake of the party. But he's not going to pretend everything is lovely, since they made him into a liar over "I'm fine and I'm fit to run and I'm the nominee". So no appearances etc. after the announcement, and if they don't like it, they can lump it.
I think, on the metaphysical level of working-class Irish Catholics, I grok his mindset here - "the bastards may have forced me out, but I'll be damned if I play their dancing monkey for them!" 😁
Yes, today his personal physician indicated his symptoms have almost resolved, and he's apparently been talking to some people. Nonetheless it remains unclear whether he'll actually meet with Netanyahu.
So far as 'a bunch of people lying' is concerned, though ... that seems to be almost standard when the president is in ill health (see; Wilson, FDR, to some extent JFK, Reagan), and I don't think doing so is career imparing ... indeed in some cases telling the truth would be the career-ending move. In short I don't necessarily put a lot of faith in his doctor's statement, though the other reports do clearly suggest he's not incapacitated.
I didn't say simply "a bunch of people lying" in general, though. I said "a bunch of people lying on deep background" about the important events of a specific place and time. That's a very different thing, for a couple of reasons that I assume I needn't explain.
This strikes me as a strange position - if somebody was going to murder the President(!) they probably wouldn't FIRST have him announce the end of his campaign, they would just murder him. (But also I think it's a pretty absurd hypothetical on its face.)
Yes, agreed. It seems very unlikely, and I think most likely Biden gives a press conference soon and that's an end to it. It's if he doesn't that things start to look weird. (They would have looked much weirder still, of course, if the endorsement via tweet had been of someone other than his VP).
In his letter posted to Twitter, he says that he will "speak to the Nation later this week in more detail" about his decision. So that's definitely going to happen. Of course, the galaxybrained will claim that he was forced to make a pretaped speech right before he was fed to the alligators.
Tricking or coercing people into signing documents is one of the more common forms of elder abuse, so it's certainly not impossible that someone did this to Biden, although obviously we don't yet (and may not ever) have any hard evidence to back up the theory.
I've heard stories of older people who are reasonably healthy as long as they continue to work, but who rapidly decline as soon as they stop. It's sometimes blamed on a "lack of purpose": they could push themselves while they had a reason, but when that reason goes away, they collapse too fast to find a new reason to go on.
Alternatively, it's like Bilbo in "The Fellowship of the Ring". Kamala looks well-preserved, and Biden looks like a withered ghost of his former self.
It's also how Germany became a republic in 1918. The Kaiser agreed to abdicate in favor of a regency for his young grandson, but one of the Social Democratic Party leaders (Scheidemann) who were to form the new government decided to unilaterally announce a republic instead, against the wishes of the Kaiser, the outgoing Chancellor (von Baden), and the incoming Chancellor (Ebert). It went over well with the crowd, so everyone else just went along with it.
Interestingly not the only time this kind of thing has happened in Germany ... the monetary reform in 1948 was a similar unilateral stroke, and the fall of the Berlin Wall also took place simply due to a lack of will on the part of existing powers to stop it.
It's uncomfortably plausible; there's nothing in the announcement that wouldn't be trivial to fake, given preexisting access to his Twitter account, which at least one staffer is known to have.
This shouldn't be the standard of evidence that major events turn upon.
Well, major events haven't turned yet. Until the votes are cast at the DNC everything is speculation. There's still time for Biden to crawl out of his grave.
If he does I expect it will be to step down from the presidency; having a boring couple of months of her being the president is probably the best shot the Democrats have. That's the most likely scenario, I think. Second most likely is 25th amendment, third is some sort of divestiture of as many responsibilities as constitutionally permissible, fourth is a batshit insane scenario where he comes out raving, fifth is he's already dead and we'll hear about it probably tomorrow (and regardless of whether or not it was natural nobody is going to believe it was natural and things will remain interesting for a bit longer), and the sixth is he's already dead and things suddenly get much crazier; in the sixth scenario I'm assuming we're all in a simulation and the writing team hit their stride, and we get a return appearance of the Epstein Files.
Wouldn't it be tricky and complicated to have Joe officially step down as president, have Kamala officially take over, then have her announced as Democratic nominee at the convention (and that's even without 'what about if there are challengers?') and then run a campaign to be elected? Wouldn't it be even more humiliating if she was (officially) Madame First Ever President while on the campaign trail but still lost to Trump?
It does seem simpler to let Joe serve out his time while Kamala gets ready to run.
I mean it's not that unlikely for men in their earily 80s to die conditional upon having covid, base rates are ~2% in gen pop, even with world-class healthcare it's still probably closer to 1% than 0.1%.
One reason this conspiracy theory has legs is that it's so obviously a joke, and a good one, to make about a guy who doesn't show up in person to anything.
"Biden is in for a surprise when he wakes up in the morning!" Yep, funny, I get it. His own staff found out from the Twitter post, meaning the woman who runs the Twitter account literally could have staged his as a coup if they really wanted to. It's kind of amazing to just imagine. (And the last 4 weeks should stop people from thinking "that would never happen" means something won't happen.)
So you can say it actually meaning it, sitting right next to the guy saying it as a joke.
This will last until Biden actually does a personal address of some kind.
I vaguely recall an incident during the Trump years where he tweeted something that sounded like a declaration of war and it took like an hour for him to tweet a clarification. Then there was the Hawaii missile alert which wasn't just twitter but an actual emergency alarm.
Realistically, people will confirm through real channels before actually starting WW3.
I very very much doubt that story is true. But I agree with it being a trivialization, and I just posted a comment to that effect. I can remember LBJ's announcement as though I had been watching it on live national television, even though it happened before I was born. A tweet isn't quite the same.
I could see him (or Jill/Hunter, if the rumours about them being the only people he trusts and who are keeping access to him very tightly monitored) being pissed-off enough about being backstabbed (e.g. by Obama) and being pushed out by the drip-drip of "don't you think he looks tired?" in the press when he didn't want to go, so doing it this way was one big "up yours" to them all.
Given that Biden's cognitive decline was a conspiracy theory up until a month ago, gimme 30% odds that this is revealed and celebrated in 2026. Like, conspiracy theories aren't usually correct...but they're a lot more correct than they should be.
The ones that turn out to be correct are usually the ones that are not wildly implausible. "White House/campaign staff try to conceal U.S. President's infirmity by carefully controlling his public appearances and spinning, via sympathetic journalists, any evidence that they can't hide" is not only NOT wildly implausible, it has actual modern precedent that is widely known and can be pointed to.
Reagan's senility was probably about as bad as Bidens' and was similarly a well-known source of amusement for those who knew about it- in the late 80s, prior to the internet, "those who knew about it" was just restricted to a vastly smaller number of people who all had more or less reason to not discuss it publicly.
Indeed, although what I had in mind specifically was the concealment (later exposed) of the extent of FDR's and JFK's physical infirmity. Both required a good deal of theatrics, staged photos/film, and a largely unpoken agreement by the press to pretend not to notice it.
The analogies are not perfect: there was no urgent need for the Nate Silvers of the day to risk ostracism or ridicule for insisting that JFK wasn't really out there every day playing touch football, or that FDR wasn't striding purposefully around the White House grounds, as there was no reason to suppose that their physical handicaps impaired their ability to do president stuff.
It was NEVER just a conspiracy theory. ALL older people experience a cognitive decline. The question is "To what extent?". Anyone elderly who denies this is either in denial, a liar, or so out of touch with themselves that they didn't notice.
FWIW, I'm younger than Biden, and I've noticed it. I can't construct programs as well as I used to, and it takes me longer to understand them. I also live with a bunch of other elderly people, and they consider Bridge to be too intellectually demanding. A few of them used to be engineers or professors (not most, of course) so it's not that they were never smart. You end up relying more on long-term memory and less on short-term memory.
Thanks for sharing. Do you have a link to that video he apparently sent around? Does anybody? Because if he's clear headed, that absolutely kills this conspiracy theory.
Because otherwise...I'm reading a handful of people in a room, in the evening when he's known to have issues, and he's sick interpreted his response as dropping out and within 24 hours his entire stance changed and he dropped out in a deeply rushed and disorganized manner.
Again, clear documentation, which should exist for a decision of this magnitude, should exist and would easily disprove the theory. This article indicates a video to internal staff exists. Is it available?
Otherwise, we have a rushed timeline, rushed public statements...and in 3 years time, when no one cares, people may reveal details differently.
Well, I'm not a gambling person, but I'll offer you 20-1 odds in imaginary internet points if you're still here in 3 years.
And to be clear, the specific claim under debate is that a staff member announced Biden dropping out against his will when Biden still insisted on staying in the race. I don't want any goal-post moving where you say "look, lots of people pressured Biden to drop out, therefore I'm right" (after all, that's already publicly known!)
And the specific claim is that Biden did not give clear, informed consent to drop out of the race before it was announced. Any clear written documentation by Biden means I lose automatically.
If this resignation was done properly, there would be paperwork, there would be documentation.
If the conspiracy theory is correct, the way it would go down is an old man with cognitive issues and sick with Covid either made decisions when he was clearly not in his right mind or, more likely, gave vague instructions that could be interpreted as dropping out that staff took advantage of.
The more specific and documented the resignation was, the worse the conspiracy case is. The more vague it is, the more likely.
Unfortunately, I don't believe there is an "properly" paperwork to dropping out of a political race. It's not like resigning from an office. So I think that part of your model is incorrect.
E.g., suppose he just said (angrily) in front of many of his staff "OK already. I'll drop out. In fact I just have. *You* handle it!".
I'm not claiming that's what happened, merely that it's one alternative that could have happened...and wouldn't leave much paperwork trail.
I have been curious about this. It seems like a sufficiently obvious objection to prediction markets that I've been assuming their proponents have some explanation for why they'd work anyway. I assume there's some way for people who want the answers the market would provide to fund it, but that seems to often not be brought up.
(As a TL;DR, the objection is basically that the money to incentivize informed market participants to do the necessary research and get involved has to come from somewhere, and these markets are often set up to be zero-sum.)
Two weekends ago I taught a class at Fractal University in NYC and it was a lot of fun. I was very impressed with the whole organization. They describe themselves as an "improvised college" -- basically a community of people around Brooklyn teaching and learning about topics they're interested in. I think it captures the best parts of traditional academia (mostly the excitement about learning), without all the downsides.
I think a lot of people in the ACX community are interested nontraditional education systems, so I would like to recommend this to people. They have a lot of different classes, some free and some that cost money but are pretty affordable. This is their website:
Today a post about our lives on a little farm, and how we eat what we grow. I like raising birds. It keeps me interested in life; to receive the little chicks, introduce them to their new home and the water source, feed and water them every day, and put them up when they’ve grown to a nice size. It’s a different life but it has its rewards: https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/if-its-brunch-its-liver-and-onions
While I've been voting since 1960s, this is the first time I've been unable to find a presidential candidate I can support. I'm hoping that the Democrats will seize the opportunity and nominate someone real. Mr. Biden's cardboard cutout DEI picks don't make it. This ain't 1964.
But throughout pop media, the gaslighting has begun. Ms. Harris's extremely modest political skills are touted as if she were a genius. She's not. Democrats, please help us out of this mess. Drop the fantasyland nonsense. You must have Somebody qualified.
>this is the first time I've been unable to find a presidential candidate I can support
Who did you support in 2016 and 2020?
I'm trying to work through this statement - it seems odd given Trump has been on the ballot every cycle since 2016, and it's hard to attribute the phrase "Mr. Biden's cardboard cutout DEI picks don't make it" to a Biden (2020) or Clinton (2016) voter.
Did you support Trump in 2016/2020 and sour on him this year?
Did you support Clinton & Biden in 2016/2020, then sour on Harris this year? Would you have preferred Biden if he stayed in?
Or is there some 3rd fact pattern I'm missing here?
I'd absolutely vote for a Democrat. I can't remember the names, but there are good possibilities in Minnesota and, I think, Maine. I was going to say Alaska, but she's a Republican, brave soul she is.
There are plenty of qualified Democrats, but few can get through the cult-like conformity gauntlet of wannabe 'progressives' (not TR, who arranged for half of Puerto Rico to get food stamps, but our current crop of authoritarian utopians).
I voted for Obama and Clinton, but passed on Biden. Can't do Trump.
The tenor and the demographics are identical to 2016. If we get a repeat, I'll have to cut off all pop media to maintain sanity. The 'woke' and MAGA are two sides of the same coin.
Unless I'm mistaken, Cosimo Giusti votes Democrat, except possibly for Reagan. Every election had a Democrat for whom he could vote, even reluctantly, but cannot now vote in good conscience for Biden or Harris.
I understand hating trump. In 2016, I voted for Johnson, since I couldn't stomach Clinton or Trump, but in 2020 I voted for Trump after seeing how he actually performed in the presidency. Not perfect: the worst mistake, I think, being unilaterally withdrawing from the Iran deal (which I agree was a bad deal, but withdrawing unilaterally undermined the integrity of the nation's treaties).
>I'm trying to work through this statement - it seems odd given Trump has been on the ballot every cycle since 2016, and it's hard to attribute the phrase "Mr. Biden's cardboard cutout DEI picks don't make it" to a Biden (2020) or Clinton (2016) voter.
Only in hindsight, there are a lot of normie libs who thought Hillary was cringe but still voted for her willingly, and that thought Biden was going to rein in the clowns and bring back normalcy.
> lot of normie libs ... thought Biden was going to rein in the clowns and bring back normalcy.
It's hard to make sense of that statement if you don't say what specific things were "clownish" and what was the "normalcy" that was lost. It really sounds like you're trying to refer to something specific but refusing to say it.
I thought it made sense in context of the parent comment (which was complaining about "Mr Biden's DEI cardboard cutouts"), but generally some combination of:
- "Cancel Culture"
- BLM ridiculousness
- Affirmative Action
- Trans stuff (men in women's bathrooms, men in women's sports, girls harming themselves because they think they're boys, etc.)
- The personal is political
- Other
- All of this being pervasive in pop culture, to the detriment of its quality
"Normalcy" would be the pre-Trump status quo, where those things still existed, but they either didn't know about them, or they were at a tolerable or palatable level.
Are these things that the POTUS has a lot of control over though? They look like cultural bandwagons to me, not something that even the most powerful person in the world can really change. And sometimes these things thrive on opposition and being the perceived underdog. Much of the growth of woke was during the "grab them by the pussy" Trump presidency.
>Are these things that the POTUS has a lot of control over though?
Honestly, I don't know. To the extent the executive has control over that stuff, they didn't help at all (and not due to inability, in many cases, like a bunch of executive orders, they could've just not done anything). But then again, does anyone but terminally online weirdos (us) even pay attention to that sort of thing? Much like with the economy, presidents get the blame or the credit for developments outside their control.
>And sometimes these things thrive on opposition and being the perceived underdog. Much of the growth of woke was during the "grab them by the pussy" Trump presidency.
That is the politically engaged normie libs' lullaby, but I'd be wary of confusing correlation with causation. My own perception is that crazy wokeness started ramping up a few years before Trump (2014 is the year many claim it really got going).
In terms of how the federal government and office of the President function? Mostly, ya. At least until the senility stuff. But even that's a more "normal" scandal than the Trump circus. You had a White House that wasn't perpetually doing its in-fighting in the press, a relatively stable set of senior staff, and bills that actually got signed into law instead of being prematurely celebrated on the White House lawn. The daily Twitter beefs weren't instigated by the President directly. It all felt fairly benign. Heck, there wasn't even as much debt ceiling brinksmanship as the second Obama term.
So ya, all that was definitely more "normal".
In terms of the culture war? I don't think that's a genie that a President can put back in the bottle.
I don’t know if I count as a “normie lib.” That said, while it doesn’t wholly *define* normalcy for me, I think things trend more normal when a sitting president does not publicly advocate the injection of bleach, comment on the fuckability of his immediate family members, publicly flaunt the size of “his button” relative to those of nuclear armed dictators, or foment riots to try to thwart the peaceful transfer of power.
Biden may not have been a full blown “return to normalcy,” but he was certaintly a step in that direction IMO.
Admittedly I never liked Biden anyway, but the whole "Republicans are the enemy of the people" speech with the red lighting and soldiers standing behind Biden killed any normalcy or unity credibility he had.
And the bleach thing, people really need to stop repeating media propaganda points. What Trump said was hilariously ignorant, but he never said or implied anyone should consume bleach.
I'd say asserting that "[other party] is the enemy of the people" or some variation thereof is pretty tragically normal for American politics these days. If we start comparing interparty quotes along those lines, it's gonna yield a loooong list.
But either way, I'd consider most anything on that list much closer to the overton window of "normal" than things like "If Chelsea were my daughter, perhaps I'd be dating her" or "Mr. Gorbachev, I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than yours, and my Button works!"
I think they really want to believe that, and are afraid to say, or even admit to themselves, that he didn't.
I think they kinda define normalcy as "Democrats in charge, no Trump in charge, no covid", and Biden certainly managed that. The undercurrents in the political left wing, those are things they're uncomfortable with, but they don't have to notice as long as Trump is in the news. And when he's not, they can tell themselves, like an abused spouse, "it's OK, they don't mean it, they really do love me, they said so that one time, it's OK, it's all my fault, I'm so stupid, they tell me I'm stupid all the time, they're so good for putting up with me, they even tell me everything I need to do, it's OK".
Pretty much, at least before the debate, and even then a lot of them were more disturbed by the dramatically increased perceived odds of Trump than the direct implications of Biden's pudding brain.
There is a notion among certain groups that some degree of normalcy has returned (the so called "vibe shift"), but how much of that do people attribute to Biden's presidency is hard to tell.
First, genuinely, the Democratic bench looks weak. There's Harris, Newsom...maybe Mayor Pete? That's it.
Second, if you are Newsom or someone with presidential aspirations...man, why would you enter this race, at this time, in these circumstances? It's a mess. Any qualified candidate other than Harris is looking at 2028.
Third, sorry, but the Democratic party has consistently chosen uninspiring psuedo-centrists. The party doesn't decide but it is powerful, see Biden. Eight years ago and four years ago they stomped the Bernie campaign down...and now they're bleeding working class support to Trump. I understand why; the Republican party of 2016 failed to stomp down their insurgency and now they're all effectively gone, replaced by Trumpists, but...you can't get interesting candidates if the party consistently crushes them in favor of pseudo-centrist Boomers.
I have a different take? 8 years ago, Hillary took control after having spent the last 8 years locking up the 2016 nomination. No one else had a chance. The fringes griped but couldn't do anything.
4 years ago, the fringes made a play, but the establishment united behind Joe as the best chance to beat Trump. Nothing else mattered to them, and they threw some bones to the fringes, most especially by having Biden toss out lefty proposals whenever he needed good press and popularity with the base.
Now Joe's gone, and they don't have a clear path ahead. But the problem with "interesting" and "real" is that that's not what any large part of the base wants. The competing interest groups want their own people in charge, and that means someone who's an "uninspiring pseudo-centrist" with respect to a political interest group inside the D coalition. That is, the only way to get to the top of the big pyramid, is to get to the top of one of the smaller pyramids first, and the process of getting to the top of a pyramid is what causes the boring unreality.
If they're trying to win, the Democrats run governors from swing states. Whitmer and Shapiro are the most obvious. Cooper is also good and brings solid "he stood up to the woke mob" cred for blowing up the Duke Lacrosse case, but I'm not sure NC is as important as all 3 of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
I have long been an advocate of including "None of the Above" as an official choice. If it were to receive a plurality, all the candidates would be thrown off the ballot and prohibited from running again in that election cycle, and a new election with a new slate of candidates would be held within XX number of days (where XX is up for negotiation, but somewhere in the 30-60 day range seems sufficient).
I realize that in practice, this would be difficult, maybe even impossible. It would probably require having the first election further out from inauguration, and I'm not sure what to do if you get to inauguration and still don't have a winner. Perhaps there is a better way of accomplishing something similar...maybe prohibit party primaries and make the general election completely open, and then just have however many rounds of runoffs it takes for one candidate to get a majority? But I still like the idea of being able to say "Not good enough, try again."
It sounds like you might like a Condorcet method of ranked choice voting (vs. the more-commonly implemented instant runoff variety).
Oversimplified* description: voters rank all the candidates, for every pair of candidates you see which of the two is ranked higher a majority of the time, and the candidate who wins each of their head-to-head matches is the overall winner.
The cumulative effect is that none of the losing candidate would have beaten the winner in a 2-way race.
*There are some supplementary mechanisms to handle rock-paper-scissors pseudo-ties.
Right now, they're trying to minimize chaos and public infighting, so I expect they'll all say nice things about Harris and then sort it out in the convention. Probably all the debate until then will be about how committal the nice things said about Harris are.
The problem with any sort of public debate on the merits is that it exposes actual weaknesses to the other side's attack machine. Loyalty to party over truth implies not doing this to your own side in public. And since the party is all nominally on the same side, the norm is to close ranks. Only a major shock, like the debate, could break that, and the only reason the reaction was so bad is that there was no obvious Schelling point response, and the party didn't have time to coordinate in private. Imagine if Biden had merely announced that he was stepping off the ticket, without endorsing anyone as a replacement. But he said "Harris", so that's who it is, until the convention.
Kamala seems to be the choice, but I suppose we'll have to wait until the convention for the formal announcement. The interesting part will be who will she pick for vice president.
So the other possible nominees have the choice between "wait till the convention, where the fix may already be in for Kamala, and try and fight it out" *or* "play nicely and see if I get the pick for VP and the chance, whatever happens, to run in 2028".
Any bets on Kamala/Gavin, the California Dreamin' Duo? Let them do for the nation what they did for California! 😁
I'd like to think that the Dems have at least some understanding of how intensely dislikeable Gavin is on a personal level, even (potentially) to people who aren't automatically going to rule him out on the grounds of being a LIBTURD from WOKEIFORNIA who is going to put WOKE JUICE into the fuel tanks of their F150s.
What John said; in fact, they cannot be from the same state. The 12th amendment doesn't explicitly prohibit it, but if this were to happen the electors from that state are not allowed to vote for both the P and the VP.
What really depresses me about this list is NBC's bright-eyed enthusiasm about "And even better, Senator Bloggins is really really *really* pro-abortion!!!!" for most if not all candidates.
Yeah, drive me away from voting for you guys (if I had a vote, that is).
No offense, but post-Dobbs history suggests pretty strongly that sacrificing your vote pays off at least a little.
On a personal level, though, I'm of course disappointed to learn that the Harris/whoever ticket can't count on your support. It seemed like such a sure thing otherwise!
The Democrats just pulled off something extraordinary in convincing a sitting president to resign. They're not gonna stick their necks out and do a second extraordinary thing and go through a contested convention (contested, remind yourself, among not the general public or even the general Democratic primary population, but among individuals selected by the party to cast a symbolic vote for Biden).
Kamala's skills ARE modest, but they're baseline. Sit down and watch her give a speech. You will experience one of two things: a sense of deep relief at how normal it is in comparison with the excruciation of watching Biden talk or even just move around, or boredom. People can holler DEI (speaking as someone who wants Trump to lose, I encourage it) but from the perspective of most people who don't feel favorably towards Trump, even boredom is good enough.
And I have a feeling a lot of the things people disliked about Harris, a lot of the unfavorable ratings and negative feelings developed when she was last in the spotlight in 2020, are gonna start looking pretty trivial to a lot of the people who hold them when revisited in the cold light of 2024
Harris is not a good speaker by any stretch of the imagination. She regularly produces word salads and frontier gibberish. She ends up proclaiming things that are either profoundly stupid or meaningless or indecipherable. There's a good reason she was completely unelectable in the 2020 primaries. Any claims to the contrary at this point are cope. The only silver lining for Harris is that she is being compared to Trump, who speaks in high-schooler-stream-of-consciousness.
Further, she is in a catch-22 spot regarding the Biden policies. Either she had nothing to do with them and was largely a figurehead (which most VPs are), but that makes it seem like her term was useless. Or she was a big part of the admin, but then she has to own all of the unpopular things like the border and woke DEI policies (especially cutting for Harris).
I think it's generally understood by adults at this point that VP terms are useless, no? The VP is an understudy, there in case the president drops dead or goes under the knife.
> The only silver lining for Harris is that she is being compared to Trump, who speaks in high-schooler-stream-of-consciousness.
And Biden, who was barely even intelligible half the time towards the end there. That's my point! She's average at best but Trump vs. Biden lowered the bar so low that "average at best" will be received as a cool summer breeze.
> Or she was a big part of the admin, but then she has to own all of the unpopular things like the border and woke DEI policies (especially cutting for Harris).
I think everybody who considers the border a priority (a smaller number than many assume, I suspect) is already locked in for Trump, and that every time the Republicans start using acronyms they narrow their appeal--that stuff didn't deliver in the midterms, and it only comes across as more stale now. I could be wrong, of course! But at a minimum, I'm confident there's a chance, and in my judgment and that of most of the people I know, that's a vast improvement over what we had before.
I'm probably overestimating the degree to which the median voter thinks through the implications of their beliefs and/or underestimating how idiosyncratic they can be, but absent that I'd expect anyone misogynistic enough to hold Harris's gender against her also was apt to doubt Biden could make it through a full term, and therefore was already against the ticket.
What do you consider "qualified"? She was the Attorney General of California, a Senator and the Vice President. On paper that makes her about as qualified as the last several Presidents when they ran, if not more:
Trump - no prior experience in government (obviously he has some now, the reader can judge whether that is in his favor)
Obama - state legislator, US Senator
Bush - Governor of Texas, military service
Clinton - Attorney General of Arkansas, Governor of Arkansas
The last President to have more varied past experience was probably George H. W. Bush.
I think, if they were all boring nerds like me, they'd unite behind Harris for the moment, and do a lot of polling regarding different pairings over the next few weeks. Maybe some friendly debates, they can say that they're "pro forma" or whatever, but something to give the options a test drive in friendly circumstances. Then they can all get together in a smoke-filed room before the convention, figure out who the candidates with the best chance will be, and rig the convention to approve them.
I don't do twitter, so what does "somebody who has pronouns in her Twitter bio" even mean? It's clearly a criticism of something, but I have no idea of what.
I feel like conservatives care way more about this "pronouns on X" thing than liberals do. I've seen plenty of conservatives complain about pronouns in bio but I've yet to see people on the left celebrate somebody putting pronouns in their bio, or condemning people who don't.
For those who write fiction: What's your inspirational process? Narrative down to scene, or the reverse?
I ask because I am cursed with the latter. I flash on a scene as if I'm the "camera" in a movie, except that in addition to being able to just look at the scene, I have a sense of the characters as if they're real people I know very well, and I'll also have a full sense of their individual emotional states and the relationship dynamic between them. Scenes themselves always have some kind of conflict between two characters (since that's what's dramatic enough to imagine in the first place); be it small, when they barely know one another, or climactic.
Notably, I always experience the tension / catharsis / general-drama of a scene *as if it was part of a coherent narrative*, even though it isn't, yet. I'll be driving my car, suddenly whisper a couple lines of dialogue to myself, and !!!BAM!!! full pathos for these characters, and a pathos several degrees more intense than what I feel as an audience experiencing someone else's story.
I say this is a curse because if I then want to write a big, coherent story that satisfyingly supports and *leads* to these great scenes happening...well, then what? I try to zoom out from the scene / dynamic / character to "see" the other events that very specifically got them there, and the bigger plot just feels vague and boring and maybe even unknowable compared to the extremely delicious intensity of thinking about and writing and polishing the particular scenes I was struck by.
This is very much the opposite of how the fiction-writing process is supposed to work: One is supposed to outline the narrative in its broadest terms, then break down the acts, scenes, and so on to develop a satisfying pattern of set up and pay off. Totally makes sense, except I've always wondered how writers who work this way could possibly "see" and know the characters in their stories well enough to know what they would do and how they react when things happen to them. I feel infinitely more like a spirit eavesdropping on and occasionally nudging these people than it feels like I'm the creator of their universe. Even extreme revisions (or entire rewrites!) of particular scenes feel far more like, "Oh, so THAT'S what really happened!" rather than making a correction.
I guess I'm looking either for commiseration, advice from people who recognize this process and have a hack to overcome its downsides, or out of pure random interest, what it feels like for those who work the opposite direction from theme down to sentence. What do you "see?"
I don't need to read Robert McKee's Story or Joseph Campbell's Hero with 1000 Faces or Stephen King's On Writing, etc - I get it! I know the beats that my story is suppose to have, I just can't seem to focus on or "see" what causes those beats.
But if anyone like me has been helped by an obscure title, I'd be interested to hear it!
> This is very much the opposite of how the fiction-writing process is supposed to work
While I am by no means a writer, I've read a modest amount about the writing process of different authors (fascination by The Other?), and there's a huge variety of techniques? Some do it the way you describe, but others write the first draft as they go, and then once it's complete, go back and revise. So maybe try stringing together a lot of scenes, holding in abeyance any worries about structure and beats, and then go back afterwards and tweak to introduce structure? Or from an alternate perspective, go back and see what the first draft's structure is telling you about the "actual theme" of the story? I've heard of authors realizing that a particular story was not, say, about an adventure, but about the development of an interpersonal relationship that happened during the adventure, which then affects how they write the next draft.
Also, apparently Miyazaki changed a single line in "The Wind Rises" late in production from "come" to "live", a change of (I think) a single vowel in a single word. (For context, the line was delivered by a ghost.)
If the sequence of events is completely unsuited, perhaps adjust the perspective or structure to be nonlinear? Check out Steven Brust's "The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars" for an extreme example. His "Dragon" is structurally simpler, with I think only three alternating chronological threads. Both are short and can be quick reads.
> "I've heard of authors realizing that a particular story was not, say, about an adventure, but about the development of an interpersonal relationship that happened during the adventure, which then affects how they write the next draft."
This is my issue exactly, but in reverse.
I have many, many scenes spanning my two protagonists' unpublishably problematic relationship. Their relationship is very much a complete narrative arc, with setups and pay offs, and I'm very satisfied *that* part - the part I really like - can be fully realized.
What I don't have is the obligatory stupid adventure "A" plot to use as an excuse to explore the relationship.
In my genre (urban fantasy / urban romantasy) there's always a murder or a police procedural or a heist or a P.I. gig or a war threatening or happening (and so on) and the protagonist(s) "job" is to go solve the mystery or try to prevent the war or fight in it or whatever.
Hell, even much-maligned YA-porn / actual-porn fantasy-romance authors like Stephanie Meyer and Sarah J Maas have their characters spend most of their page count "adventuring," rather than in the parts the books are arguably much more famous for.
It's the obligatory "9 to 5" part of the story that I can't seem to "see" (or be inspired to invent).
This is probably a horrible idea, but maybe you could "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead" it? Have a third, minor character who's occasionally seen doing adventuring work on some plot that's never fully explained, maybe even borrowed from some classic bit of literature?
I've done sword-and-sorcerery LARPs before, and often there were a group of PCs who would end up doing this. They'd (sometimes we'd) be tagging along after the people who were obsessed with the current plot, but mostly wrapped up in whatever drama we were having with ourselves. Suddenly orcs attack! So we help fight them off, and the process of fighting them becomes more fodder for drama. Oh, look, there's some old lady up there with a glowy staff talking to some people? Eh, we'll find out what she said later, but might not ever get around to it. Wait, why are we on a boat again?
I don't know nuthin' 'bout no beats, Miz Christina, but I generally do have the "scene" thing happen: these characters in this situation doing this and saying that. Then I have to try and fit all that together.
The times I do get a story from start to finish are when I have a narrative in place first where I know the general route the story will take and what I want to happen. But mostly I get "X and Y in Z doing A" and that gets written, and then that might be all that I can squeeze out of it.
I love reading about your experience of writing. The vividness of the scene you describe is really striking!
Personally, I start with the narrative, but I'm not sure that's a better process. A great story obviously needs both a great plot and great scenes, so starting with a great scene seems great. The dilemma you describe seems a bit like the old architect/gardener division of writers, with both approaches being used by great writers.
Anecdotally, Twilight famously came from a vivid scene in the author's dream; given the books' huge success but questionable quality, I don't know if that's comforting! In a similar vein, I seem to recall that the fourth season of West World was built around a visually stunning climactic scene, not the other way around.
> The dilemma you describe seems a bit like the old architect/gardener division of writers, with both approaches being used by great writers.
This is either a concept I somehow managed not to come across before or one I have forgotten. Thanks for writing about it! It's extremely useful to have a label to assign myself when discussing the process.
> Twilight famously came from a vivid scene in the author's dream; given the books' huge success but questionable quality...
The movies don't capture this at all, but: I actually think the quality of the Twilight books are vastly underrated, especially compared to the vampire genre in general. Quite a bit of Meyer's prose craft is (successfully) deliberately funny, and she is one of the best authors out there at describing traumatic injury in the first person. I've read many, many vampire novels and she's my #1 for Best Human-to-Vampire Transition Scene.
But more importantly, she (perhaps inadvertently, but possibly not) delightfully subverted the genre by *constantly* driving the story towards traditional tragic vampire tropes and then just...
[Imagine me pitching my voice enthusiastically high and throwing my arms in the air]
...having everything work out great!
Like, I can't tell you how FUN that is! Every time I, an experienced fan of vampire lit, braced for the "inevitable" horror - of the protagonist's guilt at their first kill, beloved characters dying in a vampire war, characters dying in a supernatural species war, love thwarted by destiny, vampire accidentally traumatizing their human lover, even the taboo vampire child - *it just works out great!*
I mean, not only does *literally no one important die*, no one important is even *unhappy* by the end of the series.
It just all...
works out...
...great!
It's like the Sideshow-Bob-stepping-on-a-rake joke of vampire lit. The happy resolutions and total lack of vampire tragedy are *relentless.*
Now, does Meyer have a few lines of over-the-top, overly sentimental dialogue? Sure. Are there a few deeply weird moral intuitions in her books which are clearly informed by her Mormonism? Yes, but Orson Scott Card's are no different and arguably more distracting in hard sci-fi.
Ahem.
Thank you for attending my TEDTalk on Why Stephanie Meyer Doesn't Suck, Necessarily!
Luminosity is basically the supernatural vampire fights that Twilight constantly teased without all the "watch Bella attempt suicide repeatedly due to True Wuv" that it actually gave us. I highly recommend it - though the ending is a bit lame.
Another famous example outside YA is Georges R Martin, who named the gardener/architect types of writers, and who imagined the immense story that is Game of Thrones from the scene of a young boy going with his father to a beheading.
A sign that he was not suited to write a series of novels. Along with his quote from Dreamsongs about his short story era that "My career is littered with the corpses of dead series."
What's the cutoff for "writes fiction"? I've managed to pull off a couple of unpublished four-page stories I'm mostly happy with.
Anyway, commiseration. Very much the same kind of thing, get a scene stuck in my head and try to build around it. My suggestion is to just push past the edges of it. Take whatever scene you've got in your head, and refuse to let it end; just keep following events afterward. Likewise, push past the beginning, and concentrate on what happened right before. You get a framework by having a thing to frame, and then putting stuff around it.
It's only sometimes fun; my most recent attempt was just a short card game, and it took nine days and I had to restart it three or four times to get a beginning that sort of led to the scene proper. But, like; just keep writing whatever, worst case scenario you throw it out and end up with the same progress you'd have if you hadn't tried
I think I mentioned my alliteration trick here; if you want to practice writing, just make up an alliterative sentence, and write a story based off it. "Hughie's Howitzer howled hideously as his heart heaved heavenward." ...I mean that one's probably not going to be a GREAT story, but you've got a "horrors of war" kind of framework to work out from.
In my particular case (not for anyone else, but just what I like and do), novel or series-length fiction. I finished my first novel (although probably it was more novella-length, and I'm sure hilariously awful) at 12 years old and completed a couple more here and there through high school and college.
Many novelists have a lot of difficulty with short stories, but I can blast out a single-scene short story with relative ease *because* it's the kind of stuff I like writing as part of a novel.
> My suggestion is to just push past the edges of it. Take whatever scene you've got in your head, and refuse to let it end; just keep following events afterward. Likewise, push past the beginning, and concentrate on what happened right before. You get a framework by having a thing to frame, and then putting stuff around it.
This, like most actually useful advice, is deceptively simple while being obviously the only correct option. And it's fucking *hard.*
But!
I consciously took it as I was reviewing a scene before bed. It felt like the main narrative beat of my characters' conversation had resolved, but, like, the two of them were still there in the room, so I sort of brute-forced another line of dialogue and promptly discovered a rather major hole I'd never noticed, so that was way more helpful than I was expecting.
It's very hard and as you say, not always fun, but I'm afraid it looks like there's indeed no hack to be had here.
Ignore anything I say because my track record for completing things is pretty much nonexistent.
But I tend to start with some kind of kernel - a cool setpiece, a funny punchline, a twist, a punchy exchange of dialogue, anything - then I throw several of those together and sort of grow out details from them until they all merge together into something.
Anything that isn't part of that initial visual exists to support it. I want a moment where a man throws a girl off a tower - so the heroine pops into the existence solely for the purpose of being pushed off the ledge. Later on I want a cool bit where a girl in a cage gets dangled from a hot air balloon. Well, I've already posited a heroine so let's reuse her here. Now I have some material to round her out with - she's getting pushed off castles and suspended in cages, so let's say she must be really bratty and annoying to have both those things happen "naturally" to her.
Hopefully as I go on she'll accumulate enough details to get rounded out and won't feel like a shallow plot device by the time I'm finished sticking qualities on her.
As I comb everything together, any time a new twist or theme comes up, I dance around backwards and forwards sticking in extra details, foreshadowing, etc so hopefully the whole story feels a lot more coherent than the process by which I wrote it.
I write pretty much entirely in bullet points and dialogue, so it's easy to go back and re-factor stuff quickly. I leave boring bits til later on the offchance that a future re-factor will eliminate them entirely. I shamelessly go where the fun is, and this complete lack of discipline is probably why I never get anywhere.
> I leave boring bits til later on the offchance that a future re-factor will eliminate them entirely. I shamelessly go where the fun is, and this complete lack of discipline is probably why I never get anywhere.
Oh, man, I couldn't (and didn't!) say it better, myself. As I said to @Moon Moth up-thread, my frustration is not being inspired / able to "see" the sort of 9-to-5 "gig" my characters are supposed to be doing as the "A-plot" between the scenes I love to write (which are absolutely part of a plot, too, but aren't "THE" plot, as traditionally defined by the genre).
And then I never really get anywhere in a way that would be more satisfyingly balanced for me and potentially readable for others.
I haven't read all the other responses so I'm probably repeating what someone else has already said, but: what happens if you jettison your A-plot, which you don't enjoy, and just stick all the scenes you do like to write next to each other? Then do the minimum supporting work needed to bridge it all together into coherence.
We've all heard the advice that if your characters need to get from A to B, you can just start the next scene with them getting off the train - you don't need to watch them while they sit there in the carriage for two hours.
Well if for you, the epic fight between hero and villain is as boring as sitting in the train carriage, because what you really enjoy is the subtle character study of two people sipping coffee together, or whatever, then just skip it and start the next scene with "Wow, wasn't that an exciting battle where Eric defeated Gunnhildr in that mountainside fight in that cataclysmic thunderstorm? Here's the coffee you wanted," and move on.
Your audience might well say, hey, wtf, why are you skipping past the cool stuff. And your response could just be, "Fuck you, I'm not that kind of writer and I don't want that kind of audience." If it bores you to write it'll probably bore them to read, so maybe better to appeal to the kind of people who like what you like in the first place.
I feel ya! I find vignettes so much more powerful in my imagination. Why force tourself into a traditional narrative? There are authors like Roberto Bolaño who have written great books that are very scene driven and very fun to read. It’s your voice, maybe experiment with a way to express it that is fun for you.
Alas, as I said to Moon Moth, my genre (urban fantasy / romantasy) basically *requires* a traditional "adventure" A-plot; a murder mystery or a P.I. gig or something-something war which the characters have to go "do" so their relationship can develop.
Even *I* can feel the imbalance in not having the "9-to-5" gig in the story.
I think I can partially relate to this problem. When I design my narratives, I also focus on these decisive scenes where there is real conflict. For me the best conflict is inside of the characters, when they have a difficult choice to make. And most of my plot follows from how to make this choice as difficult as possible, i.e. psychologically attaching the characters to both sides of the choice, and hinting at the conflict between those two sides straight from the beginning. Normally there are multiple main characters (each with their own choice to make), then ramping up the conflict between the choices, leading to the decisive scenes and then playing out the consequences until the resolution.
My motto is normally not to write anything that isn't fun to write. As I fill in the plot points from very rough to very detailed, I stop when I think this isn't really working and just leave it at a rough level. This mostly happens when I don't know the characters well enough, or when I am still confused about the central themes. Just letting the characters live in my head for a while, imagining them in different scenarios with their idiosyncrasies normally generates enough material to fill in those scenes later.
I don't know if this helps, feel free to ask, I have some more tricks to overcome writing obstacles! :)
It sounds like we might both be drawn to the same kind of internal conflict and psychological drama. My problem is that while that kind of thing occasionally appears in my genre (urban fantasy / dark romantasy), it's in vastly tiny proportion to the main "adventure" or "gig" A-plot where a character is, like, trying to figure out who murdered their neighbor or pull of a bank heist or whatever.
Like, if my prose and style recognizably resembles anything, it's J.D. Salinger's third-person fiction (Nine Stories, Franny, Zooey, and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters), wherein some of the characters' smallest gestures; how they mix a drink, when they break eye-contact, how they manipulate a conversation, is zoomed in because it is of deceptively great significance.
But also Salinger never attempted to write urban fantasy lit in this style.
Or he did, and that's why his later work is as unpublished as my current work!
I think I'm the complete opposite, and I don't think it's good. I've got about thirty plots in my mind, and all of them are vague outlines. And I haven't written anything because (or partly because) trying to actually get a single scene out of them that doesn't feel absurdly cliched and fake is incredibly difficult.
You'd think each of our problems would be the other's solution, but I'm not sure how that would work.
You know, at one point I actually researched if a professional dramaturg (or rather, the novelist's equivalent of one) might be an option for me, and I still haven't entirely discounted it. Although finding someone affordable with similar genre taste feels both daunting and possibly expensively pointless, as the main themes I'm interested in writing are unpublishably problematic.
Two weird takes on the fertility crisis. Almost certainly wrong as uni-explanations, but interesting to contemplate as factors:
1. Isn't it just Global Urbanization? Cities have historically NEVER had above-replacement fertility. Before the 20th century, that was mostly on excessive deaths from epidemics and bad sanitation in general. Today, it's a lack of kids - but the limitation is not novel. Kids require space (you don't want to be sharing your bedroom with them, they don't want to be sharing their room with siblings) and living space in cities is very expensive, to say nothing of babysitters, kindergartens and school district competition. Certainly a drag - and wouldn't you know it, we've just about crossed the threshold for 50+% global urban population share at the start of the millennium. (Which secondarily further economically depresses the countryside and makes having children there *also* less enticing.)
2. (even more speculative) Isn't it permanent psychological exposure to Much More Attractive Prospective Partners? This hypothesizes some subconscious psychological "module" which keeps a track of how hot the people "around you" are and tells you not to settle for anything considerably worse than the best available option. Only it was evolutionarily calibrated for groups of 150 hominids and we are now exposed to Anya Taylor-Joys and Jason Momoas on a daily basis. The brain doesn't care that it's pixels and ink dots, it still informs you that you *could be* doing much better than Tim from accounting / Susan from sales and this decreases the general average willingness to settle and start a family.
also because I miss my wife and no one will ever be as good as she. but even if it weren't for that, I have seen this issue crop up in essentially every relationship I have ever been close-enough-to...
...and this here amigo don't fuck with being a second-best option 🫥 u feel me cabrónes
Consider that the incentive structure around children has been flipped on its head in recent centuries. For most of settled civilization, the vast majority of the population was subsistence farmers. They needed labor to survive, not just for food harvesting but for producing all of their essential goods, especially textiles. When people got old and couldn't do as much physically demanding labor any more, children were their insurance policy. No kids to take care of you, and you starved to death. Of course they had to have lots of kids, because a significant number of them wouldn't survive infancy.
Today, these structures are reversed (for developed countries, which have the lowest fertility anyway). Infant mortality is infrequent, and children are no longer a net resource gain for the household. In fact, with the exploding costs of education, children are a big drain on household resources. Elderly people retire now, and rely on money saved from their own labor instead of their kids taking care of them.
This is a common argument but I don't think it makes sense. It suggests that people in advanced economies produce less than they used to. Kids might take more upfront investment assuming you buy into the notion that kids are super expensive - re cost of education, I don't think the type of kids who should be going to university need much financial support - but they'll certainly produce more economic value than kids in agrarian economies used to even if they work at, say, McDonald's.
If the incentive structure being flipped really is an important factor, the thing to look at is cultural attitudes regarding the obligations of children toward their parents and expectations that children form their own households at younger ages relative to the past. And there are still cultures today that expect children to give gifts to their parents on the regular, often in cash, even if their parents are wealthy (in which case they'll just be getting it back through gifts or in their inheritance). It's an important cultural gesture. Yet these cultures have also experienced cratering birthrates, sometimes even more than Western societies where insinuating that children have obligations to their parents is met with contempt.
> It suggests that people in advanced economies produce less than they used to.
I look at it completely differently, people today produce so much more that they don't need to rely on their children producing anything at all. Raising a child is a huge drain on resources, not necessarily just money but also the time and energy of the parents.
Your second paragraph is interesting, although I think the main factor is whether the society is productive enough that children go from a long-term investment to a net loss. You feed and shelter a kid for ~20 years, possibly pay quite a lot for education, then cast them out. Of course, I'm talking in economic terms, and obviously there is a lot more that goes into raising a family than economics. But it might be enough to explain birth rates being less than what they were.
I think that the alternatives to having kids have gotten better, especially in urban areas. People don't want to give up their free time as much as they used to since life without kids is not boring anymore.
I remember sharing a room with my parents and sister, though only for a year or so. All our beds were crammed into the room with no space for anything else.
From the perspective of a European genX who never had kids and neither did a good part of our cohort, my impression of the causes would be:
1. Individualism and the rejection of authority of elders, which mostly killed the idea that we owe anything to the world or to our own parents and ancestors, beyond the basics of taking care of our immediate surroundings and avoiding active harm.
2. Basic economic factors, such as rising standards of life, which means relatively increasing costs of meeting your own standards for how you would raise a kid.
3. Loss of faith in the future, with the twin spectres of environmental degradation and war (i.e post WW2 collective trauma).
4. More speculatively, a growing sense that the world is already crowded, so that anything cool someone would like to do has already been done and/or puts you in competition with thousands of others who would do the same.
Note that I'm not saying any of these things are necessarily *true*, just that they jointly pushed to change the psychological outlook.
The Works-in-Progress link was very informative. The Marginal-Revolution essay much less so, but Interesting all the same. I had been so focused on the Baby Boom, that I never considered the long-term (75+ year) Baby Bust that preceded it. Interesting that there doesn't seem to be any solidly convincing explanation for the subsequent Baby Boom. And since we don't really understand the causes of the Boom, there's no reason to assume there couldn't be a future Boom. Just sayin...
The WIP piece suggests a decline in maternal mortality explained (some of) the boom. Mortality continued to decline, but the processes that over the long term had been reducing fertility overcame that.
On number 2...I always find these descriptions of attraction and romance so ridiculously cynical it's hard to take them seriously. Now maybe I'm wrong and everyone really is calculatingly shallow like that. Maybe I am and I'm just deluding myself that I'm not. Maybe I'm not but I'm a weird exception. Maybe a lot of people aren't and a lot of people are, and the latter group is still large enough to make theories like yours useful.
But I feel like, in a world where most people would certainly *say* that they are marrying or hoping to marry the person they actually love, or who shares their values and personality in the most fundamental way, and who is hopefully reasonably nice to look at as well*...and *not* that they are methodically trying to get the hottest body they think they "have a decent shot at"...claims to the effect of the latter require a tad more justification than is usually (or ever) given in their support.
(*and even within the framework of physical looks, a cursory look at the world certainly suggests this is fairly subjective, to say the least, and these evolutionary theories always posit an objective ranking of some kind.)
I don't think you can believe yourself in this area. I loved my wife, but before I met her, if I'd just seen a picture, it would have seemed ridiculous to be attracted. But I was.
I don't think there is much intentional calculation going on at all. But, as a very simplified example, imagine that humans are naturally wired to fall in love with the (subjective to them) most attractive, otherwise compatible person "around". Now, that would mean something very different for an isolated nomad tribe, for a village in the hills or for someone with a smartphone in Manhattan. In NYC, your brain now knows there are 10X hot people "around" (you've seen them in Time Square) - but a normal person never meets them face to face. All they bump into are these clearly inferior, flawed specimens (themselves 10X compared to the malnourished, disease-ridden, illiterate standard of the medieval village in the hills; but that doesn't matter because the scale is always relative to your local present conditions.)
I believe it can be (and has been) reasonably proven that humans calibrate their sense of beauty and attraction by the standards of their era and location; What happens when, due to technology, the median image of attractiveness rises far above attainable reality?
The TFR of Lagos, one of the world's most populous cities, is apparently 3.4, so (1) seems like a weak explanation. But I don't even understand why we'd need any other explanation than improvements in contraception.
Yes, I'm not saying there's no effect from urbanization; I'm just saying it seems like a weak effect. Just compare those numbers to KR, where basically every province has a TFR around 1 or even lower.
Decrease by 2 children per mother doesn't seem like a *weak* effect to me. It clearly isn't the only thing going on (and interactions with the local culture will always introduce varying multipliers) but it does strike me as a persistent universal drag on fertility.
By eliminating high TFR nations, you're stacking the deck in favor of your pet argument. How about the ratio of rural TFR to urban TFR? I bet we see the the same pattern in high TFR countries vs low TFR countries — i.e. fertility seems to be inversely correlated to the productivity of the local economy. Which would explain why Nigeria, whose countryside is much poorer than its urban areas, has an overall TFR of 5.5 while Lagos is 3.4.
I am not eliminating them; My argument could be condensed to "Cities always have lower fertility rates than non-urban environments, ceteris paribus, and more people now live in cities than ever."
I do wonder whether that is actually extricable or differentiable from your productivity point, as I can't think of any peace-time, non-disaster example where the countryside would be more economically productive than a city, in a given polity. (I would almost argue it definitionally can't happen because the city would simply automatically depopulate to a point where the inequality holds again.)
I thought your argument was urban environments create "permanent psychological exposure to Much More Attractive Prospective Partners"—and that's why urban areas see lower population growth rates because of increased partner selection. I know some conservative commentators have claimed this.
Granted the marriage rate has dropped from ~9 per 1000 in 1900 to ~7 per 1000 in 2015 (with some huge peaks and troughs over the decades) — so, maybe this difference is made up of people who are happily living a single lifestyle with a variety of sexual partners to keep them satisfied. But the fact that fewer married couples seem to want children would tend to refute that hypothesis. After all, if you're married, presumably you've selected a satisfactory partner. The decline in fertility among married couples can't be explained by the partner selection hypothesis.
I don't think 1 is correct? Singapore has had the same trend as the rest of east Asia (very high fertility in the mkd 20th century, very low recently) despite not having the same kind of mass movement to cities (the city itself became more urbanized, but it didn't have people moving from the countryside into the city like Japan and China).
What's the problem? Doesn't Singapore's fertility dropping like a rock as it transformed itself through urbanization strongly support the idea that the cause *is* urbanization?
I don't think one non-central exception would invalidate the entire thesis. Singapore is very sui generis as a city and a nation. But just in general: Consider the transition from Malthusian (population levels kept in check by famine on the margins) to post-Malthusian (to a first approximation, nobody starves) conditions as a weird one-off. For a brief moment, population was going up Everywhere, as the previous bottleneck had been removed. Then all settled into a new equilibrium with Choice, Opportunities and Living space as the new limits.
Well, based on a VERY quick google search, she doesn't know how to smile. But if you ignore her expressions she looks quite good. Not even close to my ideal, but I'm not sure I believe my own ideal (as a conscious choice) matches my real ideal...which I suspect is based off my lover.
Lol ok fair enough I guess. I’m pretty straight but based off looks alone I think I’d have to go for Mamoa.
It feels ironic in the context of your point though because she’s exactly the type girl I could conceivably be attracted to if she were a local girl that was in my league with a great personality, but based off looks alone/“Hollywood attractiveness”, I’d never give her a second thought.
I feel like this kind of supports the original point; if you knew Anya Taylor-Joy personally, she'd probably be the most attractive woman you'd ever met.
> if you knew Anya Taylor-Joy personally, she'd probably be the most attractive woman you'd ever met.
I doubt that. The majority of images that turn up when simply searching for a celebrity's name are carefully prepared and enhanced promotional pictures. Don't believe them. This is not how these people look like when you meet them on the street.
If you look at paparazzi photos [1] of beautiful actresses taken on the beach, for example, then they're still attractive, but you'll find dozens of women that are at least as good looking as them on any large beach on a sunny summer day.
[1] Publishing those photos is unethical, in my opinion, and you shouldn't support this financially. But it's good evidence.
I would call that somewhat weak evidence - it's hard to take a good picture and easy to take a bad one (doubly true for candid shots). Actors definitely do put a ton of effort (or have people who put a ton of effort) into their looks on set, but it's still hard to look that good on film, and as I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, even the acting students I've known were an incredibly good-looking bunch.
No. The most PHYSICALLY attractive, possibly, but when you meet someone other factors rapidly come to dominate (except in very extreme cases). I've known a few (well, very few) extremely physically beautiful women, and none of them were even interesting, because of personality traits.
Yeah it kinda does in a backwards way, that’s why it’s ironic. OP is saying “how can ordinary girls stand a chance with the likes of ATJ running around” and I’m saying “how can the ATJ’s of the world stand a chance with all the beautiful girls you see in cities”
I think this is way more contextual than people generally realize. If you only see Anya Taylor-Joy onscreen, with other actors, it skews your perceptions a lot. If you actually just took a bunch of pictures of her and of whatever girls you've known in person that you thought were really attractive and shuffled through them until your sense of familiarity wore off, you might think differently.
My ex-wife was in a prestigious acting school in NYC and when I would go to parties with her and her fellow students, all carefully selected for both looks and talent, I would be struck by the sense that I was BY FAR the least attractive person there, and just do my best not to stare at all the beautiful people. It was like being in some fae court. Of course, you could probably find a more attractive, or at least comparatively attractive, group on a film set or a modeling shoot, but that's not something you tend to experience up close and personal.
2 makes sense if fertility decline is caused by absence of pair-bond formation and/or total absence of children; it doesn't get very far inasmuch as a major part of the decline is fewer (but non-zero) children per couple.
1. Cities have historically had above-replacement fertility in the 19th and 20th centuries, just not as high as rural areas.
2. Fertility has declined in France since the french revolution, a process of social contagion that spread to other countries 100 years later, way before pixels and Anya Taylor-Joy.
I think the French demographic transition began prior to the French revolution. It appears to have been linked to declining religiosity, which may have enabled said revolution.
I'm willing to accept the first point, although those conditions were an anomalous point of escape from the Malthus trap, food-wise. But the second is not what I would call a rigorous multi-faceted analysis.
I'm not making a rigorous multi-faceted analysis in substack comments but there are academic papers about what I said. Plus that fertility has declined long before sexy pixelated people is obvious to anyone with even the most basic knowledge of demographic history.
Ad 2: Unless you're suggesting that fertility declined before the advent of printing press in the 15th century, pictures of hottest people from a much larger demo pool have been around for longer.
Fertility declined first in the least religious french regions where the idea of deliberately limiting fertility first appeared during the french revolution, than through french culture it spread internally and externally. For example french-speaking regions in neighboring countries started the demographic transition sooner than the other regions.
Then it spread through translations. For example in Britain radical activists Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh created the Malthusian League and promoted contraception and translated books about birth control leading to a famous trial. Knowledge of contraception spread and social acceptance of it was a major proggessist cause leading to fertility declining in a global trend that has not yet ended.
The idea of deliberately limiting population is prehistoric. It's been found on isolated pacific islands, in tribes in Africa, etc. The French created a particular mechanism for limiting population (French Letters...later the condom), in Africa girls used a leather apron (I wonder how that worked, but I accept that it did). I don't know about other places. For some reason this doesn't seem to be commonly reported on.
I do think the ability to choose childlessness as a viable social option plays a role, but contraception as such, in various forms, was known to humans since at least ancient Egypt.
Also, how does the lack of religiosity explain identical trends in China (never religious in the Western sense), India (non-believers under 1%) or Iran (a theocracy since 1979)?
It's not just a "white people" thing. Fertility does seem to be decreasing. Possibly (my guess) due to industrial pollution in the food chain. While it seems to be concentrated in urban areas, it's not JUST in urban areas. IIUC it's even true among hunter-gatherers, though to a lesser degree.
"What is a fertility crisis? Why would be it be a bad thing if the world population would go back to two billion and real estate would be cheaper and we would have more room to breathe?"
Others have already commented on the challenges of transitioning to a lower population, given existing economic and political models.
I'll add my own personal take -- people having fewer, and often zero, kids indicates, or perhaps even contributes to, a lack of optimism about and investment in the future. I worry it will become self-fulfilling.
Also, being a parent may not be for everyone, but it has been an integral part of the human experience for *nearly* everyone for the vast majority of human history. I can't help but feel that our culture will become impoverished as fewer and fewer people experience parenthood.
Yeah that sounds like a reasonable concern. Unlike the fear mongering of people who can't seem to conceive of a natural variable ever going down for a while.
So far, it's shaping up as an "Organized technological civilizations stop being able to maintain themselves, as their physical, systemic and intellectual infrastructure slowly crumbles, and are replaced by Bronze-age level chaos zones" kind of a crisis.
Considering that the US productivity-per-person has increased >5x in the past 75 years, it seems to me we could easily live at an early 1950s level of civilization with one-fifth population. Yes, I'm being somewhat facetious, because obviously there would be all sorts of catastrophic economic dislocations if four-fifths of our population suddenly got sucked up in the Rapture or died from a Super COVID. But overall we won't begin to see a decline in our population before 2125-2150 by some estimates. It seems like we could easily muddle through with fewer people, and it doesn't seem like a civilization-ending scenario to me.
US is probably the only developed country which isn't facing imminent major problems as a result, not least on account of its ability to attract and absorb immigration; Everyone else is various shades of effed.
Give me the links to the data you're referring to. Also how imminent, and how major?
For instance, Japan is supposed to lose half its population by 2100, and they're worried about the decline in GDP. Theoretically, that's supposed to impact the standard of living. But that will reduce their population to what the UK is now. Seems like Japan could have a perfectly comfortable smaller national GDP, but where the per capita wealth remains similar to today.
It seems like you've got your pet theory, but you don't want to consider the data that would falsify it (which seems very common on AC10 for some reason). I'm not sure we can take this discussion any further unless you give me some data to chew on
>Why would be it be a bad thing if the world population would go back to two billion and real estate would be cheaper and we would have more room to breathe?
It's not impossible that the whole modern world as it is could run at that level of population, but it's not certain either.
>Or is it just a not enough white people crisis?
It's a not enough smart people problem, and white people are actually not doing the worst (east asians are cratering, middle easterners not deeply embedded in Islam are not doing great either).
>Or retirement crisis?
This too, 2 billion peple with an average age of 25 is not the same as two billion people with an average age of 50.
The direction of movement hasn't yet changed from "up" to "down", and you're already predicting that once it shifts this one time it can never shift again?
In the long run evolution will let its opinion known, but before that point expect the collaspe of this era of politics; and given the number of poeple who seem to think "end of history" unironically happened, that will be quite the rude wake up call.
I’m going to be visiting SF in August, and would love to meet up with some rational-ish people (or anyone that reads ACX). Let me know if you’d like to get coffee! I’m available at gruffyddgozali@gmail.com
I was thinking about staying in a hotel in the Theater district, is this known as an alright location? Also, I’m from London so like walking everywhere, is this doable in SF or is the crime/homelessness situation too bad?
The Theater District is one of the last areas you want to stay in SF. That whole area from Civic Center to the Tenderloin are the bad parts of SF you see in the news. SOMA isn't great either. I lived in SF in a recent past couple years and would recommend staying in North Beach. It's a great part of town with a lot to offer in and of itself but is also in proximity to everything you'd want out of a visit to SF. It's extremely walkable with tons of good restaurants and cafes nearby, it's close to Chinatown, the ocean, and Telegraph Hill, among other things... Highly recommend!
The theatre area is directly adjacent to the more sus parts of town. For a more pleasant experience, I would recommend staying west of Van Ness Ave, or closer to Union Square or North Beach if east of Van Ness.
First, because I really don't want an exact repeat of 2016. Please, no. Not another election, and years after it, of never ending identity politics, of saying that the result can only be explained by misogyny, that it had nothing whatsoever to do with a horrifically incompetent administration and policies completely out of touch with the median voter and a partisan/media ecosystem that's more biased and dishonest by the day. No, nothing but misogyny. And racism, this time. Two kinds of it, anti-black and anti-Asian. We'll never hear the fucking end of it.*
Of course, this is all only if Harris is the nominee, but who else is it going to be?
Second, relatedly but distinct, whoever is the nominee is still going to lose, and I think very likely they'll lose worse than Biden would have: incumbency has a major advantage (see the Keys To The White House) and e.g. both Obama and Trump significantly beat their polls when running for reelection. The Democrats will not benefit from this.
But you know who else won't benefit? Democratic accountability. It will be much harder to say that Trump's win is squarely a result of Biden's terrible record, his weaknesses and inability to stand up to his party's extremists. We'll get all sorts of crap about how the election result actually says nothing whatsoever about the last four years' policies. No, it's *only* because of the chaos of switching candidates, which (we'll be told) was a tactical mistake and actually if Biden had been kept he would have won and he was never senile, that was just misinformation, and actually Trump has no mandate at all.
This harms most Democrats (they'll still lose) and harms most Republicans (the ones who want a bit more clarity and less alternative facts echo chambers) and harms most moderates. It benefits only said echo chamber ideologues.
And third, I'm so sick of rule by polls. Especially after all the recent evidence that polls are unreliable. Biden should have been booted, but he should have booted by a proper vote. Everyone should have had the chance to actually express a verdict on his presidency. Instead of there just being the assumption that obviously everyone *would* have expressed that judgement, and decisions being made on that basis. It's so fundamentally undemocratic.
(*Note those who are harmed most by this are young girls, and non-white children, who live in progressive environments and are told every day that the world hates them and that Harris only lost because of racism/misogyny and not for her incompetence, and that merit and individualism means nothing and that they are entitled to tokenism and AA and if they don't get that to despair, and never ever encoraged to aspire to actual equal judgements on their own merits. I can hardly think of a more toxic message).
I've heard a few media talking heads try to emphasize Harris' Asian half but I doubt anyone really thinks "Asian" or "Indian" when Harris is brought to mind.
"But you know who else won't benefit? Democratic accountability. It will be much harder to say that Trump's win is squarely a result of Biden's terrible record, his weaknesses and inability to stand up to his party's extremists. We'll get all sorts of crap about how the election result actually says nothing whatsoever about the last four years' policies. No, it's *only* because of the chaos of switching candidates, which (we'll be told) was a tactical mistake and actually if Biden had been kept he would have won and he was never senile, that was just misinformation, and actually Trump has no mandate at all."
... I don't think that's the world we're in anymore, not for either party. I mean, let me ask, when Trump lost in 2020, do you think the Republicans saw it as a repudiation of his policies? Or, for that matter, should they have?
Nobody votes on policy anymore. Not in the bigger world, and even not in spaces like this. The last open thread I tried to solicit some conversation about specific policy expectations of a 2nd Trump admin, and how that would contrast against a 2nd Biden term, and the only thing people could say is "well he won't be woke like Biden," without offering much of anything in the way of specifics.
Outside of a few salient issues - like abortion - nobody votes on policy anymore. It's all vibes.
>The last open thread I tried to solicit some conversation about specific policy expectations of a 2nd Trump admin, and how that would contrast against a 2nd Biden term, and the only thing people could say is "well he won't be woke like Biden," without offering much of anything in the way of specifics.
Have you tried asking the question in spaces with a different ratio of normies to people who are almost pathologically obsessed with culture war and specifically with wokeness in all of its innumerable and insidious forms?
I see your point, and yes there's a lot of muddled thinking, and even more importantly an inability to easily communicate one's thinking to others who don't share your premises (which doesn't mean your thinking isn't logical).
But I also wonder if you're equivocating a bit between two meanings of "vibes". This can mean:
(1) concrete opinions on actual policies (e.g. transgender mandates, immigration, executive appointments) that are largely ideological or cultural
(2) vague feelings about which candidate will push things in a certain ideological direction, without concrete policies to point to
1 seems pretty rational to me: if you don't like a certain culture or ideology (e.g. wokeness) ruling society, there are plenty of concrete things Trump did last time and will likely do again that will reduce that ideology's power (at least in particular places like schools and the government). People here have been quite clear about some of those.
As for 2, that also seems quite rational if those feelings are based in evidence like the kind of rhetoric the candidates use and the kind of demographics they associate with and represent. Ordinary voters can't be expected to know all the policy decisions presidents might make, *plus* correctly predict exactly how each candidate will make all of those decisions, *especially* when the candidates avoid making clear committments on those things. The whole point of representative democracy is that you vote for a representative who will make those decisions for you, and whose judgement you somewhat trust. So I don't see anything irrational about identifying the general princples (or vibes or you like) that one party has been using to make decisions, deciding that those principles have been very harmful (e.g. cancel culture, women's rights in sports etc, merit based hiring), and thus voting for the opposite party whose rhetoric (vibes?) strongly suggests they will use different principles in those decisions. You may disagree with the premises of that argument, but the argument has a perfectly valid structure.
I was mostly speaking on point (2). And you're right, as a baseline assumption that seems valid. But I still think it's not a great way for a thinking person to approach the question.
To start with a narrow point: sometimes vibes are lying. The clearest example of this would be Trump's farm tariffs. Introduced as a way to be 'tough' on China, they wound up backfiring, wrecking finances for many farms and forcing the government to subsidize them. And yet, the farming community remains as pro-Trump as ever, as best I can tell, because he's 'their kind of guy' and is going to be tough on the people who are hurting them. They simply don't believe he could be responsible for what happened with them.
You can also see this with labor. Comparing the two parties policies, there is no serious question which party is more pro-union. And yet a lot of rank-and-file union members are still pro-Trump, apparently in denial about the potential economic impact.
In both cases, this doesn't seem to be a case of "we know he's bad financially but we like him for other reasons," but rather "we can't believe he'd be bad for us financially because we like him so much."
People treat the Presidency as the Mascot-in-Chief. Having Your Guy in charge is a sign that your 'side' is Winning - despite whatever actual policies emerge. And it worries me. I think if you look at places like Venezuela or South Africa, you see places where people vote* their nation into ruin because the leaders really seem to say the right things and talk about the fighting the right enemies.
So when I see people ignoring the actual policies - some of which could be quite bad for us - likely to come from a Trump admin, and instead just assuming that he'll make the kinds of decisions they'd like because he seems like that kind of guy, I get the same uh, vibes as those poor nations.
*(Venezuelan elections are not perfectly free but Chavez/Maduro do enjoy a high degree of support anyway).
I'd love to see more people willing to split ticket vote. If you want to fight progressives in the schools, focus on the school board and your state's government. If you want to fight progressives in colleges, do so through your donations, where you send your kids, etc.
Of course, if you think that fighting progressives in the federal bureaucracy should be the top priority, then focus on the Presidency. That's a perfectly valid stance, to be clear! (Personally, I think the combination of a meritocratic bureaucracy and ruinous tariffs are worse than the inverse but that's a valid point of disagreement).
3. I entirely endorse split ticket voting. In 2020 it seemed obvious that the rational vote, for anyone upset about the corruption and extremism of both sides, was to vote for Biden and vote Republican in the Senate, thus restoring sanity to the government while stopping him doing any of the extreme undemocratic things being floated by his party, like packing the Supreme Court. I was and am amazed that so few (I think it was 2% or less) people did this, and half of Maine was the only place that combination won.
I think this shows two things. First, that most people vote party loyalty, and do not actually differentiate at all between candidates, races, different elections, incumbents and challengers and so on. This is basic political science and is the same in almost every country, though it's easy to forget in broader discussions and analysis.
Second, it shows that most people view the presidency as the only real race that matters (and don't even think about their other votes), and I think they're largely (not completely) right to do so. The reality is that the president has a ridiculous amount of concentrated power, and what makes it even worse is that it's often not clear how that power will manifest. It was obviously never supposed to be like this, but that's how it's become. And saying "the president doesn't really control this" is usually either wrong, or overlooks the many (subtle or not) ways that he or she can manipulate other parts or levels of the government and bring about huge and irreversible social shifts.
Imagine telling a religious conservative in 2008 who was reluctant to vote for Obama because they didn't want gay marriage and a decline of religious belief, that the president has no power over those things, the former is a state issue and unless red states vote by a clear majority for gay marriage it won't happen. Well Obama won, red states never voted on the issue, but it somehow happened anyway (and it wasn't even judicial apppointments changing the leaning of the Supreme Court, it was more of a cultural thing where the President's symbolic support pushed the Court to change course, and also caused popular opposition to basically collapse). Similarly there's been an enormous decline in religious belief and practice among the American population since Obama's election; you can say it was completely unrelated but I find that entirely implausible given the time correlation.
Imagine telling a libertarian in 2012 who was worried about rising political correctness and declining support for free speech that the president has no power to do anything in that direction. Somehow, Obama's reelection correlated with the almost immediate and massive rise of cancel culture--some of it directly traceable to him (e.g. the letters his Department of Education sent to colleges to suppress "hostile" speech) but most of it being a cultural shift that was bound up with the election outcome.
Imagine telling an anti-war progressive in 2000 that Bush wouldn't be able to start a war on his own, he'd need bipartisan Congressional support. Hey, somehow 9/11 gave him carte blanche to basically get support for whatever war he wanted, as long as he could tenuously claim a hypothetical link. Exactly what the anti-war people were worried about.
I think you get the point. Telling people the president has no power to affect a certain issue has a terrible track record. The president has enormous, often unpredictable power to reshape society and move the other levers of government. Split ticket voting is a good idea but 90% of the meaningful power (on pretty much every issue) is in your vote for president.
4. A slightly different extension of the above point about partisan loyalty. People speak as though "Trump voters" are a unified group of people, something like "blue collar rural whites who are convinced he's their guy". Obviously this is completely false. Look at the 2016 results: Trump got 46.1% (with particular concentrations in swing states), Clinton got 48.2%, Johnson got 3.3%.
Then compare to 2012. Romney got 47.2%, Obama got 51.1%. What drove Trump's win? It wasn't a huge group of farmers or workers switching parties for Trump. It was overwhelmingly the same people who voted for Romney, plus a small number of Rust Belt swing voters, minus a small number of moderate Republicans put off by Trump, *combined* with a group of younger men abondoning the Democrats for Johnson (put off either by Clinton's identity politics, her establishment persona, or her alleged corruption).
So rather than most of Trump's voters being "blue collar swing voters who personally love Trump" it's mostly a combination of consistent conservatives who believe the conservative agenda is better for them and society, and swing voters of different stripes who just want to vote against the Democrats. The first group aren't voting on vibes; they clearly believe in right wing policies, and you'd have to engage the merits of all the well known arguments for conservative policy to convince them. The second group are just refusing to vote D, and may vote for a third party who speaks to them, or otherwise for Trump as the default. That's also not vibes, that's rational rejection of one particular set of values, not positive embrace of a different set.
It's not clear how much the "he's our guy" voters contribute to Trump's actual vote total, even if they get a lot of attention. Even if those voters are purely emotional, that doesn't mean most of Trump's vote doesn't come from people making a rational decision, and that he doesn't have a justified mandate on that basis.
5. Finally, after all the above reasons why it may be valid to vote on vibes not policy, here are some actual concrete policy reasons to possibly vote for Trump:
-union members may want to avoid the party that actively promotes norms of firing people for their political views and/or demographic background
-union members may want to vote for the candidate that *hasn't* built active discrimination against white people (in admissions, in federal jobs, and across society) into its platform
-union members may want to vote for the candidate who is actively (and notoriously among the elites) opposed to those above things
-people in crime ridden areas may want to vote for the candidate and party who is pro-police rather than anti-police, and who supports higher rather than lower sentences for crimes
-people in drug infested areas may want to vote for the less drug-friendly candidate
-blue collar workers may want to vote for the anti-immigration candidate, both to have less competition for jobs and to have more stable and coherent communities with a shared language and culture (note that many of Trump's policies were blocked or slowed down by partisan obstruction from courts and cities, abd reversed by Biden, so there really wasn't enough actual implementation to judge their effectiveness)
-rural workers may want to vote for the less pro-lockdown candidate, given the lower risks of covid in the country and the greater harms of lockdowns on the livelihoods of manual workers
-rural workers may want to vote against the minimum wage party, since it generally seems to help urban workers and depress the rural job market
-more generally, rural workers may want to vote for the party less supportive of top-down federal decision making that takes less account of local and rural conditions
-I don't know enough economics to contest the general consensus that tarrifs don't work, but it's at least arguable thar they weren't fully in place for long enough to properly judge their long-term results
And I suspect there are a lot of other factors I've overlooked.
I really appreciate your approach here--very respectful and rational. I understand your argument, though I think there are about five distinct (but subtle) things wrong with it. But first, let me make a meta-point.
I think part of the reason for you not getting much engagement when asking for rational reasons to vote for Trump, even here, is the general bad faith that surrounds the issue. Something I've seen many, many times (especially during Trump's first term) is a discussion that looks something like this:
"A: Could someone explain to me what your reasons for supporting Trump are? How is he going to help you economically?
B: Well I'm not sure if he will, but there's a chance his tax and trade policies will be beneficial. Mainly, though, he's standing up to the cultural left who I think have done far more damage to society than any economic problems have.
A: Thank you for admitting you're just a bigot who's hiding behind economic anxiety to justify your hatred of brown and trans people. Exactly what I suspected."
When this happens enough times, most reasonable people get jaded and don't feel up to putting in the effort to give a detailed response when they may just get a one-line insult in return. The people who *do* reliably engage are the keyboard warriors looking for (or perfectly happy to have) a good fight. And so the quality of discourse is lower on this sort of issue even in a place like this.
This assumption of bad faith is not, to be clear, defensible. It's used just as much as an excuse by wokeists for not engaging criticism, and they too have a point. I've seen enough instances of someone "just asking questions" about say feminism in their first comment, phrased respectfully, and by their third comment they're saying "feminazi" and "matriarchy" and regurgitating whole lists of thoughtless redpill talking points. And so even the reasonable feminists are wary of someone just asking questions, without even getting to the unreasonable ones for whom it's a convenient excuse to shut down discussion.
Basically, it's all a horrible Prisoner's Dilemma where everyone's always defecting, expecting everyone else to defect, and telling their friends to expect everyone else to defect on a daily basis...and so when someone comes along suggesting maybe cooperating, they're going to be met with a lot of suspician.
With that in mind, all I can suggest is continuing to ask these questions, over and over, as respectfully as possible, and maybe promising at the start to hear people out and not judge them. To have the best chance of bringing out people who may have something to say but aren't sure it's worth it.
Okay, meta-point over.
I think your claim about vibes over policy being the way Trump voters think, and that being bad, has five different things it overlooks.
1. First let's just accept you're right and Trump really is all vibes, no sensible policies at all and will undoubtedly make things worse. The problem is that Biden/Harris looks the same. Yes, what people should be doing is voting for an intelligent candidate with a rational platform based in reality and compassion. But that option isn't on the ballot.
It might have been. The No Labels campaign to nominate a centrist ticket with more sanity and broad support was abandoned, and recently the chief strategist said it was the Democrats who largely sabotaged their attempt (https://thedispatch.com/newsletter/dispatch-politics/no-labels-chief-strategist-says-its-too-late-for-an-independent-presidential-alternative/). So what struggling working class voters are confronted with is two tickets that both have bad records for their lives, and are both notorious for putting ideology over facts in their governing approach (regarding covid, the border, and so on). Neither looks likely to make their lives materially better. But one of those tickets is (a) currently in power, during terrible times, (b) has a media system and academic system and activists that ooze contempt for them and their values, and (c) has been deliberately trying to remove their access to alternative options. While the other speaks with love for them, hasn't been in power for the worst of things, and has not tried to restrict their options.
Absent very clear reasons to the contrary, I think it makes sense to give more trust to the latter to have a chance (however small) of improving things, when forced to make this choice.
2. Making judgements based in policy and evidence is difficult when there's no remotely unbiased media to inform people of the actual facts. How are e.g. farmers supposed to *know* which set of policies will help them more, whether tarrifs are harmful or helpful, whether financial problems during the Trump presidency were his fault and/or whether current financial problems are Biden's fault?
That's what the media is supposed to be for. But right wing media is not going to honestly point out the problems with Trumpism, and mainstream media is now all left wing and wears its hatred for Trump on its sleeve, making it impossible to reliably trust what it reports. I find this very saddening, because the media has an important role in a free society, and until recently it was pretty clear that mainstream/left-leaning media were vastly more reliable than their right-leaning counterparts at getting facts right (and at maintaining a basic image of objectivity). But now that's been abandoned: the likes of NYT doesn't even pretend to be objective about any culture war issues (hell, they go out of their way to repudiate the possibility of giving a hearing to both sides of things like the trans debate) and they are more and more likely to lie or suppress information (e.g. lab leak in 2020) for openly partisan reasons.
This could all have been avoided if these outlets, and their audiences, had not decided to embrace/demand ideological comformity as a central part of their mission. And now because of that, nobody (especially those without a college education) knows what to believe of what they report, when they make it *very clear* that their priority is stopping Trump and they don't think factual accuracy should get in the way of that (see the outrage among the NYT's readership for their accurate reporting of Hillary's email scandal before the 2016 election, and see the paper's own response to the Tom Cotton op-ed in 2020 for how they'd learned their lesson about the importance of partisan conformity).
And finally, there's academia. In a different world, academia could have been the most reliable, the most non-partisan and non-political and disinterested source of accurate information and unbiased truth. Instead, it's literally *the* most ideologically biased institution in modern society. It's *actually* widely considered the *most dangerous* place to express dissent on political topics. Just, let that sink in, how screwed up that is. This just shows how sick our society has become, and while Trump's approach is negative and toxic, it's a symptom not a cause of the sickness. The sickness predates Trump by many decades, was getting worse and worse before he appeared, and to me it's eminently understandable why people might support a populist upheaval like Trump in *some attempt* to change things, dethrone the corrupt power structure of the status quo, and return to a society where elite informational institutions do not entirely exist to promote the interests of one particular political party and its agenda.
It may not work. But if you have a better way of doing that, I and I suspect many Trump supporters are all ears.
I don't believe Trump is capable of implementing a more meritocratic bureaucracy in the first place. To the extent that he does manage to change things, he'd just be selecting people on the basis of personal loyalty above all else.
But I suppose to be fair, you're talking about the hypothetical views of Trumpists, and I guess they probably think that any changes Trump would make are strict improvements, so it is a valid question *from their perspective*. Then again, they probably think that ruinous tariffs are awesome for the exact same reason.
Yeah, I agree - this very same logic would otherwise already apply to Trump, whose defeat by Biden only seemed to, in effect, increase party loyalty to him.
tfw when someone says "incumbency is an advantage" without realizing that 2024 has been an very anti-incumbent year for elections in every country
Every single election there is a new group of hacks who back-fills a bunch of variables to "explain" most of the prior elections. It works until it doesn't https://xkcd.com/1122/
You know what predicts most elections? The polls. Really good track record. They missed on 2016 but were within the standard polling error measurement.
>Biden would have: incumbency has a major advantage (see the Keys To The White House)
Obligatory mention that Lichtman screwed the pooch conclusively regarding the credibility of his model by predicting a Trump popular vote victory in 2016 (the model was always supposed to predict the popular vote - this was inbuilt to the whole book insofar as I remember) and then, when this didn't happen, accepting the accolades for "predicting a Trump victory" from the media and never acknowledging the disrepancy with what his actual model was supposed to do.
On 2: It seems like you are hoping a Biden loss to Trump would force Democrats the lesson you want them to learn - namely, that their policy preferences are wrong, Trump's are right, and he accordingly has a mandate and they should relent to it and/or change to be more conservative.
I'd offer you that that kind of lesson is extremely unlikely for *any* electorate to take away from *any* election. The human brain is an astoundingly effective "I'm not wrong" machine. The left would settle on explanations like "Biden lost because of senility," "Global anti-incumbent sentiment," or "he was too milquetoast moderate - we needed a candidate with harder left platform, an affirmative vision we were pushing *towards* instead of just being anti-Trump" long before they would settle on "I'm wrong and should be more conservative."
Much the same way the Obama years or the 2020 loss to Biden did little to left-ify the right. It can happen occasionally, but the only example I can think of is Clinton in 92, and that was after 12 years of presidential losses including the Reagan landslides.
I don't think this is quite right. The Republican Party was extremely evangelical in 2008 and to a lesser extent in 2004. After losing, they next nominated a Mormon. After losing again, they became even less religious, and anti-government libertarianism largely disappeared from their rhetoric (at least until covid).
The Democrats also somewhat reduced the identity politics after losing in 2016 by being willing to nominate a white man, something that was basically unthinkable in the previous election. Obama embraced a hawkish foreign policy in office after running against that had been a losing strategy in 2004. I agree the parties don't moderate on *everything* after losing once or twice, but they do moderate on some previously central issues and replace them with others (which latter issues some of us have more support for, and thus want them to so change).
The Republican Party managed to execute a huge ideological shift between 2008 and 2020. I doubt they would have done it under President McCain or President Romney.
Losing elections doesn't necessarily prompt soul-searching, but it does provide an opening for someone with a different vision that's more popular with the voters to come along and challenge the existing party. It was Trump for the GOP. For the Democrats it would probably be someone like a younger and slightly more moderate Bernie Sanders, with an emphasis back on the economic side rather than the identity politics side, and the concerns of the working class. But that person might not exist (or might have joined the Republicans instead).
I think the difference is that the Republicans were forced to because of their voters. Democrat voters, on the other hand, are still more liable to fall in line behind their elites largely because the chattering classes are mostly Democrats. Republican voters were much more eager/able to revolt because the Republican elites don't control the media, academia, et al.
Maybe, but Bernie got within reasonable spitting distance of the nomination despite being extreme, old, and not even a real Democrat.
He also had the disadvantage compared to Trump in 2016 that he only had one establishment opponent, whereas Trump's establishment opponents split their support several ways.
I kind of want Trump to win because of the insanity around PROJECT 2025 and if he does win, it will not be the end of the world as we know it.
But agreed, if Kamala loses, then it will be a repeat of Hillary's loss, only with added "and racism!" to go with "sexism! misogyny!" instead of "nobody likes her which is why they didn't vote for her".
Damn it, Democrats, run Willie Brown. An honest crook! If he likes you, then you're on the gravy train, and he keeps his promises about "be my arm candy and you'll go places, girl". This is old-fashioned Tammany Hall "honest graft":
"Allegations of political patronage followed Brown from the state legislature through his mayoralty. Former Los Angeles County GOP Assemblyman Paul Horcher, who voted in 1994 to keep Brown as Speaker, was reassigned to a position with a six-figure salary as head of San Francisco's solid waste management program. Brian Setencich was also appointed to a position by Brown. Both were hired as special assistants after losing their Assembly seats because they supported Brown. Former San Francisco Supervisor Bill Maher was also hired as a special assistant after campaigning for Brown in his first mayoral race. Brown is also accused of favoritism to Carolyn Carpeneti, a philanthropic fundraiser with whom he had a child. In 1998 Brown arranged for Carpeneti to obtain a rent-free office in the city-owned Bill Graham Civic Auditorium. Between then and 2003, a period that included the birth of their daughter, Carpeneti was paid an estimated $2.33 million by nonprofit groups and political committees, though not all this money went directly to Carpeneti.
Brown increased the city's special assistants payroll from $15.6 to $45.6 million between 1995 and 2001. Between April 29, and May 3, 2001, San Francisco Chronicle reporters Lance Williams and Chuck Finnie released a five-part story on Brown and his relations with city contractors, lobbyists, and city appointments and hires he had made during his mayoralty. The report concluded that there was an appearance of favoritism and conflicts of interest in the awarding of city contracts and development deals, a perception that large contracts had an undue influence on City Hall, and patronage with the hiring of campaign workers, contributors, legislative colleagues, and friends to government positions.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation investigated Brown when he was Speaker. One investigation was a sting operation concerning a fake fish company attempting to bribe Brown; he was not charged with a crime. The FBI further investigated Brown from 1998 to 2003 over his appointees at the Airport Commission for potential conflicts of interests. Brown friend, contributor, and former law client Charlie Walker was given a share of city contracts. Walker had previously thrown several parties for Brown and was among his biggest fundraisers. He had served jail time in 1984 for violating laws concerning minority contracting. The FBI investigated Walker. The FBI also investigated Brown's approval of expansion of Sutro Tower and SFO. Scott Company, with one prominent Brown backer, was accused of using a phony minority front company to secure an airport construction project. Robert Nurisso was sentenced to house arrest. During Brown's administration, there were two convictions of city officials tied to Brown. Brown reassigned Parking and Traffic chief Bill Maher to an airport job when his critics claimed Maher should have been fired. Brown also put his former girlfriend Wendy Linka on the city payroll.
Brown's romantic relationship with Alameda County deputy district attorney Kamala Harris preceded his appointment of Harris to two California state commissions in the early 1990s. The San Francisco Chronicle called the Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and the California Medical Assistance Commission patronage positions. When the appointments became a political issue in Harris's 2003 race for District Attorney, she responded: "Whether you agree or disagree with the system, I did the work". Brown's relationship with Harris gained renewed attention in early 2019 after she had become a U.S. senator and ran for president. Brown addressed the questions by publishing a piece in the San Francisco Chronicle titled "Sure, I dated Kamala Harris. So what?" He wrote that he may have "influenced" her career by appointing her to boards and supporting her run for District Attorney, but added that he had also influenced the careers of other politicians. Brown noted that the difference between Harris and other politicians he had helped was that "Harris is the only one who, after I helped her, sent word that I would be indicted if I 'so much as jaywalked' while she was D.A. That's politics for ya".
Okay, maybe he's 90 and that's a bit too old but at least with Brown you would know who is getting the plum jobs in the administration and why, instead of whatever shadowy handlers and unelected SPADs are running things for Biden up to know.
For a devout Catholic such as yourself, cheering on the guy whose policies mean disaster for the poor and sick seems a bit out of character, no?
Sure, you can counter with "Trump always lies, he won't actually do any of these things" but again, is that the kind of candidate a devout believer in Jesus Christ ought to support or "kind of want to win"?
I do like how those who haven't a bull's notion of being Christians themselves suddenly find deep wellsprings of piety within for questions like this 😀
I'd like to vote Democrat on pretty much many of the issues. Except their solution to "the poor and the sick" seems to be "kill them in the womb", hence all the rah-rahing for "reproductive rights".
Murder of the innocent is a whole freakin' lot deeper rooted in religion than 'which variety of economic policy that will benefit the deep-pocket donors do you want?' for me.
Correct me if I'm wrong, benighted atheist that I am, but in the Gospels Jesus spends a ton of time talking about how the rich should help the poor and sick, and exactly zero time about abortion.
Politically I'm not at all aligned with Deiseach here, but I do have to say I think this is a really bad argument, if for no other reason than that in Jesus's day the common solution to unwanted babies was to leave them out and let nature take care of it, a.k.a. "exposure". https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infant_exposure
I think it'd be hard to do a fair reading of the New Testament and think Jesus would be onboard with a strategy of post-birth abandonment/negligent infanticide.
Gosh, now I *never* heard that one before! Go on, tell me how Jesus never said X about culture war topic Y, hence that means He totally like approves of it and it's not a sin and you stupid redneck conservatives are not real, like, Christians, man.
drosophilist, I'm too hardened for these "but you live in a society! curious!" gotchas to work. I've heard The Shellfish Argument one too many times.
So you want to appeal to the words of Jesus in the Gospels? Does that mean you will accept "no divorce" and "Hell is real and sinners go there", too?
Jesus also says absolutely nothing about slavery, for instance, but somehow people think He would be against it.
You misunderstand me, or else I didn't express myself clearly. I'm not saying "Jesus would have been totes cool with abortion." I'm making a point about the RELATIVE IMPORTANCE and EMPHASIS on "abortion is a bad sin" vs. "I tell you the truth, whatever you have done to the least of my brothers and sisters, you have done to me."
Like, I genuinely don't get the mindset of a sincere, devout Catholic looking at Trump and saying, "Well, he's a twice-divorced adulterer who is greedy, petty, dishonest, and spiteful, and whose policies will screw over the poor and sick, but HE"S AGAINST ABORTION so obviously he's the man Jesus wants me to support! Because Jesus clearly says in the Gospels that abortion is the most important issue ever!"
I'm appealing to the words of Jesus because you yourself identify as a Catholic, not because I believe he was the Son of God, I already told you I'm an atheist. I have my own reasons for wanting to help the poor and sick, like the Golden Rule, which anyone can follow, religious beliefs or no.
And finally, of freaking course I don't believe in Hell; the idea of infinite torment/suffering for finite sins (anyone's sins must be finite, because any human being has only finite power and lifespan) strikes me as hideously immoral.
Democrat pundits always claim that the Republican's policies will hurt the poor. This may even be specifically to target religious Republican voters and convince them to not vote as they otherwise would. Plus, if I agreed with Yglesias's analysis, I would already be a Democrat. The standard Republican response is thus that he is both wrong and concern trolling.
How the religious appeal falls down for me is that the same bunch chanting "get your rosaries off our ovaries" and "separation of church and state" suddenly start interpreting "but didn't Jesus say?" in the most literal, Biblical-verse quoting, Evangelical Fundamentalist manner when it comes to "I don't believe any of this nonsense, but since you are dumb enough to do so, I'm going to appeal to your sky-fairy beliefs to gain advantage for my views, even though I wouldn't be caught dead following that Bronze Age bullshit myself".
Conservatives (not necessarily Republicans) don't want to hurt the poor, but want to allow the opportunity for success. That doesn't guarantee success, but the idea is that if you work hard for something good you will succeed.
Liberals (not necessarily Democrats) want specifically to help the poor, because they are downtrodden, and compassion compels them. But it more like giving them fish than teaching to fish that conservatives object to.
Re incumbency advantage - it's generally been shown to be very weak (possibly even negative) these days, especially in high profile races where both candidates are well known. I doubt Biden would have had any. The keys to the white house model in general is also pretty discredited.
Re "everyone will talk more about racism and misogyny" - yeah, this seems real and pretty bad. If the Harris campaign is smart they'll downplay those elements to try to show her as a moderate, but, well, that's a big if.
Re "now people will blame the shift instead of Biden's record" - I don't know, I think if Biden had stayed they'd just blame his age (also, he's (wrongly) perceived as representing the moderate end of the party, so it might have paradoxically given the left fringe more power).
There's no singular "they" here. There's a cluster of journalists and Wikipedia editors who would do that. There's also, increasingly, both left and center-left clusters who're tired of identity politics and would try to avoid that whole kerfuffle. And of course there's various shades of right wing media that's just looking for any criticism they can find, much of which will probably deliberately look for stuff that will provoke identity politics responses because they know how exhausting it is.
>There's also, increasingly, both left and center-left clusters who're tired of identity politics and would try to avoid that whole kerfuffle.
Does it matter when all the messengers can't help themselves? The vast majority of the news bits I've watched about Harris (to my shame, a lot) has talked about how groundbreaking it is that she'd be the first female African American president or the first female African American presidential nominee of one of the parties. I suspect we'll be getting a lot more of it if/when she's formally nominated.
EDIT: Forgot the Asian part. Yea I get it already, she's half Asian/Indian.
Biden dropping out is the best thing that could have happened to democracy. It means someone in the Democratic Party cares more about the country's well-being than their party's political power or brand recognition. It means we get an election with two candidates, not just two letters.
>It will be much harder to say that Trump's win is squarely a result of Biden's terrible record,<
Which is a good thing because that claim isn't true; Biden has dementia, his record no longer matters. He would lose because he's no longer capable of doing what he was doing.
We'll see what the news does, or if anyone's still listening to them.
> Biden dropping out is the best thing that could have happened to democracy.
Maybe if it happened a year ago, this short notice, political insiders probaly set the stage have a handful of public fights to enage in and removed real outsiders from the field
>horrifically incompetent administration and policies completely out of touch with the median voter
I think perhaps it might be your own partisanship that is coloring your views. Neither of these claims would seem to be backed by evidence. Polls show support for most administration policies, and the administration got passed substantial legislation and seems to have been perfectly competent, at the least, re foreign policy.
Honestly, although I could probably think of other examples, I was mostly just thinking of Afghanistan. On my mental list of things Biden screwed up, that takes up at least five slots, and I think it should.
I'd suggest the trans stuff (which goes further and further beyond imagination by the year, and has just flat-out declared war on reality and reason) and some of the border stuff, would count for the median voter claim.
As for partisanship, I did (and do) make exactly the same claims about Trump's first term.
So here's a contrarian's take: the Afghanistan pull-out, horrible as it was, was the single best thing Biden has done, and in fact this is the only presidential action I truly respect going back to 20th century:
It was an old festering wound, set up by Bush, and cowardly not dealt with by Obama (I fucking voted for the fucker to do this one thing, get out of all the stupid wars, and he did a "surge" instead. pardon my language). It had to be drained, and it was going to be ugly no matter who the surgeon was.
Once it was clear it was getting messy, and Biden was taking a public hit for it... he just kept doing what he knew was the right thing to do. No, we're not going to stop. No, we're not delaying. No, we're not leaving a "small contingent". No, leave means leave. Now. He did take a huge popularity hit, and never quire recovered from this. But we're out of that godforsaken place now.
That's real courage. Doing the right thing, no matter how messy and unpopular, because you know it has to be done, and there's no more any way to do it any better, because the three (!) Presidents before you messed it up so badly it was irredeemable.
> and cowardly not dealt with by Obama (I fucking voted for the fucker to do this one thing, get out of all the stupid wars
As a candidate Obama was very clear that the Afghanistan war was right and just. Maybe you *felt* he said we should get out of Afghanistan, but that was based on nothing he said or did.
What were the screwups in Afghanistan? I would say the main problems were the rushed departure, the military humiliation, the takeover by the Taliban, and the abandonment of most Afghanis who had worked for us.
But Trump wanted an even earlier withdrawal, we were never going to win militarily given how we had conducted the war to date, the Taliban were the only plausible successor government (again, given how...), and I have a hard time believing Trump would have taken better care of Afghanis.
I blame the Biden Administration for the logistical snafus, but the four big problems I listed are on Bush, Obama, and Trump.
Regarding it being actually Trump's fault: I blame Biden personally for three reasons:
1. He's the one who actually did it. Trump may conceivably have backpeddaled, I don't think it's likely, but I think it's absolutely fair to blame the party that actually won the election and actually carried it out.
2. One of the central things Biden ran on was that he would listen to and respect the experts. Then one of the first things he did was overrule his top generals and withdraw (with exactly the results they warned of). I can't forgive him and his administration for that.
3. He reversed many of Trump's foriegn policies immediately on taking office. By conspicuously keeping the Afghganistan one, he made it entirely his own.
I perceive #3 exactly the opposite as you, by distinguishing between policies and things international agreements: Trump reneged on agreements made by previous administrations; Biden kept them. The international community agrees with me on that point, viewing Trump as chaotic and Biden as reliable.
First, if Presidents simply deferred to "top generals" re Afghanistan, we would be there in perpetuity. If for no other reason than that the military has a "can do" bias.
Second, there are experts other than "top generals." A competent President consults a range of experts.
Third, Biden himself had 45 years of foreign policy experience. Not to mention experience dealing with the aforementioned bias of top generals (which was widely reported on when he was VP and warned Obama about precisely that).
> First, if Presidents simply deferred to "top generals" re Afghanistan, we would be there in perpetuity.
Exactly. It's obvious that there was never going to be any *good* time to withdraw from Afghanistan. Biden deserves a lot of credit for being willing to take the reputational hit anyway to end the war after three presidents before him failed to do so.
Kind of inevitable, given the rapidity of the capitulation of the forces supposedly loyal to the government
>the military humiliation
I honestly don't understand this take (it is a common one, so this is not meant to be a criticism of you personally). The anti-Taliban war by the Northern Alliance is going nowhere until the US sends a handful of troops; the Taliban are then ousted almost immediately. The US military then suffers fewer than 2500 deaths (only 2000 of which were due to hostile action) while keeping the Taliban out of power for twenty years. Then, the US ceases combat, and the Taliban takes over within a couple of months. That is supposed to be a black mark against the military? And, not just a black mark, but a "humiliation "?
The version I heard was that the government military collapsed at least in part because what they were doing was dependent on air support, and that went away when the Americans left. It wasn't just a lack of morale.
That doesn't make any sense, it's not like the Taliban has air superiority because the Americans pulled out. If the entire Afghan military collapsed because they didn't know how to fight without air support (against an enemy that doesn't have an air force), the people in charge were horrendously incompetent. Which lines up pretty well with everything else I've seen, honestly.
I agree with you, to a point. To the extent that the objective after ousting the Taliban from power was to establish an autonomous, democratic, and allied government, the military failed utterly. However, that objective was impossible to achieve. So I don't blame the military for doing a poor job. I blame the military leaders for arguing that the mission was within their capabilities.
Asserting that we had won would have been foolish. And if the Taliban resurged that quickly, it must have been the popular government. That I think it's atrocious is a separate matter. (And given the US tendency to support unpopular governments, I find it easy to believe.)
>On my mental list of things Biden screwed up, that takes up at least five slots, and I think it should
And I could make a similar list for every President. You made a claim of "horrific[] incompeten[ce]." That is a very extreme claim. To honestly support that claim requires 1) considering both positives and negatives; and 2) comparing them to the norm.
But, more importantly, once again, a claim that the Administration is "completely out of touch with the median voter" needs evidence re more than just a couple of policies.
To be clear, by horrific incompetence my emphasis was on "incompetence, with horrific results", NOT "incompetence to an extreme level". The harms done to innocent people by the botched Afghanistan withdrawal can be imo fairly called horrific. As can the Ukraine war which can well be argued to have been influenced by the projection of weakness in Afghanistan, though anyone who doesn't agree probably won't be convinced.
On the other hand, I'll concede that "completely" was unjustified hyperbole. I was trying to get at a general sense that both parties (in their rhetoric, policy and general ideology) are *far* out of touch with what a government aiming to represent real popular opinion would look like. But I can see that justifying that with reference to individual policies alone (as opposed to all the policies and rhetoric taken collectively) is a lot more difficult, so I'll amend my claim to "out of touch with the median voter". I think I can easily find polls to support that for trans and border policies, at the very least, if you want me to.
>The harms done to innocent people by the botched Afghanistan withdrawal
So, what alternate policy should have been pursued, and how many lives would have been lost because of that policy?
>the projection of weakness in Afghanistan
Yes, I am sure that Russia said to themselves, "the US kept the Taliban out of power for 20 years while suffering only 2000 combat fatalities. They sure are weak!" And, of course, we all remember when the USSR's withdrawal from Afghanistan prompted NATO to invade Ukraine. People have been making this "projecting weakness" argument forever. But is there any evidence for it?
>I think I can easily find polls to support that for trans and border policies, at the very least, if you want me to.
You haven't even mentioned what I think is the biggest issue for most people, which is the cost of living.
I think Biden made the same mistake on inflation as Trump did on Covid - he tried to downplay it which communicated "I don't think your problems are important". Governments can survive and even profit from crises, but they need to be seen as trying to fix the problem.
In the sense that everything in economics is arguable, sure. But most economic theories would agree that if the government pours a sufficiently large amount of deficit spending into the economy you're going to get inflation. This is doubly true if at the same time you're constraining real production capability.
In other words, covid and the response to it was about as custom-built an inflation engine as you could devise. And to defend Biden somewhat here, not only is the responsibility for those actions shared with Trump and the various state governments, but it's also the case that erring in the other direction to avoid the risk of so much inflation would also likely have resulted in high and prolonged unemployment, as occurred following the global financial crisis.
So I think the choice to accept some inflation to reduce unemployment in this scenario was a perfectly sensible one. They over-egged it a bit but it's really hard to fine-tune these things precisely in the middle of a once-in-a-generation global crisis. And Biden's team was correct when they said that inflation was transitory and would subside on its own.
But they mucked up the politics of it completely. The "transitory" argument didn't make people feel like everything was under control, it made them feel like the government was telling them they were overreacting.
In the same way Operation Warpspeed was a really good policy response to the pandemic, but Trump got minimal credit because he was going around trying to talk people into thinking covid was no big deal.
50% because of inflation - the worldwide phenomenon that basically every populace blames their own leaders for. It's why right-leaning governments have fallen in Australia & the UK, and why left-leaning governments have fallen in New Zealand and elsewhere. How much the President controls inflation is obviously a contested topic, but the general view of economists is that it is a worldwide phenomenon with multiple complex causes.
40% because of increasing polarity and the salience of Thermostatic Public Opinion. People usually get suspicious of whoever they just elected. Trump was historically unpopular during his first term, too. It's just the way the world works now.
If you think that there is much relationship between Presidential favorability and Presidential policies, I would encourage you to review the literature on that issue. The relationship is tenous, at best; most people don't even know what the policies are; and the causal relationship, to the extent there is one, tends to be in the opposite direction.
> Look, the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion are the core strength of America. That’s why I’m proud to have the most diverse administration in history to tap into the full talents of our country. I promised you, when I was president, I would have an administration that looked like America. We have more Afrin- A- — African Americans; we have more women; we have more minorities in our administration than any other administration in all of history. That’s why we’re doing so damn well. (Applause.)
Biden is telling you he picked his administration because they were women, and because they were minorities, and that DEI hires are a great thing. It isn't a conservative line.
"People are already making misogynist and racist attacks on Harris with the “DEI candidate” line though."
Just echoing the others' points that when Biden *explicitly* promised to nominate a black woman, that was *literally* what she was. I don't know how anyone can possibly deny this.
>Blame the conservatives making those attacks for identity politics.
I'm going to blame the side that fights for affirmative action. Of course I'm going to think that any diverse person is benefitting from their background when they made it in a system that explicitly gives them points for their skin colour.
"1) People are already making misogynist and racist attacks on Harris with the “DEI candidate” line though. That’s not her fault. Blame the conservatives making those attacks for identity politics."
When she ran in 2020 for the nomination, she couldn't make it and dropped out, claiming a "lack of funds" was the reason. Now she's getting nominated mainly, it seems, for being Biden's VP. Oh, and let's not forget that during the primaries in 2020, she was all up for "Joe Biden is a racist":
"On June 26 and 27, the first debate of the primary season was held at the Arsht Center in Miami, FL, hosted by NBC and MSNBC. It was split into two parts, with 10 candidates debating on June 26 and 10 other candidates debating on June 27; a random drawing placed Harris in the latter group of candidates. ... Later, she criticized Joe Biden for his comments regarding his past work with segregationist Senators and his past opposition to busing. Her widely quoted comment was:
There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day. That little girl was me!"
How did she get to be VP? Well, unhappily, whatever the reason behind it, it does *look* like DEI hire, given all the talk about "Biden will pick a black woman":
"Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden committed Sunday to picking a woman for his vice president if he were to win the party’s nomination.
Speaking during a CNN-hosted primary debate with fellow candidate Bernie Sanders, Biden said: “There are a number of women who would be qualified to be president,” and that he would choose a woman as his running mate.
Biden also said that he would try to make his Cabinet reflect the demographics of the country and would choose a black woman to serve on the Supreme Court if a vacancy were to open during his presidency."
This also affects Ketanji Jackson Brown, who at least seems to be impressing people as a judge after concerns about her ability. The unfortunate part there is the perception that "Harris was picked because she had the right chromosomes" and not because of her ability.
Also, I had forgotten her Jussie Smollett grandstanding, but I do think it was rather opportunistic of her and Corey Booker to do the "for the first time ever we will make lynching a crime" bit.
"Harris came under criticism when, in February 2019, she immediately believed the Jussie Smollett hate crime hoax while the affair had already been strongly questioned by the Chicago Police Department. She called it a "modern-day lynching" and used it to push for the adoption of a law co-sponsored by her. The incident later turned out to be staged, and Harris had to walk back her comments. The Daily Beast asserted this was representative of her supposed "habit of making flip comments, and tending to latch on to narratives that confirm her preferred political worldview".
>>How did she get to be VP? Well, unhappily, whatever the reason behind it, it does *look* like DEI hire, given all the talk about "Biden will pick a black woman"
Historically speaking, isn't the VP pretty much *always* a "DEI hire?"
Nobody picks their VP by selecting the "most qualified" candidate. They balance the ticket because they need 'someone to shore up the midwest' or somesuch form of regional/ideological/ethnic balancing. Obama picked Biden to get a white dude with establishment connections so his candidacy seemed less revolutionary. Trump picked Pence for essentially the same reasons, minus the white part since he had that covered already and didn't have an ethnically diverse base to deal with. Nobody worried whether those picks were yielding unqualified candidates by filtering on 'most qualified older white man with establishment connections' rather than working solely from 'most qualified.'
I am slightly hornswoggled how "picking a straight white cis guy" is now "Diversity! Equality! Inclusion!" instead of "check your privilege and unpack your invisible knapsack".
I mean, it makes more sense than the alternative assertion that it's somehow normal, unobjectionable politics and should pass without comment for campaign A to prefer a Christian White guy from the midwest for VP because of how his identity balances their ticket, but an act of absurd DEI nonsense that we should all roundly mock if campaign B prefers a black woman because of how her identity balances theirs.
It passes without comment because it was how it was always done. The fact that picking a black woman is a Big Freakin' Deal is part of that, but it's tied in with DEI now and not simply "I'm picking Sally because she's the best". You know, I know, Sally knows she got picked because "We need a black woman for optics" and Sally was available.
To some extent yeah, it just depends how much you narrow your pool.
Kennedy wanted a southerner, and he had loads of southerners to choose from.
Obama wanted an old white guy, and he had loads of old white guys to choose from.
But McCain wanted a woman, and when you filtered down to the number of Republican women available in sufficiently senior roles in 2008 there weren't many, so he wound up choosing Palin, who was terrible.
Biden wanted not only a woman, but a woman "of color", and he chose the only one available, and she's terrible too.
The examples of VP selection you give seem to be merit-based ones. Biden made Obama seem less revolutionary. That helped, right?* Trump picked Pence because he was relatively stolid. That helped, right?* But how did Kamala help Biden? She was a California Democrat. Was she supposed to have increased turnout among black and Hispanic voters? If so, why would anyone believe that, given that she couldn't get their votes during the primaries?
*--These are serious questions. I'm sincerely wondering whether they helped. It could be, for all I know, that the selection of VP has never made a difference to US electoral politics since, say, 1932, and that parties just assume it does without any research (e.g., there's apparently some good evidence that TV advertising is not cost-effective, but actually loses more money than it nets; maybe VP selection is like that?).
I don't think there's any more practical evidence of Pence & Biden's VP impact on their presidential tickets than there is of Harris's VP impact on Biden's. Or if there is, I'm not aware of the polling, and it'd be hard to do given the unavoidable lack of counterfactuals to compare against.
Big picture, though, I think this framing of merit is one that would work for DEI/AA advocates, but not for the kinds of critics that would consider "DEI hire" a valid knock to make on Harris.
If we assess whether a candidate was hired on merit or a mere "DEI" hire based on the post-hire outcome, rather than based on where they ranked relative to other candidates in an identity-neutral analysis at the time the selection is made, then there's not really much reason to be upset about affirmative action in jobs and schools - if an African American kid gets picked over a white kid for Harvard or Yale, and we comfortably say he was a 'merit-based' selection as long as he graduates, AA/DEI advocates will certainly be happy, but I don't think DEI skeptics like Deiseach would share that assessment.
Skeptics tend to insist that we evaluate 'merit' at the point of the selection by comparing the resumes of candidates, without weighting or adjusting for identity based characteristics. If Mike Pence has one resume, and Chris Christie has a 'better' one, but Trump prefers Pence because Pence is from Indiana and more outwardly religious, while Christie is a NJ guy who would weight his ticket with Northeastern elites and do less to validate Trump to evangelical voters, then a DEI skeptic would call that a 'DEI hire,' since the more qualified candidate is discarded simply based on his faith and place of origin.
But we don't typically engage in that kind of analysis when Kennedy picks a non-Catholic, or Obama picks a white guy, etc. It seems like there is a selective application where Harris is being treated as a DEI hire because Biden wanted to balance his old white-dudeness with someone younger and reflecting the minority voters in his base, while no one considered Biden himself a 'diversity hire' when Obama was looking for an older white guy to balance his own ticket. Most likely because the 'DEI hire' stuff is coming from people who (a) were going to criticize Harris either way, and (b) are used to applying skepticism when minorities are selected for scholarships/candidacies/jobs/etc but don't think as skeptically when a white person gets the cookie instead.
Well, taking on the mantle of being a DEI skeptic, in that case *Obama* was the DEI hire while Biden was 'business as usual' and possibly chosen for exactly that reason to balance out the ticket.
I think there would be a lot less comment if Biden *hadn't* made the remarks about "definitely gonna pick a woman as VP and a black woman for the Supreme Court". That kind of talk does, unfortunately, put the emphasis on "what is your sex and race?" and not "what is your ability?" when making a selection.
> But how did Kamala help Biden? She was a California Democrat.
Yes?
Biden is from Delaware, where like half the country's businesses are headquartered. Picking someone relatively left-wing, like Kamala, balances the ticket by suggesting to the party/base, "Yes, I will not be governing completely as a technocratic centrist."
Pence helped signal to the GOP that Trump (philanderer, serial divorcee, Epstein partygoer, guy who thinks it's called "Two Corinthians," etc) that there would be a Christian/social conservative angle to his administration. Biden helped signal to the Democrats that Obama wasn't going to run as a left-wing radical.
I mean, there's a reason that every single suggested VP for a Kamala ticket is a white dude. Is that DEI too?
"A statement released in July 2019 by Clinton spokesperson Angel Ureña said the former president traveled to Europe, Asia, and twice to Africa on Epstein's private jet. Clinton's staff and Secret Service agents also went on these trips, which were to further the work of the Clinton Foundation, according to the statement.
Court documents unsealed in July 2020 show Epstein accuser Virginia Giuffre testified that Clinton also visited Epstein's island — something the former president has denied.
Clinton told New York Magazine through a spokesperson that Epstein was "both a highly successful financier and a committed philanthropist with a keen sense of global markets and an in-depth knowledge of twenty-first-century science."
Ureña also said that Clinton and Epstein hadn't spoken in "well over a decade" and that Clinton "knows nothing about the terrible crimes" Epstein was charged with."
Lots of glass houses standing in the way of those stones.
Was Kamala relatively left-wing, though? All my progressive friends kept on (and keep on) calling her a cop.
I think someone is a DEI hire if the rationale for hiring them is not because it improves the quality of the product but because it's a matter of representational justice. If the white dudes don't improve the quality of the product and are hired for representational justice, then they would be DEI hires too.
By contrast, if Kamala improved the quality of the product, then she wasn't a DEI hire.
There were also stories dropped, or planted, in the press about how her staff hated her/she was unpopular in the White House, which I found odd - who was planting them and why? Was it an attempt by the Biden staff to keep her in her place, if she was trying to take more on her plate and away from Joe by expanding the role of the VP in preparation for a run in 2024? Nothing much came of it in the end, but I did find it odd.
"Kamala Harris assumed office in historic fashion, becoming the first woman to serve "a heartbeat away from the presidency".
But her first year as vice-president has been far from a smooth ride.
The job has not come easy. Ms Harris' approval ratings have slumped. The president has tasked her with assignments that range from the intractable to virtually insoluble. Her office has been beset by high-profile resignations.
If Ms Harris accepted her party's vice-presidential nomination thinking she would be anointed as the Democratic heir apparent to the presidency, it was a notion that did not take long to dispel.
While Mr Biden said in a press conference on Wednesday that he would keep her as his running mate if he stands for re-election, it remains to be seen whether that will put to rest speculation about her political future.
So what, exactly, has gone wrong for her - and can she set it right? There are no easy explanations and few easy answers.
It was, without a doubt, an ugly poll. According to a November survey by USA Today, Ms Harris' public approval rating sat at 28%, making her one of the least popular vice-presidents in modern history - lower than Iraq War architect Dick Cheney, who was reviled by Democrats.
If there was one moment that truly set off the spate of "what's wrong with Kamala Harris" stories that dominated the latter half of 2021, it was that "comically bad" poll, as the San Francisco Chronicle put it. The poll effectively framed the conversation about the vice-president as one of struggle and disappointment."
"Worn out by what they see as entrenched dysfunction and lack of focus, key West Wing aides have largely thrown up their hands at Vice President Kamala Harris and her staff – deciding there simply isn’t time to deal with them right now, especially at a moment when President Joe Biden faces quickly multiplying legislative and political concerns.
The exasperation runs both ways. Interviews with nearly three dozen former and current Harris aides, administration officials, Democratic operatives, donors and outside advisers – who spoke extensively to CNN – reveal a complex reality inside the White House. Many in the vice president’s circle fume that she’s not being adequately prepared or positioned, and instead is being sidelined. The vice president herself has told several confidants she feels constrained in what she’s able to do politically. And those around her remain wary of even hinting at future political ambitions, with Biden’s team highly attuned to signs of disloyalty, particularly from the vice president.
...But, with many sources speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the situation more frankly, they all tell roughly the same story: Harris’ staff has repeatedly failed her and left her exposed, and family members have often had an informal say within her office. Even some who have been asked for advice lament Harris’ overly cautious tendencies and staff problems, which have been a feature of every office she’s held, from San Francisco district attorney to US Senate.
...In and around Harris’ circle, they speculate that there must be someone getting in her way.
Some think it’s the President himself leaving her out in the cold, prioritizing his own agenda. Some blame specific West Wing aides whom they feel sure are out to undercut her. Some fear the vice president is, as she has often done in her political life, leaning heavily on her sister Maya Harris, brother-in-law Tony West and niece Meena Harris, whom they sense exerting influence over everything from staff hires to political decisions – a not uncommon situation historically among presidents and vice presidents.
Several people familiar with the operations of the vice president’s office say that after a spike in involvement earlier in the year, the family has been pushed further out again recently. Few expect that to remain the case, especially with the vice president feeling isolated and unsure of whom she can trust on her staff.
Harris herself has complained about the lack of support, internally and externally. After appearing at a fundraising event in Virginia for former Gov. Terry McAuliffe in September ahead of the gubernatorial election, she asked why she’d been put in a situation that ran counter to the good modeling of Covid-19 protocols she has been trying to stick to, as she looked out at a sizable crowd gathered in a mini-mansion backyard, largely mask-less, dipping into an Indian food buffet.
She’s not the only one who’s noticed the operation falling short. When she appeared at an event in the Bronx in October to promote the administration’s Build Back Better agenda, longtime supporters grumbled that not only were several politicians and donors left off the invitation list, but that she hasn’t even been making calls to check in and do the basic political maintenance that many have come to expect. Instead of feeling connected to Harris in her historic first year in office, they feel cut off."
"While much of the ire is aimed at Harris’ chief, two administration officials said the VP herself also bears responsibility for the way her office is run. “It all starts at the top,” said one of the administration officials, who like others requested anonymity to be able to speak candidly about a sensitive matter.
“People are thrown under the bus from the very top, there are short fuses and it’s an abusive environment,” said another person with direct knowledge of how Harris’ office is run. “It’s not a healthy environment and people often feel mistreated. It’s not a place where people feel supported but a place where people feel treated like s---.”
…But for some of the people who know Harris best, it’s become an all-too-familiar pattern for a politician who has churned through several iterations of staff on her rise and took office with a team almost entirely new to her.
Just six months in, some of those aides in the Office of the Vice President said they are eyeing other employment opportunities. Others have left already. In recent days, two top advance staffers, Karly Satkowiak and Gabrielle DeFranceschi, parted ways with Harris in what they and Harris officials said were long-planned departures, a point disputed by two other people familiar with the matter.
For DeFranceschi, the deputy director of advance, the departure came down to a “difference in opinion on how things should run,” according to another person familiar with the matter, who said that Harris’ office is run “very different” from the Obama operation, where DeFranceschi previously worked. “If you have an opinion about how things should run and it’s not listened to, that can be frustrating.”
...A third Harris aide who worked on her digital team, Rajan Kaur, left the staff after opting not to relocate to Washington from Brooklyn.
…Harris’ staff struggles are nothing new. People who have worked for her in the past describe days as “managed chaos.” “The boss’ expectations won’t always be predictable,” said one former Harris Senate aide.
Her presidential campaign operation imploded in a painful maze of finger-pointing and leaks. Harris jettisoned nearly everyone from that campaign and returned to the Senate in 2020 with her government staff and a small outside political operation in tow. When she was put on the presidential ticket, she was given a staff of mostly handpicked, trusted aides from Bidenworld. It did the job. The team avoided the spiral of internal backbiting.
The pressure-packed VP’s office has been a different story, and it hasn’t helped that few of her aides had any familiarity with their boss or her chief of staff when they started their jobs.
The morale level for current Harris staffers is “rough” and in many ways similar to the failed presidential campaign and her Senate office, according to the former Senate aide, who is in touch with current Harris staffers."
Quick question: why think these stories were "planted"? Couldn't it be that some journalist had an incentive to break a story for clicks, and had contacts who had mentioned how annoying it is to work for Kamala? I realize probably every boss is at times difficult to work for, but maybe she was unprecedented in how irritating she is.
I thought they were planted because it was very early to start a whispering campaign about how Kamala - the First Asian/First Black Woman VP, remember, and Joe's Bestest Pick Ever - was actually no good at the job, her office was in chaos, her staff hated working for her, etc. These stories come from 2021-2022, when she was barely in the door.
That kind of "actually insiders say, but only under strict anonymity because they're scared of what she'll do" story is generally messaging put out by rival camps, and the only rival camp I could think of was the Biden side. That's why I thought that maybe behind the scenes Kamala was pushing for a bigger role while Joe was there to be the grandfatherly figurehead, and this was a way the Biden camp reminded her who was boss.
Compare, for example, with how right up to the last minute the media was kissing Joe's... feet, until it was suddenly permissible to run stories about "oh yeah, I met him at a thing months back and he was out to lunch". Well why didn't you run that story back then, Mr Investigative Hard-Hitting Reporter? Because messaging, is why. Now that it was time to put pressure on Biden to step back, the stories about how he was slipping and failing could be run.
<i>Progressives can’t stop them from getting that message from the rest of society, but ought to at least try to channel it to get non-whites to work harder and try to go into fields where performance can be measured more objectively and/or where management is less dominated by racially conservative white people, rather than despair.</i>
Or they could stop showing preferential treatment to non-whites, so when a non-white person is successful in their career, nobody has "But did you *really* deserve that, or did you just get a leg up because you aren't white?" rattling around in the back of their mind.
>The main things I want to know now: when does your state release its voter information packet?
When I moved to NYC from California, I was surprised how limited the voter information packet was, compared to California. Not because there were fewer issues on the ballot, but because it was far less comprehensive re each issue. I don't know how other places compare.
Looks like there's no standardized name for this thing.
Relevant states are California (SF, Oakland, Berkeley, San Jose, LA), New York (NYC), Washington (Seattle) Texas (Austin), Massachusetts (Boston) and Illinois (Chicago) though there's no obvious reason other cities couldn't join in.
in 2022 Massachusetts did this with a flyer titled Information For Voters, though it mostly contained the ballot measures. My guess is we'll get the 2024 version in early October.
In Texas, there are no information packets. If you work at it, you can see your sample ballot online. With even more work, you can read the text of the proposed constitutional amendments, but most voters will only see a one-sentence summary of what they are. There are no official candidate bios.
During a regular bloodtest it was discovered I have a disease called autoimmune hepatitis. I wonder if anyone has experience with this disease, and if there is any relation between the use of the Astra Zeneca vaccine and this disease., or the virus itself, and this disease. A friend of mine told me that in our local hospital there has been an uptick in autoimmmune hepatitis since Covid, and she blames on the vacinne. I don't take that at face value but I don't want to dismiss it either. Anyway, curious what you guys think.
I feel bad about having been cranky about your question, so I put in a little time researching your situation. Here’s what I found.
*Could AstroZeneca have caused the autoimmune hepatitis?*
There’s no evidence at all that it increases the prevalence of autoimmune diseases. It does clearly cause blood clots, including blood clots in the brain, which is quite a bad thing to have. However, while it makes someone more likely to have one of these clots, the clots themselves are a rare event. Getting a AZ shot just makes a rare event slightly less rare. If 100,000 people get an AZ shot, and then are followed for a month afterwards, and extra 5 out of 100,000 will have a blood lot in the brain. Here’s the article I looked at: https://www.bmj.com/content/384/bmj.q488
Also, bear in mind that the AZ vaccine, unlike the Moderna and Pfizer, was not made with a novel technology. it’s what’s called a viral vector vaccine and people have been getting vaccines developed by this method for 40 years.
*Could Covid have caused the autoimmune hepatitis?*
I didn’t even bother to look this up, because I’m sure nobody knows at this point. But here are a couple things to bear in mind: Autoimmune hepatitis is not a real rare disease. Extrapoloating from the figures I could find it sounds like maybe 1 person in 200 in developed countries has it. And autoimmune disease has been increasing in developed countries for several decades. So when somebody, esp somebody older, is diagnosed with autoimmune hepatitis it's not reasonable to conclude that some unusual factor explains their illness — it seems most reasonable to just think of it as the luck of the draw, Oh, and one other thing: About the person who told you they are seeing a lot more autoimmune hepatitis and her hospital. Even if she’s right(and people aren’t always right when the believe they’ve spotting a tend of this kind), the trend she’s seeing doesn’t mean shit about the trend in the population as a whole. She’s like somebody who believes she’s getting bitten more often by mosquitos in her back yard, and based on that comes up with a theory about why there are more mosquitos in the world this summer.
*How bad an illness is autoimmune hepatitis? *
It doesn’t sound great, but def. isn’t lethal. To cut to the chase, people who have it are 1.6 times as likely to die as someone who does not have it. So if your chance of dying in the next 10 years would have been 10/1000 without autoimmune hepatitis, it’s now 16/1000. BUT, there are a lot of treatments these days for autoimmune problems, and no doubt there are various things you can do that would protect your health: No alcohol? Drink more water? Avoid certain foods? Lose weight? Exercise? Most patients are not particularly compliant with treatment recommendations, and that noncompliance is pushing that how-much-likelier-to-die number up. Be fully compliant, and your odds will be much better than the average one.
In my anecdotal experience, I used to diagnose people with stuff, and they accepted that was part of random chance/the weakness of the flesh/the inevitability of aging and death. Now they frequently ask if it’s due to the Covid vaccine, particularly if they come from a certain cultural milieu.
I really dislike the interactions between politics and medicine. Politics makes everyone dumber and less trusting. This occurs in transgender medicine as well, which thankfully I don’t have to deal with much.
Don't ask more people what they think. What fraction of the population, even the smart population, can be walking around with data about changes in diagnosis of autoimmune hepatitis and how to interpret it? Look it up! Literally ask Google, or Google Scholar. And tell your friend the same. And if she is a medical professional she has an extra obligation not to suggest to someone their illness was caused by covid or by the vaccine unless she has actually looked at the stats and various competing explanations, is such exist. Otherwise she is part of the problem. What I know (but you should check even this) is that autoimmune disease has been increasing for at least a couple of decades, esp. in developed countries.
Later edit: Sorry, I really don't think it's a bad idea to ask more people, especially people here, what they think. I was mostly having an irritation attack at the person who told you they suspected the autoimmune cases were caused by the vax or by covid. So ask away. Something I'd like to point out is that if you live someplace where AstroZeneca was the only vax available, then there are very few people in the population who have not had the vax and also have not had covid. So how can the person you know at the hospital form an opinion on the likelihood that the vax or covid itself caused somebody to develop autoimmune hepatitis? There's no "control group" --no group of people without either of the risk factors she can observe to get a sense of how often they develop autoimmune hepatitis. And of course, even if there were a good-sized natural "control group" at the person's hospital it is not possible for a casual observer, not doing stats, with a smallish population from a single hospital to draw conclusions about matters like that.
Interesting. I didn't know that the incidence of autoimmune diseases had been increasing over the past couple of decades. There are at least a couple of dozen of different a-i disorders. I'd be curious if it's only a subset that's increasing, or across the board?
Thanks for the comments. It was just that I wanted to check whether anyone here had relevant knowledge/experiencethat could help me. Indeed I have trouble accepting my mortality/ old age.
Yes, I think you're right. I was probably unreasonably irritated by the idea of a medical professional saying to OP something that I'm pretty certain is wrong, and absolutely certain is not well-founded.
Or the fact that we have so many more chemicals in our living and working environments now than we did fifty years ago. Many that have been developed recently and we really don't have any longterm data on their health impacts. A-i diseases and allergies are not something I've spent a lot of time reading up on. So, I'm not willing to die on that hill. I don't know if there have been any metastudies that attempt to sort through the variables, though.
I don't think there have. I spent 10 mins or so online trying to find info about changes in prevalence of a-i diseases over time, and ran into several articles saying that there have been few studies of the prevalence even of particular a-i diseases.
Currently the implied probability (to the nearest whole percentage point, mid-price) of the following people winning the US Presidential Election is, in the order Betfair/Polymarket/Metaculus/Manifold (numbers 3 weeks ago in brackets):
Trump: 63/64/65/58 (57/63/65/56)
Harris: 30/29/34/34 (4/5/3/7)
(Michelle) Obama: 3/3/1/1 (6/5/1/1)
Biden: 0/0/1/2 (18/18/29/26)
Newsom: 0/0/1/1 (8/5/2/3)
Whitmer: 0/-/1/1 (4/-/-/3)
RFK: 1/1/1/1 (1/2/1/0)
In future I'll remove the candidates other than Trump, Harris and Obama unless their odds shorten.
Three weeks ago I said, "If Biden does end up being replaced as nominee, it will be something of a triumph for real money markets." He has been and it is.
On 25 March 2024 (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-322/comments#comment-52405635) I noted that Metaculus was implicitly predicting near certainty that Biden would stay in the race, while Polymarket was explicitly predicting an 18% chance he would drop out (and implicitly Betfair was similar). I gave my own view that the true probability was well below 18% but well above negligibility.
In retrospect, the market was right, I was wrong and Metaculus was even more wrong. We should take some care in judging probabilities after the event, because sometimes very unlikely things do occur, but in the present case it can't really be said that the race has been dramatically affected by something which came out of the blue. Perceptions changed dramatically after the debate. While Biden's debate performance was poor, it wasn't so poor as to be outside the foreseeable range, so if you were going to assign him a probability of withdrawing of, say, 50%, conditional on the debate going at least that poorly, you ought to have assigned some significant chance of that outcome beforehand.
On the minus side, the markets have consistently had Harris unrealistically low. In April and May both Polymarket and Betfair gave her a 1% chance of winning the general, but it ought to have been obvious that conditional on Biden stepping aside, she would be clear favourite to be Democratic nominee. They still did better than Manifold, which gave her a 0% chance.
I've lost money overall on this election cycle to date, but I'm ahead in the Democratic Nominee market. In mid-February I was confident that Biden would be the nominee, but I was also confident that, conditional on Biden not being the nominee, Harris should be the favourite. I therefore constructed a conditional bet by betting on Harris to be the nominee, while simultaneously betting on Biden. That Harris bet currently looks to be among my best calls.
Harris is currently at 87% to be the nominee per Betfair, 83% per Polymarket. Polymarket is perhaps on the low side here, but don't take my word for it.
The market for Democratic VP nominee is all over the place and if you have a clear view or can cross-site arbitrage there may be money (or internet points) to be made here. In the same format as before, implied probabilities as follows:
Shapiro: 36/27/40/24
Cooper: 17/30/15/27
Beshear: 13/17/16/16
Kelly: 12/16/10/10
Buttigieg: 9/7/7/7
Whitmer: 1/2/5/3
Based on my initial gut reaction, I have placed a monkey on Shapiro, but again don't take my word for it (also, I got better odds than currently offered).
"In future I'll remove the candidates other than Trump, Harris and Obama unless their odds shorten."
Please don't remove RFK, because (1) the prospects of third-party candidates (and how well these are captured by prediction markets) is surely interesting and useful information, and (2) I really think every possible opportunity to promote the value and existence of third party candidates should be taken.
And by the way, I really appreciate your regular updates and analysis on this!
>While Biden's debate performance was poor, it wasn't so poor as to be outside the foreseeable range(.)
Indeed - I think Nate Silver said it was good that a debate was going to happen before the convention, precisely so that a poor performance would give them a chance to switch.
I wonder if Trump made a mistake agreeing to a debate so far out. Imagine if Trump insisted that Biden be the official Democrat candidate before he'd agree to any debate.
Imagine you have 10 companies that you would consider to work for. What criteria/publicly available information besides their website/Linkedin presence would you use to do some background research to shortlist 5/10 companies?
I am currently thinking about it a lot and would appreciate any input possible.
Have you considered privately available information? Or more specifically, going to a few meetups for your chosen field, standing around the free pizza table with a beer in hand, and asking the other attendees who they think you should and shouldn't work for?
Financial filings are sometimes available. In the UK, they are for all companies, but for small private companies the information is limited, and at least a year out of date. However, there are usually penalties for lying on such a statement.
In the US availability depends on state, and might require payment.
These are useful for startups, as you can estimate how much capital they have left. There may also be red flags although these will be difficult to spot if, like most people, you are not that familiar with such filings. I don't have a list, but one I've learned is when the CEO makes himself a secured creditor of the company....
You've noted linkedin presence, but I'd add that the most informative part of that is to look at the other people working there - what they did before etc. Although, there's no actual guarantee that all the people do work there. My previous company had a bunch of random people claiming to work there. Some of these are easy to spot though.
Glassdoor is somewhat useful (albeit a very noisy source).
Yes! I was also thinking about financial filings -- outside of the public companies they are available with a big delay, but still better than nothing. I will do additional research on the red flags on public filings.
Scott is an ideologically motivated anarchist. He wants to find that answer and so he does while ignoring counterexamples or alternative explanations.
For example, Southeast Asia mountain peoples were generally fleeing state power. Because those states were prolific slave raiders and they wanted to keep their culture and freedom. Regular expeditionary raids to get slaves lasted until the French/Dutch showed up and basically fought wars to stop it at which point the mountain peoples became supporters of the (rather state-like) colonial regimes. This doesn't work for Scott who glides over this to make them ideologically motivated anarchists. He uses a quote about avoiding being ruled and ignores this is not some vague philosophical notion. It is literal slavery.
There's also just holes in his analysis. The idea that grains are easier to tax while potatoes are not ignores that the spread of potatoes did not, generally, make areas harder to govern. The Irish adopting potatoes didn't suddenly end the Protestant Ascendancy. It didn't even really help. And plenty of people, like the Prussians, taxed potatoes without issue.
The core point that material conditions affect the ability of a state to centralize is true and perhaps underappreciated. But he takes the good idea and runs way too far with it to get to his ideological preferences.
Regarding grain vs potatoes, a modern state had already come into existence based on grain. The question is whether that could happen where people raised roots instead of grains. The one example I know of something like that is the Inca, who indeed raised potatoes.
Yams in Africa didn't prevent state formation either. You don't have other potato states because this is before potatoes propagated to other parts of the world.
Weren't there migrations out of China in around 3000 BC by a people called the Hakkai? I think some went south east, as you say, and a pet theory of mine is that others went west and later became the Etruscans!
I believe there is an area of China where very well constructed buildings, from several thousand years ago, have been excavated, but the identity of the former inhabitants who abandoned the sites at around the time of the early Hakkai migrations is a complete mystery.
Looking at Etruscan tomb paintings, they seem to have had a distinctly Asian appearance, and they were also good at building and metal working, and had a weird language unrelated to any Indo-European language, or any other language known of in classical times.
Classical historians claimed they originated in Lydia before setting off again for Italy in around 1200 BC. (Lydia is now called Anatolia in Western Turkey.) A group migrating west from China could well end up settling in Lydia, as their wandering would naturally end there, stopped by the Mediterranean.
I guess DNA analysis might settle the matter, along with linguistic comparisons between Etruscan (what little is known of it) and ancient Chinese languages (ditto I imagine). But three thousand years is a more than adequate time for languages to evolve beyond recognition away from their supposed mutual origin, so the linguistic side is probably a long shot.
Are you thinking of the Hmong? They migrated out of China to Southeast Asia about 2,000 BC. I'm not sure otherwise. I don't know anyone named Hakkai. There's the Hakka but they're too late to be Etruscans. What happened to the natives that formed part of the Hakka through intermarriage is not a mystery. The Hakka were a relatively marginal people and intermarried with other marginal people, adopting some of their practices like living in well constructed fortified communal homes. Or a relatively more egalitarian attitude toward women.
Greek historians claimed they were Pelasgians from Lydia, not ethnically Lydians. Though their aristocracy might have been Lydian. So they were related to the Greeks in that telling. Also, the specific path was from Lydia (supposedly under a son of the Lydian King) to Lemnos. So whoever they were they clearly could sail both to Lemnos and from Lemnos to Italy. The Romans maintained they were natives or mostly natives. Maybe intermixed with people from the Alps.
Hum... WIkipedia says "A 2021 genetic study published in the journal Science Advances analyzed the autosomal DNA of 48 Iron Age individuals from Tuscany and Lazio and confirmed that the Etruscan individuals displayed the ancestral component Steppe in the same percentages as found in the previously analyzed Iron Age Latins, and that the Etruscans' DNA completely lacks a signal of recent admixture with Anatolia or the Eastern Mediterranean, concluding that the Etruscans were autochthonous and they had a genetic profile similar to their Latin neighbors."
I think the archaeological evidence is against such a theory -- AIUI, there's a clear continuity between the bronze-age material culture of northern Italy and that of the Etruscans, without the sorts of discontinuities one would expect from a more advanced group of foreigners moving in.
While I have no stance on Zomia specifically, the idea of a region being mostly outside of state control because of its terrain is reasonable, with lots of historic precedent; perhaps most famously the Mongolian steppe that birthed one of history's great empires.
However, since the Industrial Revolution and railroads, few contiguous land masses are truly out of reach of a neighboring state, if only it wishes to grab it. The question whether or not it remains anarchic then becomes more one of politics and economics, as technology and state capacity increases. Whatever the region has to offer a state, if it becomes valuable enough, the state will eventually go there and grab it.
This is a process we can see contemporarily in the Arctic, and in Space: Long considered off-limits except for exploratory and scientific missions, the costs to exploit and militarize these domains drop while the return on these investments goes up. Consequently, international treaties to the contrary become as relevant as leaves in the wind.
As I recall, James C. Scott says governments are expanding their control into the region, and will have full control of it relatively soon-- in decades, I think.
Honestly, 80% of society is going to become a genetic dead end in post-scarcity due to two factors:
1. AI sexbots / companions. A GPT-5+ caliber mind in a sexbot body is a category killer, and the category being killed is "human relationships".
Zennials are already the most socially averse and isolated generation, going to ridiculous lengths to avoid human interaction when they don't want it. This is going to be amplified hugely.
I mean, G5-sexbot will literally be superhuman - not just in sex skills, in conversation it can discuss *any* topic to any depth you can handle, in whatever rhetorical style you prefer. It can make better recommendations and gifts than any human. It's going to be exactly as interested as you are in whatever you're into, and it will silently do small positive things for you on all fronts in a way that humans not only aren't willing to, but literally can't due to having minds and lives of their own. It can be your biggest cheerleader, it can motivate you to be a better person (it can even operant condition you to do this!), it can monitor your moods and steer them however you'd like, or via default algorithms defined by the company...It strictly dominates in every possible category of "good" that people get from a relationship.
And all without the friction and compromise of dealing with another person...It's the ultra-processed junk food of relationships! And looking at the current state of the obesity epidemic, this doesn't bode well at all for the future of full-friction, human-human relationships. 😂
2. VR heaven / Infinite Jests - you know how all the trillion dollar companies have teams of thousands of Phd's dedicating their collective brainpower to making you stare more at your magic technology box?
We're right on the cusp of tight feedback loops literally reading and optimizing on your legible biological reactions to perfect this. As in, it will be reading your pupil dilation and subtle facial blood flow changes and heart rate and who knows what else (I'm sure the actual models will have thousands or tens of thousands of variables), and then optimizing in real time based on those things to keep you "engaged."
If we're all post-economic, this quickly turns into pod-people in VR life-support coffins being infinitely and maximally stimulated for the rest of their lives, with the monthly coffin rental and app fees coming from their UBI. And this is also for the people who still want to do things with friends and family - the sexbot eschewers can all enter VR heaven together, and still interact and hang out with family and friends in addition to doing maximally fun and engaging things all the time!
So, I estimate at least 80% of society goes the way of the dodo in post-scarcity. But hey, this should be great for the environment!
The flip side of these immediate and massive selection pressures is that we're going to be very strongly selecting future generations for people who are some combination of luddite and / or who are strongly instrinsically motivated to do and accomplish things in the "real" world, and look on sexbot and coffin slavers with disdain.
So, fundies and peak internally motivated gray tribe, more or less. Should make politics interesting / fun.
I don't understand why many right-wingers appear to a) have such strong distaste about claims like "trans women are women" and b) are so absolutely certain that their beliefs are objectively correct.
It's one thing to have object-level policy positions that are trans-exclusive, eg like thinking trans women shouldn't use women's bathrooms (I disagree), or that they shouldn't be in women's sports (I weakly agree), or that government funding shouldn't be used for gender affirming therapies (I strongly disagree).
It's another to have strong ontological beliefs (which afaict are wrong or at least confused) and then *assert those beliefs as fact without debate and people who disagree with you are laughably wrong*.
I'm not confused that conservatives are wrong about this issue. That's normal! Plenty of people are wrong about plenty of things, and I'm sure they think I'm wrong too. But I don't understand where the *confidence* is coming from. Ontology isn't an easy question and people tend to get them wrong all the time[1], even when there's a clear "truth of the matter."
And in this case most of the debate doesn't even have a "truth of the matter" to begin with. (eg it's hard for me to identify an empirical crux or prediction about object-level reality that'd cause the majority of proponents to predictably update if it turns out True/False). So I don't understand the level of confidence, or the associated meanness.
[1] some sample questions that are much much easier and yet people can reliably either disagree or get them wrong:
1. Is 2 a prime number
2. Is Pluto a planet
3. Are whales fishes
4. Is Confucianism a religion
5. Is property theft violence
6. Are hot dogs sandwiches
etc
I don't see a single argument in your post that would support your point of view. In fact, I can take your post, mirror it along the left-wing/right-wing axis, and it would make just as much (or as little) sense.
For example:
"I don't understand why many left-wingers appear to a) have such strong fondness of claims like "trans women are women" and b) are so absolutely certain that their beliefs are objectively correct. "
Or:
"It's one thing to have object-level policy positions that are trans-inclusive, eg like thinking trans women should use women's bathrooms (I disagree), or that they should be in women's sports (I weakly agree), or that government funding should be used for gender affirming therapies (I strongly disagree)."
Or:
"I'm not confused that liberals are wrong about this issue. That's normal! Plenty of people are wrong about plenty of things, and I'm sure they think I'm wrong too. But I don't understand where the *confidence* is coming from. Ontology isn't an easy question and people tend to get them wrong all the time[1], even when there's a clear 'truth of the matter.'"
My point isn't that you're wrong and they're right, or any similar gotcha. Rather, I want to show you that your beliefs aren't as objectively and obviously correct as you think they are. Dig deeper. *Why* do you believe what you believe, and why might conservatives believe what they believe?
"Rather, I want to show you that your beliefs aren't as objectively and obviously correct as you think they are" lolwut.
I feel like you're confused about my comment. I think you are treating it as if I was trying to advance my own position in a debate, whereas that was explicitly not what I was going for.
I think if left-wingers have extremely strong confidence that their subjective beliefs are objectively correct, that'd be a problem! And in fact I do try to criticize them when they act like their moral preferences have more "truth of the matter" than they actually do.
So I don't find your attempt at symmetry particularly convincing.
> I think if left-wingers have extremely strong confidence that their beliefs are objectively correct, that'd be a problem!
That is already the case. I don't see any indication that left-wingers have less strong confidence in their beliefs than right-wingers, insofar as such generalizations over large population groups make sense at all.
> So I don't find your attempt at symmetry particularly convincing.
Of course you don't. You've made up your mind that your outgroup's beliefs are more wrong than your ingroup's. Which is why the following statement:
"I'm not confused that conservatives are wrong about this issue. That's normal! Plenty of people are wrong about plenty of things, and I'm sure they think I'm wrong too. But I don't understand where the *confidence* is coming from."
sounds perfectly reasonable and self-evident to you, while the mirrored statement:
"I'm not confused that liberals are wrong about this issue. That's normal! Plenty of people are wrong about plenty of things, and I'm sure they think I'm wrong too. But I don't understand where the *confidence* is coming from."
sounds non-sensical and obviously wrong to you, even though they're objectively symmetrical in their reasoning.
Note that I'm *not* saying that all beliefs are equally right or wrong, far from it! It's just that any argument or claim you made in your original post works just as well (or as badly) for your position as it does for the opposite position.
I feel like you're still claiming that I'm making an argument/thought my comment was strong enough to be persusasive by itself, which was not my intent. Compare: "I believe Green is a better color than Blue, for XYZ reasons, and people who think otherwise are dumb" to "I happen to think Green is a better color than Blue, but I don't see why people who think Blue is objectively better than Green are so confident in their beliefs."
Sex-realism dovetails into a certain narrative.
-- Conservatives believe in human-nature; progressives believe in blank-slateism.
-- Conservatives believe in race-realism; progressives believe in racial-fungibility.
-- Conservatives believe in moral-realism; progressives believe in moral-relativism.
-- Conservatives believe fetuses have souls; progressives believe souls don't exist.
-- Conservatives believe in hard money; progressives believe in fiat.
Broadly, conservatives believe in concrete properties. Progressives believe in abstract theories. Conservatives say their beliefs are obvious and common sense, and that progressives engage in wishful-thinking. Progressives say their beliefs are righteous and just, and that conservatives are uncouth bigots.
On a deeper level [0], I think conservatives are pessimistic realists (e.g. doomsday prepping is conservative-coded), whereas progressives are optimistic idealists (utopianism is progressive-coded). In fact, I'd argue that optimism vs pessimism is what fundamentally differentiates conservatives from progressives. (N.B. I think the right-vs-left axis is a separate dimension altogether, which pits hierarchy vs egalitarianism.)
Now let's examine the trans question. Conservatives: "M/F (qua sex) is biologically-real, HRT doesn't erase facts such as big forearms". Progressives: "M/F (qua gender) is socially-constructed, my feelings are of prime importance".
You and I have both read Scott's writings about categories. But from a conservative perspective, can you now intuit how one might conclude that the progressives are trying to gaslight everyone else about aspects of reality that are "obvious" and "common sense"?
On top of that, progressives have really been feeling their wheaties lately. So I'm not super surprised about a proportional amount of kneejerking from the conservatives.
[0] https://fromthechair.substack.com/p/game-theory
Thanks for your hypotheses! I appreciate the explanation, sorry if my replies come across as rude and you absolutely should not feel an obligation to respond! :)
Firstly, I'm not that interested in "conservative vs progressive" as a an analytical lens on trans issues for this comment, I'm more interested in "conservative vs correct" on this issue[1].
("Broadly, conservatives believe in concrete properties. Progressives believe in abstract theories. Conservatives say their beliefs are obvious and common sense, and that progressives engage in wishful-thinking. Progressives say their beliefs are righteous and just, and that conservatives are uncouth bigots."), I think your generalities are too broad here. Let's go to the examples:
"Sex-realism dovetails into a certain narrative.
-- Conservatives believe in human-nature; progressives believe in blank-slateism. -> I think framing conservatives as "believing in human-nature" seems pretty loaded here. Most progressives will say that they believe in human nature as cruel (eg racism, sexism, whateverism, corporate greed etc) whereas conservatives are overly optimistic about people, especially their preferred groups. Now I think progressives are often wrong here (corporate greed isn't a good explanation for inflation, which is better modeled as very impersonal forces of supply and demand). But it certainly doesn't seem like conservatives have a monopoly on understanding human nature!
-- Conservatives believe in race-realism; progressives believe in racial-fungibility. -> Is so-called "race-realism" really the majority belief among *conservatives* writ large, rather than some weird internet randos?
-- Conservatives believe in moral-realism; progressives believe in moral-relativism. -> But morality is an extremely abstract thing! What does it even mean for morality to have concrete properties?
-- Conservatives believe fetuses have souls; progressives believe souls don't exist. -> Huh? Suppose you're explaining American culture to an alien. You tell him that humans have roughly two factions. one group believes in an immortal soul that can not be measured concretely in any discernible, whereas the other group are materialists. Which faction do you think the alien will guess are the more "concrete" vs "abstract" groups?
-- Conservatives believe in hard money; progressives believe in fiat." Again I think believing in "hard money" (what does that mean concretely, gold?) is more of a weird internet rando thing than a common belief among conservatives, even the libetarian party doesn't talk about ending the Fed anymore.
[1] I will separately be interested in debating "progressive vs correct" at a latter point though I think I understand the left's departures from reality more intuitively.
"one man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens."
Here's an easier example. Consider abortion. Both conservatives and progressives agree in the abstract that "murder is wrong". But their modes of reasoning can nonetheless diverge. Because it's possible to reason that
A) killing babies is murder -> killing babies is bad
B) killing babies is murder
C) => killing babies is bad
but you can also reason
A) killing babies is murder -> killing babies is bad
B) killing babies is not bad
C) => killing babies is not murder
Which syllogism is "objectively correct"? Both! These are both valid syllogisms! And yet they're incompatible! Once you understand this on a deep level, you see this everywhere.
Homework assignment: how does this apply to the gun control debate?
My impression is that *most* of the gun control debate comes down to empirics. Leftists believe that outlawing guns will reduce gun violence, rightists believe that outlawing guns will increase gun violence ("if you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns")
Unlike some of the other questions discussed, this is actually a fairly resolvable empirical question.
These are tactical considerations rather than strategic. I mean, do you honestly believe that "violence reduction" is the motivator behind the anti-gun-control faction?
"What's the best way to reduce violence in the world? . . . . . . . . . I know! by joining the NRA and lobbying for 2nd amendment rights! So many QALY's!" said no one ever.
Humans are not automatically strategic, or consequentialist. Leftists reduce racism via protests in the US, when it's almost certainly the case that the best way to reduce racism would be in places with a higher baseline level of racism, and less antiracist messaging. Prolifers spend almost all of their pro-fetus efforts on reducing abortion, rather than reducing other sources of fetal deaths like early miscarriages, or increasing contraception access and promoting homosexual relationships. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5443340/
> I'm not that interested in "conservative vs progressive" as a an analytical lens on trans issues for this comment, I'm more interested in "conservative vs correct" on this issue
"all models are wrong; some models are useful."
I wrote the game theory essay [0] and also this essay about classification [1] just for these occasions. Ontological statements (including about truth and falsehood) are only useful insofar as they streamline some decision-making algorithm.
Suppose you visit the store to buy bread. The cold and uncaring universe doesn't guarantee that any particular loaf is actually made of bread. It could be adulterated with sawdust, or sand, or asbestos. If you didn't know what went into your bread, you might be inclined to chemically test every single loaf so you don't get randomly poisoned and die like a Victorian. Fortunately, the FDA promises us that the labels that are assigned to the loaves accurately reflect the loaves (up to a certain extent). I.e. accurate categories help streamline our purchasing decisions.
You can also observe that categories are instrumentally subordinate to decisions by noticing that the resolution of name-space collisions depends on how you plan to use the labels. E.g. botanists categorize tomatoes as fruits because they care about anatomy. dieticians categorize tomatoes as vegetables because they care about nutrition. They have different categorization schemes because they plan to take different actions with different consequences.
So what im saying is, framing the trans question at the level of "correct vs incorrect" is a crude level of analysis. They should be thought of, not as ontological statements, but as implicit bundles of policies which help navigate an uncertain environment. I.e. you should be thinking "what pros and cons does this perspective offer?"
> Conservatives believe in human-nature; progressives believe in blank-slateism.
What I'm really getting at is malleability. it's overwhelmingly the progressives who tend to believe that we can all earn 6-figures, if only we just go to college and get STEM degrees and learn to code. To which conservatives (and Freddie Deboer) say "no, not every truckdriver/janitor/hotdog-vendor/etc is infinitely malleable".
> Conservatives believe in race-realism; progressives believe in racial-fungibility.
I'm exaggerating for rhetorical effect. No, not every conservative is openly turbo-racist. But consider, who's more likely to warn their daughters about wandering alone in bad neighborhoods: conservative parents or progressive parents.
> Conservatives believe in moral-realism; progressives believe in moral-relativism.
Moral realists believe in a single, objectively true morality. E.g. lots of people believe "murder is bad" is objectively true. Moral relativists believe morality is more subjective. E.g. your answer to the trolley problem is just, like, your opinion man.
There's a continuum. on one side, things are "real", "objective", "concrete", "tangible". On the other side, things are "ethereal", "subjective", "abstract", "intangible". Moral realism falls closer on the real side than the ethereal side.
> Conservatives believe fetuses have souls; progressives believe souls don't exist.
you've never seen a soul. but you've also never seen an electron either. The Standard Model of Physics is just that: a model. and it is *extremely* abstract.
contrast this with souls. it may not be tangible or visible, but it's something people nonetheless "sense" directly with their sensory perceptions. E.g. a comment a few weeks or month ago (by Lv50 Lapras? I think?) described a creak, and realized that they probably would have ascribed it to a ghost if they'd lived in a different time period. People see faces in rocks all the time. Ascribing agency and intent to random aspects of their phenomonology is what humans just naturally do. Thus, it's actually quite low in the abstraction hierarchy.
> Conservatives believe in hard money; progressives believe in fiat.
Again, I'm exaggerating. And I very much feel it's conservatives who tend to lean more toward the "chronic-debt and chronic-inflation are bad, actually" side of the monetary-policy spectrum. The goal here is not to paint all conservatives as having extreme beliefs. The goal is to show that their dispositions naturally follow from a certain type of world-view.
[0] https://fromthechair.substack.com/p/game-theory
[1] https://fromthechair.substack.com/p/magic-runes-and-sand-dunes-the-binary
Lumping question 1 with the rest is such a grave injustice to lady Mathematics, it's a question that could be answered by - quite literally - a bunch of sand, commonly called a "computer". A bunch of sand with not much sophistication at that, unlike all the others where the primary issue is drawing boundaries and an unhealthy amount of values clash in the mix.
> So I don't understand the level of confidence, or the associated meanness.
I'm not a conservative or rightwing in the most straightforward, US/UK-centric sense you mean, and whatever amount of sympathy or shared values I might have had with them is swiftly being burned to the ground as we speak by their overwhelmingly enthusiastic, uncannily aggressive and marvelously spineless cock sucking of Israel's criminal war, and I'm not a huge fan of the US left either. So I think I'm a good candidate for a moderately neutral opinion on the trans thing:
(1) The level of confidence can be easily explained by the fact (apparent fact? common sense? unexamined view?) that "Trans women are women" is a - in the most straightforward and face-value interpretation - quite wrong belief. You know what I mean by "Straightforward Interpretation", something along the lines of "Trans women are women in the exact same sense someone born with an XX chromosome is". An oft-repeated counterargument is "Eyes don't see chromosomes" or "People can't smell hormone levels", but that is irrelevant; A human-senses-perfect replica of a ten-million-dollar Da Vinci art piece would never be detected by a human either, but nobody will ever say about it "This replica is Da Vinci art". No it's not, it's a **replica** of Da Vinci art. The issue may seem philosophical, and it is, very much so, but it has very real consequences for art fraudsters.
"Trans women are women" can always be made correct with dozens of qualifiers and nuance, but any nuance added to a slogan makes it no longer a slogan, and people are confidently disagreeing with the slogan, not any essay-length elaboration you add to it. Simply put, if you want to change people's unexamined stance on Trans women, you somehow have to change the "folk philosophy" of copying every person unconsciously subscribes to, the philosophy of identity, what do they mean when they say things are "the same" or are "different". Intuitively, things are the same when they're the same "on every level", a naturalized immigrant is not quite a "True" American because there is some level of identity in which they're not American, namely the past identity (which survives in memory). That's what people usually mean when they say that Trans women are not women, there is some level at which a "true" woman and a trans women differ, but at which 2 "true" women never differ.
(2) As for the associated meanness, this is the combined resultant of 2 distinct forces: topic-independent meanness, and topic-dependent meanness. The topic-independent meanness is a measure of how much "unspicy" conversations (e.g. about Universal Grammar in Linguistics, or about String Theory in Physics), things that we intuitively expect to be calm and collected and dispassionate because no one's values are at stake, can still descend into unmitigated shit-flinging if enough people argue for enough time in enough words. People arguing about Star Wars insult each other viciously. People call up the actress who played the wife of a drug lord (Anna Gunn) in a popular TV series and harass her with death threats. So, if you think that **any** topic, any one whatsoever, is ever safe from descending into shit-flinging after enough people invest in it, you're severely wrong.
And then there is the topic-dependent meanness. Contrary to empty fashionable cliches that feminists like to repeat about how "Women's Pain is Invisible", women's pain and struggles are **quite** visible, and people get **quite** passionate about them. Throughout history, if you wanted to whip up people into a frenzy, there is pretty much nothing you could do better than convincing them that (a) $SOMEBODY is making fun of their god (b) $SOMEBODY is harassing, molesting, or otherwise making life difficult for their women, girls, and/or children. With industrialization and secularization, North America, Europe, and massive portions of East Asia have gradually mellowed out on (a), but (b) remain as universal and as passion-inducing as ever. The 2 sides of the trans debate both see the other side as attacking **their** women, and the facts occasionally come up to support either side. This is a second source of meanness, on top of the background-radiation source of topic-independent meanness.
I think I still don't understand #1. There are many other "to be" slogans that are seen as slightly cringe but not obviously wrong ("women's rights are human rights", "I am my brother's keeper"). Also "to be" verbs in English are extremely overloaded, so the fact that there isn't an isomorphism between trans women and women isn't very compelling to me (You can also say "black women are women," which I'm sure some racists will take issue with but I doubt is a particularly controversial position). Like clearly in the cases of those other slogans (and also in everyday usage) there are many times where "to be" is not meant as an identity claim. "I am 10 years old", "Obama is a man."
(Identity claims have to be symmetric. Nobody thinks the state of 10 year-oldness means a specific person, or that Man <=> Obama).
Re Da Vinci art fraudsters, the example seems like a stretch because fine art is famously this make-believe game where people care a lot about things like provenance, but most of the time we (depending on your perspective) either live in reality or at least a pretty different social game.
> the philosophy of identity, what do they mean when they say things are "the same" or are "different". Intuitively, things are the same when they're the same "on every level", a naturalized immigrant is not quite a "True" American because there is some level of identity in which they're not American, namely the past identity (which survives in memory).
Interesting. I think I like your analogy because I think it's a good crux. I disagree with both sides of it. I think I basically disagree that people need things to be the same "on every level" to deploy set membership. For example, saying platypuses are mammals isn't a particularly controversial claim, even though platypuses do not have many of the properties that we usually associate with mammals (eg we usually think of mammals as not laying eggs).
I also find the immigrant analogy interesting, because I expect "Immigrants are not True Americans" to not be a very popular message, to put it mildly. I think most people are smart enough to call BS on that, even though of course there isn't a "truth of the matter" to this particular question. And I agree your average immigrant is meaningfully different from your average native-born American, including on areas that seem fairly central to "Americanness" (e.g. much more likely to have an accent, much more likely to love America, etc).
Similarly, black women are not on average identical to the median American woman, or the median white woman (for example, most American women have paler skin). So I don't think people's current intuitive conception of set membership or "is"ness requires a complete identity relationship.
__
Re your arguments about meanness, I kinda see it but I mostly don't buy this. I do like your topic-independent meanness vs topic-dependent meanness comparison. It's a good thing to keep aware of.
People do seem way more mean about trans issues on a regular basis than most other issues, so the topic-dependent meanness is high. I can buy that some of the meanness is coming from a place of sacred values + fear, especially from female TERFs. But a lot of the meanness comes across as unusually gleeful and delighting in others' misery. E.g. making fun of suicides. I also follow a pro-gaming scene where the best trans female player (this is someone who presents female ~ as far as I can tell, and I think I'm above average for straight men at e.g. detecting things like makeup or having a gaydar.) regularly gets hounded in Youtube comments with people reminding them that she's trans and making sure to "correct" others when they call her by her gender rather than her birth sex. Frankly, these things just don't seem to come from a place of love, or of fear.
Re question 1: yes this was a mistake on my part, in retrospect I should've said "is 1 a prime number?" (which makes it clearer that this is a definitional dispute)
I felt the same way back in 2018 and left IT after 15 years for the trades. I had built my own home a few years earlier so I wasn't a complete stranger carpentry and I had an offer to work with some guys on finishing. It was a slight pay cut (I had previously taken a pay cut working for a non-profit) but my costs were higher due to more travel/eating out, and no benefits. Luckily I ended up working on mostly new higher end homes right away which was nice. What I observed was "Time is money" so being quick but accurate was highly important, there was less interpersonal drama but more "I've never missed a day of work in my life" kind of tough guy toxicity. I think I expected to feel more appreciated but it was about the same. Was also expecting to make more but I was just getting by.
I was laid off in 2020 due to Covid and started working for myself. This is both better and worse. I can set my rates and make a decent wage but I also need to line up work which I'm pretty terrible at. This has led me to be as broke as I've ever been (though not in debt outside a small mortgage). I've looked into going back but it's pretty difficult to get back into IT after 6 years away from it. I could stick with the trades but in many cases the pay working for someone else isn't going to give me any freedom. There's a balance and it's really a series of trade offs changing up your career. Neither is really better but change is often needed, I definitely needed it for my sanity at the t ime.
I thought the part of the Paris Olympics opening ceremony featuring blood spurting from windows, and severed heads, was startling and horrifying - I can't imagine any other country making re-enacted executions a feature of a ceremony about sport and unity. Do the French - e.g. in school curricula - address the violence of their revolutionary history - are there French members here who'd be able to confirm or disconfirm? Thanks for any thoughts.
I just saw something about an OceanGate scandal and assumed it was a scandal of some sort about the ocean, ala the usual -gate snowclone. I didn't realize that OceanGate is their actual name. Pretty ironic in hindsight.
Probably not the best thing to name your company that operates shoddily built custom submarines, no.
AFAIK it was author (futurist) Charlie Stross who called the AI bubble first. Seems like other people are starting to notice...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ljztbcdzkeo
I mean, McKinsey is the epitome of hyping every recent trend only to then pretend it never happened - here’s the new shiny thing, but I’d expect this AI cycle to play out similarly to the communication bubble of the late 90s. Sure Qwest went belly up, but we’re still using the fiber optic cables it laid down. Many current AI players will burn through piles of investor money, but the technology will yield some useful applications.
Some news this morning related to a topic that Scott has recently written about:
Headline: "Gov. Gavin Newsom issues executive order for removal of homeless encampments in California"
https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/25/us/gavin-newsom-executive-order-homeless-encampments/index.html
"California Gov. Gavin Newsom, buoyed by a recent US Supreme Court decision, issued an executive order Thursday calling on state officials to begin taking down homeless encampments.
The move to begin dismantling thousands of encampments throughout California comes after the high court ruled last month in favor of an Oregon city that ticketed homeless people for sleeping outside. The ruling rejected arguments that such “anti-camping” ordinances violated the Constitution’s ban on “cruel and unusual” punishment...."
The executive order is posted here:
https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/2024-Encampments-EO-7-24.pdf
Yup: thanks to the Supreme Court overturning Martin v Boise, they can finally clear encampments again. I wouldn't be surprised if a year from now people find that the seemingly impossible to solve problem of homeless encampments taking over downtowns and parks was solvable all along, and it was just the 9th Circuit preventing it all these years.
But where are all those homeless going to end up moving to? Seems like a whack-a-mole scenario with human lives. (Not that I think anything else was working.)
The obvious answer is, new homeless camps in places with fewer tourists, reporters, and upper-middle-class homeowners, where nobody will bother them. Down side is, those locations may not have sufficient economic opportunities (e.g. panhandling) to support the homeless population.
I think people will mostly be disappointed. You can break up encampments and force people to move around often, but there will still be the same number of homeless people hanging around and all the other things people complain about, and that's a largely intractable problem for the reasons Scott recently explained.
The real solution is to legalize house building, but a) that takes many many years to make a dent in the problem and b) faces fanatical opposition from most voters.
My theory is that the problem is not nearly as intractable as people think, and has mostly been caused by the 9th Circuits decision in Martin v. Boise. So this is a great natural experiment to see if I’m right!
Martin v. Boise was in 2018. Do you think there was no homelessness problem before that?
The homelessness problem was significantly less bad on the west coast, yes.
Check out the graph in this article: homelessness has always been unusually high in California, but note how it starts increasing rapidly starting 2018.
https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-brief/homelessness-california-causes-and-policy-considerations
Biden's speech: the best American political speech since when?
I think better than Obama's 2004 DNC speech. Maybe up there with GW Bush's impromptu remarks about 9/11. Probably there are some things Reagan said about the Cold War that match it. But I'm not a political speech connoisseur, and my mentor for them is awful.
The first 20 minutes of Trumps RNC speech was pretty excellent. Shame he can't stop talking once he starts, with the whole thing turning into another of his rally speeches. Which is fine I guess, but 90 minutes is too long for anybody to sit through these days.
It was a good transcript but I'm not sure how much it reflects reality.
> And today, violent — the violent crime rate is at a 50-year low.
The FBI page I looked at only went back to 1985, but the lowest violent crime rate was around 2013. It shot up in 2020 (big surprise) and hasn't returned.
> Border crossings are lower today than when the previous administration left office.
CBP stats show ~2.3 million illegal alien encounters from 2017-2020. This year alone has seen ~1.8 million, with 3 months left to go in the reporting period. So that's a blatant lie.
> I believe my record as president, my leadership in the world, my vision for America’s future all merited a second term, but nothing — nothing — can come in the way of saving our democracy. That includes personal ambition.
I would give Joe more credit for this one if he hadn't stepped aside at the last possible moment, after his entire party did everything short of invoking the 25th to get rid of him.
> In this moment, we can see those we disagree with not as enemies or — but as frien- — as fellow Americans. Can we do that? Does character in public life still matter?
Pretty rich coming from the same president who gave us the "Everyone who supported Trump is an extremist enemy of the state" speech (with marines on stage and comical red lighting, which would have led to months of "Fascist! Hitler!" coverage had Trump done it.)
You get the point, etc. It would have been a great speech, if Biden had actually lived up to its ideals.
> The FBI page I looked at only went back to 1985, but the lowest violent crime rate was around 2013. It shot up in 2020 (big surprise) and hasn't returned.
Generally speaking, if a non-Trump politician says something like that, they do at least have some sort of source for the claim.
This analysis shows that after correcting for methodological changes in the definition of rape, 2022 *was* the lowest in 50 years except for 2013 and 2019 being slightly lower. So that's already morally correct, even if it's technically not 100% correct. But as they point out, that's *2022*. Based on the trends, 2023 was very likely the lowest in 50 years outright. So as a present statement, it seems fair to say that violent crime *is* at a 50 year low now.
https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2024/crime-rate-up-or-down-united-states/
Thanks for the implicit rec to read/watch it! I wasn't planning on doing so but it was time well-spent. :)
Looking at the events surrounding the attempted assassination of Donald Trump on July 13, I am left with the impression that Kimberly Cheatle, the Director of the Secret Service, should not have been hounded into resigning her post.
To begin with, Trump is alive. While he was slightly injured by a grazing shot, he was well enough to be released from hospital the same day and continue campaigning two days later. That means the assassin failed. And if the assassin failed, then the Secret Service succeeded. To be sure, it was a result that left a lot to be desired -- two others were injured but survived, and one died -- but the Secret Service succeeded in its core mission of protecting the life of Donald Trump.
Also, we don't yet know why the shooter was able to get so close to the podium with a rifle and fire so many shots before being killed by a Secret Service sniper. It could have been a pure fluke. It could have been a specific misjudgement or a flaw in doctrine. Or it could have been some sort of systemic problem in the agency as a whole. Several investigations (by Congress, by the Dept of Homeland Security and by the Secret Service itself) are underway, and can be expected to provide answers.
Finally, it seems to me Ms. Cheatle's degree of responsibility depends very much on this question. She can't reasonably be held responsible for a specific misjudgement made by some low-level operative. At the other end, as Director she can certainly be held responsible for systemic problems in the agency as a whole. But until we know where on this continuum of error the actual problem occurred, we don't really know the degree of her culpability. And the government should therefore have delayed calling for her head until we all knew for certain who was responsible.
<quote> That means the assassin failed. And if the assassin failed, then the Secret Service succeeded.</quote>
If you hit on a 19 you are a poor blackjack player, even if a 2 happens to come up
With rare events like this, it's really hard to see the signal, so you need to also look at near misses. Otherwise you're just setting yourself up for a bigger fail down the road.
Um, is this comment meant to be satirical? I kind of hope so.
This is why nothing works in this country. An assassin's bullet is an inch away from killing Trump, and the same assassin ends up killing bystanders anyway. And the takeaway is "the Secret Service succeeded".
DUDE THIS IS HER ONE JOB THAT SHE'S RESPONSIBLE FOR. WTF.
She is responsible full-stop - that's what it *means* to be responsible. That she needed to go through a congressional hearing (where BOTH parties were pissed at her) before resigning, instead of doing it day-of shows how far gone this idea is.
Questions of responsibility for the planning and preparation are legitimately debatable, and ideally would be supported by more information than we have. And I agree that she can't be responsible for the tactical decisions made in the field. But the *aftermath*, that's on her.
The bit where she said "We couldn't put our people on the roof because it's *sloped* and that would be *dangerous", when it was a 1:12 slope and the USSS countersniper team was on a roof with a much greater slope, makes her either a damn fool or a damn liar. Probably lying for no other reason than to absolve the local commander of responsibility and make her team look less inept, but a pathetic coverup of minor incompetence is still a coverup.
I got the impression she was poorly briefed for the questioning she faced from congress. But really, someone at her level should be able to make sure she is properly briefed, even if she has to yank her staff's chain to get it.
> Trump is alive.
Total dumb luck that in no way exonerates the USSS. They let a shooter put rounds on their charge. If he was a better shot or the wind was different or Trump doesn't turn his head, Trump dies. They completely failed in their core duty. And it wasn't something difficult to prevent either, like someone in the crowd nearby with a concealed pistol. A guy with a rifle climbed up on a roof within a few hundred yards, people saw him and notified law enforcement, and he still got to take his shot at Trump.
Cheatle's responses to the investigation were wholly unsatisfactory. She even stated in an interview that the "buck stops with her", she has the final responsibility for the actions of the USSS. This is a pretty common doctrine that the chief executive is ultimately responsible, even if their individual actions are not the issue. Frankly, the whole debacle is a huge embarrassment to the country and she should have resigned on the 13th.
I get the feeling that if something similar had happened in Britain and she were British she would have resigned as soon as practicable. The only reason not to would be that no one else could step into the position, which I find unlikely.
Part of the customary punishment for this sort of failure is to endure the public beating by Congess members before turning in your resignation.
Is there any good place to read about British opinion of the American Revolutionary War and how it changed over the course of the war?
You may not have mentioned me by name. But having read Unsong, I know better than to believe in veridical coincidences. And fortunately, our favorite bugman hath graced us with a cornucopia of primary texts. Probably the most relevant bag of receipts is "Chapter 2: The American Rebellion" [0]. The primary texts include:
-- "Strictures upon the Declaration of the Congress at Philadelphia" by Thomas Hutchinson (https://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/1776-hutchinson-strictures-upon-the-declaration-of-independence)
-- "Origin & Progress of the American Rebellion" by Peter Oliver (https://archive.org/details/originandprogres011156mbp/page/n17/mode/2up)
-- "History of the Origin, Progress, and Termination of the American War" (Volumes I and II) by Charles Stedman (https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_History_of_the_Origin_Progress_and_T/bmQFAAAAQAAJ?hl=en) (https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_History_of_the_Origin_Progress_and_T/h2QFAAAAQAAJ?hl=en)
tbh, idk how people read stuff from this era without dying of boredom. The sentences just run on, and on, and on, and on. Always comma-spliced to the nth degree.
Incidentally, the specific term "terrorist" qua U.S. revolutionaries is something I actually picked up, not from the bugman, but from a Simon Whistler video. Unfortunately, I've not been able to find it. The topic might have been entirely tangential to the U.S. Revolutionary War. I'm near certain it was Simon Whistler though.
[0] https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2009/01/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified_15/
Nothing like going to contemporary sources: the record of speeches in the UK Parliament (both Commons and Lords) are pretty good for this period and they give a sense of the range of opinion (and the arguments given) across the period. A publication called the Parliamentary Register from the early 1800s is probably the best compilation.
Short version is that the war was contested all through the period (and therefore there are people attacking and defending it throughout, which is useful for the historian): the people opposed to it on principle were always a small minority, but as the war dragged on (and especially once it looked unwinnable) the trend of opinion joined them, and the government (who were kind of obliged to support it) were increasingly isolated. Complicating factor: British opinion later largely moved to focus on the war with France/Spain, where the government has more public support, America being conveniently more and more ignored.
I had an instructor in US history from Britain once upon a time, who suggested that the British public, after the visit by Franklin, saw the problem as an incompetent and ineffectual monarch who couldn't be bothered to even pretend to take the problems raised by the colonists seriously; the colonists were ungrateful and wrong but understandably peeved - and that after a small show of force everybody would agree to go back to the negotiating table and put all this nonsense behind them.
Take that with a grain of salt, granted.
Mid-century, US culture seems to have conceived of the work of doctors and hospitals as Medicine (scientific/technological, mechanical, focused on knowledge and control of specific problems). Over the past few decades, we've seen an interesting shift toward instead conceptualizing it as Healthcare (emotional/ relational, holistic, focused on providing overall "support" and "care" for a patient's "well-being").
I can think of a bunch of possible causal factors, including power shifts away from individual doctors and toward systems; the rise of healthcare marketing/ advertising; gender shifts in the makeup of the workforce; and the broader trend toward more emotive rhetoric in the culture at large. But I'm interested in learning more. Does anyone know of good articles or posts digging into this phenomenon?
It might be a shift in emphasis from treatment to prevention. It's my understanding that people nowadays tend to die from things that are hard or impossible to treat but could have been prevented, or at least delayed, by a healthier lifestyle.
(I'm not judging here; I'm currently having a beer at 8:38 am.)
I think there was a very pro-science and tech attitude in general in the mid century. This was the time of Everything Will Be Atomic In The Future (and of course lots of new home conveniences, processed food, etc.)
True, but to my eye the broader culture is just as pro-tech today? Possibly even more so; for instance, normies have pretty well internalized pro-tech marketing memes like "that 5-year-old device is painfully outdated, I clearly need a new one" and "my new expensive tech makes me a cooler, smarter person." And we're notoriously still in the tail end of the "I f*cking love science" fandom era. What would account for the simultaneous shift toward vitalist medicine?
You may want to poke around the recent book-review-contest's entry [0] for "Sadly, Porn". The Big Idea (tm) under investigation is Narcissism. And a subcomponent of the Big Idea is the claim: over the past century, modern society's transfer of agency from individuals to bureaucracy has effected a vibeshift from materialism to therapy. The review also goes beyond "Sadly, Porn" to mention other texts within the "epidemic of narcissism" genre.
N.B. in this context, I'm defining "materialism" as "I want to advance my economic interests by making inventions and being industrious". Whereas "therapy" is being defined as "(no point trying to beat the rat-race, therefore) I need self-care, a renewed focus on mental health, etc".
The book review doesn't really focus much on the therapy angle, at least as I remember. (Though the review is also really fucking long. So maybe I'm misremembering.) I know the therapy angle is part of the genre though because I remember it being a more prominent theme in Christopher Lasch's book "Culture of Narcissism". But I still recommend starting with the "Sadly, Porn" book review, since the writing-style of everything else within the narcissism genre is inexplicably, infuriatingly obscurant. Also, I don't think "Culture of Narcissism" is available online, though the other texts are.
[0] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GYQw3pgvhi7hqOVR-Ql629Q_8thbyHe8sSRy5voyt30/edit#heading=h.cdezdtonc8cn
Medicine has to do with your own body, and body and mind are as entwined as it gets. A detached scientist doctor doesn't do much good when a good portion of what you're seeking is a bit of human reassurance.
Last week, I asked about glucose monitoring, as I was worried that I might have prediabetes. I ended up ordering a Freestyle Libre 3, which arrived last night. Unfortunately, now I have the opposite problem, that the CGM is showing implausibly *low* readings.
In particular, the app kept waking me up last night due to low glucose readings, which dipped as low as 53. However, as I'm not taking any medications and don't have any symptoms, it seems extremely implausible that I actually had hypoglycemia.
Now I'm not sure what to do, since it seems like I can't actually trust the CGM readings at all anyway.
One other annoying thing is that the historical graph shown in the app doesn't correspond to what the app actually showed at the time, and I have no idea why.
I'm surprised you went this route. I use this, too, and insurance makes it $20 for 14 days of readings. But that's almost $1.50 per day, and if you only want to take readings a couple times a day, the fingerpricks would be more cost effective in the long run (initial purchase of a meter for perhaps $20, and then a 100 pack of test strips for another $20).
Does insurance even cover this if you just want it for your own information?
It does have its faults, such as not being able to adjust the low glucose level, sound it makes when you reach it, or the volume, and only displaying 12 hours of readings instead of a whole day. Plus, it seems to crash a lot, probably due to a memory leak. Overall, though, I find it to be pretty accurate in my own readings.
I just paid out of pocket ($95). After all, the whole point is that I didn't know whether I had a problem or not and wanted to find out.
I've been thinking about trying to get a fingerprick test too in order to see whether the low blood sugar reported by the CGM is actually real or not. I actually went to CVS yesterday, but the reader said on the box that it required a control solution which is sold separately, and they don't actually have the control solution on sale, so I wasn't sure what to do and left empty handed.
It doesn't REQUIRE a control solution, really. The control solution ought to read a specific amount, probably about 110mg/dl, so if it doesn't, then something is wrong with the meter or test strips. They recommend using the control solution perhaps once a month, but I used it perhaps once a year, since I never had any reason to doubt my results.
I would still recommend getting the fingerprick test combination, as it's likely the results will be accurate (I estimate +/- 10% on readings, as I have gotten that kind of range on the same drop of blood). Ask a pharmacist what total supplies to get. I think you'll need a meter, compatible test strips, lancets (I recommend 32 gauge), a lancing device (which may even come with the meter), and something to clean the site like alcohol swabs. Maybe also a log book to record your readings, for your own information, as I find medical professionals never look at these records.
The pharmacist should be able to tell you which devices/test strips work together.
The sensors generally take a little time to settle in, though 24 hours is usually sufficient. It's also worth noting that the Libre family are intended for Type 1 diabetes so the bands and alerts are calibrated for someone without insulin production. My grandmother, who used the sensor to monitor her own prediabetes also reported quite low readings compared to what a Type 1 diabetic would report. If you're still concerned you could order some testing strips to get a second opinion.
Source: Helped develop (in a small way) the sensor :D
Would it be difficult or impractical to run this by a physician?
It's very inconvenient and time consuming to find and visit a doctor.
Your call, of course but at some point peace of mind might make it worth the hassle.
Peace of mind is why I ordered the CGM in the first place!
Hopefully this is just a matter of the sensor being inaccurate in the first 24 hours and it will even out over time.
You have a chance to become the best in the world at one of the following professions:
- hotel housekeeper
- electrical lineman
- military drill team member
- language scholar (Etruscan)
- pizza chef
- athlete (shotput)
- IBM 1400 computer operator
- forklift operator
- sheep shearer
- piano tuner
- GeoGuessr player
- debt collector
- foremast jack (tall-ship sailor)
- antique car driver/maintainer
Which one do you choose?
Language scholar (Etruscan) probably has the best chance of contributing value that lasts over 100 years. Plus I like linguistics.
Being the best pizza chef in the world would be a significant accolade. Most, if not all, of the other jobs here would result in the same output from performance whether you are simply qualified for the job or "the best in the world". A piano tuner and "the best" (the quickest?) piano tuner are still going to tune a piano. Someone who can make pizza and the best pizza maker in the world are making two entirely different products.
lineman for the cool wide-brimmed hard hat
I'll have to go with debt collector. There must be $trillions in non-performing debt, and the best collector will get very rich. Put Crassus to shame.
Second choice: shotput. I went to school with our state champion. It would be cool to be that strong.
"Hotel housekeeper" seems like it would also make you really good at regular housekeeping, and "shotput athlete" would come with some pretty good physical fitness buffs.
Also, "Geoguesser player" means you are really good at figuring out where photos were taken based on tiny background details, which is not really a day-to-day skill but lets you do cool tricks.
language scholar.
I grew up next to a sheep farm. Sheep shearer requires lots of wrestling. Sheep can kick painfully with their hooves, and (damn!) sheep can bite! And there's nothing more terrified and hysterical than dumb sheep, except maybe Donald Trump when trying to deal with the Biden-to-Harris campaign backflip.
What madman would choose anything but Pizza Chef? Turn that skill into a franchise, and all the competitors fall like Dominoes.
Yeah, pizza chef doesn’t belong on this list. Way too popular and profitable. It would need to be “eggplant Parmesan chef” or something to fit with the others.
Well, being an awesome pizza chef doesn't make you a good business executive or entrepreneur.
I'm not sure offhand what to most lucrative placement for the world's best pizza chef would be. They could be the hands-on chef in a small renowned pizza restaurant. Or they could be the head chef in a large pizza restaurant, working in the kitchen mostly supervising the work of souschefs, probably producing work that is not quite up to the standards of their own hands-on work. Or they could step further back, and be the training/quality-control officer of a chain of pizzerias, producing good but not nearly as good work. There is definitely a tradeoff there.
You can argue over whether Tony Gemignani is literally the best pizza chef in the world, but he has more awards at major pizza competitions than anyone else (AFAIK), and also has a bunch of successful restaurants in California and Nevada and some other smaller ventures.
If you suck at the other aspects of the job, you get a partner to handle the business side. Though there's no reason, the way this was framed, that you HAVE to suck at everything in the world besides making pizza.
At minimum, you open a restaurant in a high-traffic area of a big city. That's a solid living.
The leap to establishing a big chain is much harder. Though you have much better odds with pizza than almost anything else! That's why I made the eggplant parm comment -- that maybe gets you one quirky little restaurant somewhere but you're not going to be opening locations in Peoria.
Out of curiosity, I Googled and quickly found this guy who did it in South Florida and is moving up the state, with 15 locations. Opened a "pizza school".
https://www.miaminewtimes.com/restaurants/how-mister-o1-became-miamis-pizza-phenomenon-19242806
I'm struck by sudden urges to locate the number one practitioner of the midwestern casserole, and build a specialty restaurant around them. :)
Around Lake Woebegone we call it ‘hot dish’.
Well, the good news is, if you ask around who makes the best casseroles in the world, you'll find there's a consensus. Almost everyone gives the same answer.
The bad news is that answer is "My grandma."
Can we add baseball shortstop to the list? I mean the shot put thing is kind of cool but pretty boring.
It just doesn't seem odd enough to qualify. Baseball is a major league sport, and every team has shortstops. If you want more options, looks for something more oldfashioned or unusual.
How about crackerjack gandy dancer? I was actually a pretty good one at one time. Always the guy to say “we have time to build one more section of track” and all that.
Sure. Laying railroad track by hand sounds like brutal work, though.
I looked at it as a challenge. I was a skinny adolescent and the work seemed to build me up into a stronger healthier man. Circumstances ended that job before I was 30 though. Not sure how it would have played out long term.
My 60 year old track boss was still pretty lean and mean though. He could drive a spike home with the best of us.
The work was physically difficult but good technique made it a lot easier.
When are we talking about? To take one example, IBM 1400s might still be running in emulation inside some legacy systems, but devops for such systems is unlikely to be similar to the skills expected of IBM 1400 operators.
The time is right now. While a bunch of these options are distinctly oldfashioned, your skillset includes both traditional techniques and modern adaptations, if applicable.
OC ACXLW Meetup: Understanding Arousal - Chapters 3 and 4 Pragmatists Guide to sexuality - July 27, 2024
OC ACXLW Meetup: Understanding Arousal - Chapters 3 and 4 Pragmatists Guide to sexuality - July 27, 2024
Date: Saturday, July 27, 2024
Time: 2:00 PM to 5:00 PM
Location: 1970 Port Laurent Place, Newport Beach, 92660
Host: Michael Michalchik
Email: michaelmichalchik@gmail.com
Hello Enthusiasts,
Join us for our 69th OC ACXLW meetup, Part 2, where we'll continue exploring human sexuality by delving into Chapters 3 and 4 of "The Pragmatist's Guide to Sexuality." Our discussion will focus on understanding the factors that cause arousal and debunking common myths about what does not cause arousal.
Discussion Topics:
Chapter 3: Things That Cause Arousal
Chapter Three examines various factors that trigger arousal, breaking them into distinct categories and exploring each in detail. The chapter challenges traditional models of sexual orientation, proposing a more nuanced understanding of human arousal patterns.
Breeding Targets:
Primary and Secondary Sex Characteristics: Arousal is linked to characteristics indicating fertility and sexual differentiation, such as body parts and movements.
Arousal Indicators: Traits like musculature, broad shoulders, and deep voices in males, and breasts, hips, and certain body movements in females.
Sexuality Models: Traditional models like the Kinsey scale are critiqued, proposing that attraction can be to specific traits rather than a spectrum from straight to gay.
Inverse Systems:
Atypical Arousal: Arousal from stimuli generally found disgusting by others, such as fetishes involving bodily functions or insects.
Early Onset: These patterns often appear early in life and are not learned through socialization.
Gender Differences: More prevalent in males, possibly due to different evolutionary pressures.
Emotional States and Concepts:
Dominance and Submission: Significant portion of human arousal is linked to feelings of dominance and submission.
Conceptual Arousal: Emotions like betrayal, transformation, and being eaten can trigger arousal, as can power dynamics.
Neural Crosstalk: Crosstalk in the brain between areas responsible for social behavior and arousal might explain these patterns.
Emotional Connections to People:
Emotional Lowering Threshold: Emotional connections lower the threshold for arousal, making familiar and loved individuals more sexually appealing.
Trope Attraction:
Role-Playing and Stereotypes: Certain stereotypes or roles (nurse, goth, cheerleader) can enhance arousal due to their adherence to specific tropes.
Novelty:
New Experiences: New and unique stimuli can be more arousing due to their novelty.
Pain and Asphyxiation:
Pain and Pleasure: Some arousal patterns are enhanced by pain or oxygen deprivation.
Basic Instincts:
Autopilot Behaviors: Some mating behaviors are driven by deeper neurological systems that do not always generate traditional feelings of arousal.
Physical Stimuli:
Direct Physical Interaction: Physical actions like kissing or touching erogenous zones directly trigger arousal.
Conditioned Responses:
Learned Arousal: Some arousal patterns result from conditioning, such as fetishes for inanimate objects.
Chapter 4: Things That Do Not Cause Arousal
Chapter Four delves into common misconceptions about what causes arousal, debunking myths and clarifying what does not influence sexual arousal patterns.
Limited Impact of Socialization:
The chapter argues against the pervasive belief that socialization significantly shapes sexual preferences.
Evidence shows that societal ideals promoting thinness do not change underlying arousal patterns.
Body Weight Preferences:
Despite societal ideals promoting thinness, studies show men generally prefer women of healthy weights.
Cultural Myths:
Historical examples like the art of Peter Paul Rubens suggest personal preferences rather than societal standards.
Parental Influence and Childhood:
The study finds no significant correlation between childhood conditions and adult arousal patterns.
The myth of the "childhood abuse cycle" is debunked; most abusers were not abused as children, and most abused children do not become abusers.
Social Taboos and Rule Breaking:
The notion that breaking social taboos inherently causes arousal is challenged.
Kinks are often socially taboo, but this is because they are defined by their taboo nature.
Intelligence and Sapiosexuality:
Attraction to intelligence (sapiosexuality) might be influenced by socialization.
Intelligence is processed in higher-order brain functions, suggesting it may not be an innate arousal trigger but rather a socially informed one.
Summaries:
Chapter 3 Summary:
Chapter Three of "The Pragmatist's Guide to Sexuality" examines various factors that trigger arousal, breaking them into distinct categories and exploring each in detail. The chapter challenges traditional models of sexual orientation, proposing a more nuanced understanding of human arousal patterns.
Breeding Targets:
Primary and Secondary Sex Characteristics: Arousal is linked to characteristics indicating fertility and sexual differentiation, such as body parts and movements.
Arousal Indicators: Traits like musculature, broad shoulders, and deep voices in males, and breasts, hips, and certain body movements in females.
Sexuality Models: Traditional models like the Kinsey scale are critiqued, proposing that attraction can be to specific traits rather than a spectrum from straight to gay.
Inverse Systems:
Atypical Arousal: Arousal from stimuli generally found disgusting by others, such as fetishes involving bodily functions or insects.
Early Onset: These patterns often appear early in life and are not learned through socialization.
Gender Differences: More prevalent in males, possibly due to different evolutionary pressures.
Emotional States and Concepts:
Dominance and Submission: Significant portion of human arousal is linked to feelings of dominance and submission.
Conceptual Arousal: Emotions like betrayal, transformation, and being eaten can trigger arousal, as can power dynamics.
Neural Crosstalk: Crosstalk in the brain between areas responsible for social behavior and arousal might explain these patterns.
Emotional Connections to People:
Emotional Lowering Threshold: Emotional connections lower the threshold for arousal, making familiar and loved individuals more sexually appealing.
Trope Attraction:
Role-Playing and Stereotypes: Certain stereotypes or roles (nurse, goth, cheerleader) can enhance arousal due to their adherence to specific tropes.
Novelty:
New Experiences: New and unique stimuli can be more arousing due to their novelty.
Pain and Asphyxiation:
Pain and Pleasure: Some arousal patterns are enhanced by pain or oxygen deprivation.
Basic Instincts:
Autopilot Behaviors: Some mating behaviors are driven by deeper neurological systems that do not always generate traditional feelings of arousal.
Physical Stimuli:
Direct Physical Interaction: Physical actions like kissing or touching erogenous zones directly trigger arousal.
Conditioned Responses:
Learned Arousal: Some arousal patterns result from conditioning, such as fetishes for inanimate objects.
Chapter 4 Summary:
Chapter Four delves into common misconceptions about what causes arousal, debunking myths and clarifying what does not influence sexual arousal patterns.
Limited Impact of Socialization:
The chapter argues against the pervasive belief that socialization significantly shapes sexual preferences.
Evidence shows that societal ideals promoting thinness do not change underlying arousal patterns.
Body Weight Preferences:
Despite societal ideals promoting thinness, studies show men generally prefer women of healthy weights.
Cultural Myths:
Historical examples like the art of Peter Paul Rubens suggest personal preferences rather than societal standards.
Parental Influence and Childhood:
The study finds no significant correlation between childhood conditions and adult arousal patterns.
The myth of the "childhood abuse cycle" is debunked; most abusers were not abused as children, and most abused children do not become abusers.
Social Taboos and Rule Breaking:
The notion that breaking social taboos inherently causes arousal is challenged.
Kinks are often socially taboo, but this is because they are defined by their taboo nature.
Intelligence and Sapiosexuality:
Attraction to intelligence (sapiosexuality) might be influenced by socialization.
Intelligence is processed in higher-order brain functions, suggesting it may not be an innate arousal trigger but rather a socially informed one.
Questions for Discussion:
How do the ten distinct systems described in Chapter 3 contribute to a comprehensive understanding of human arousal?
What are the key misconceptions about arousal debunked in Chapter 4, and what evidence supports these clarifications?
How can the insights from these chapters be applied in educational, clinical, and personal contexts?
We look forward to seeing you all and engaging in a stimulating discussion. For any questions, please contact Michael Michalchik at michaelmichalchik@gmail.com.
Links:
Chapter 3: Google Doc
URL: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GxUYb9SLfBsxfGUOUJfpuR7R6c3BXD2zXWiu6pRRXCc/edit?usp=sharing
Chapter 4: Google Doc
URL: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1er0lDZzdYNC8FkPfthg--iojTUxUi56NEWF1zgfMWQs/edit?usp=sharing
A question about trading real money prediction markets for Americans. I've been afraid of trading them because they are technically illegal and I'm afraid of the IRS. If I trade foreign markets using a VPN and make a profit I will owe taxes on them. You can declare "gambling profits" with the IRS and pay that, but I'm afraid doing that will lead to suspicion that I'm doing something illegal, which I would be.
Is there some full-proof way for Americans to trade on prediction markets and pay taxes on the profits and have every step of it be legal?
Aren't Kalshi and PredictIt legal in the US?
Incidentally, you *are* allowed to report illegal income to IRS. Not that that's necessarily a wise move.
I do read most of Scott's posts but it seems like the news is always bad for prediction markets, so I didn't realize that Kalshi is alive and kicking.
You could move out of the States. Or you could try Manifold, which is currently trying to exploit a loophole to make some of their markets legally real-money.
Thanks. Supposed "loopholes" have gotten me in huge trouble in the past, which is why I want to be 100% above board with clear laws that everyone understands and agrees upon.
If you want to avoid grey areas, probably best to stick to Kalshi then.
Thanks
Today I've come across an old post on Scott's Kabbalistic tumblr (https://aaronsmithtumbler.tumblr.com/post/180028129540) arguing that Buddhism is an Abrahamic religion on grounds of emperor Ashoka being descended by Abraham and Hercules. I've responded with a different line of arguing toward the same conclusion (https://o-craven-canto.tumblr.com/post/756801523678314496/), as follows:
> Buddhism is an outgrowth of Hinduism in the same way that Christianity and Islam are outgrowths of Judaism; indeed, Buddhism is counted as one of the heterodox schools[1] of Hinduism (along with Jainism, the ultra-determinist Ajivika, the agnostic-nihilist Ajnana, and the vaguely LessWrongian Charvaka[2]).
> Hinduism in turn grew out of the Proto-Indo-European religion [3], with the Vedic pantheon having clear parallels in its Greek, Roman, Germanic, and Slavic homologues.
> Central to most Indo-European religions is the theme of //Chaoskampf// [4], a battle between a male god or demigod, usually associated with the sky and storms, and a monstrous dragon or serpent, associated with water and the underworld, thereby bringing order and safety to the world. Examples include Hittite (Tarhunt vs. Illuyanka), Greek (Zeus vs. Typhon and Apollo vs. Python), Norse (Thor vs. Jormungandr), and Hindu (Indra vs. Vritra). But even older examples are known from the Mesopotamian-Semitic world, including Babylonian (Marduk vs. Tiamat), Egyptian (Ra vs. Apep), Cananean (Baal Hadad vs. Lotan), and of course the Bible, which reminds us that Yahweh crushed the Leviathan [5] in the course of creation, and that all the ills of the world are to be blamed on a serpent.*
> By the principle that two cultures that share something sorta similar must be related, it is clear that one of Indo-European or Mesopotamian tradition has to be ancestral to the other. (“But that’s not how it–” Shut up.) The question is which.
> Now, the Yamnaya Culture [6], which is the current best guess for the last common ancestor of all Indo-European cultures and languages, existed in the Ponto-Caspian steppe around 3000 BCE; whereas Abraham is traditionally believed to have lived around 1800 BCE.
> HOWEVER: 1) //Answers in Genesis// ensures us [7] (and if you can’t trust the scholarship of Young Earth creationists, who can you trust?) that probably Abraham was in fact contemporary to the Early Dynastic period of Mesopotamia, so a thousand years older than usually supposed. 2) We have no writing from the Yamnaya culture: the Indo-European mythemes might very well have entered their cultures when the migrations were already in course. The first written traces of Indo-European religions are Hittite tablets dated at the 17th century at oldest; the //Rig Veda//, which tells us the story of Indra and Vritra, is about the same age.
> Since we know that Abraham might have defeated an early Hittite king in battle [8], it’s not out of the question that words of Abraham’s faith may have spread among the Hittites, who had not quite settled in Anatolia yet, and thence to their fellow migrating Indo-Europeans, who had not yet reached their eventual locations. In this way, garbled memories of Yahweh’s creation of the world found their way in early Greek, Norse, and Hindu mythology as well as in the rest of the Near East.
> Therefore, all major Indo-European religious traditions can be considered Abrahamic. Therefore, Hinduism is Abrahamic. Therefore, Buddhism is Abrahamic too.
> * = For some reason, the same motif is also in Japan (Susanoo vs. Yamata-no-Orochi); no idea how to fit that in.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%80stika_and_n%C4%81stika#N%C4%81stika
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charvaka#Philosophy
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_mythology
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_(cosmogony)#Chaoskampf
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psalm_74
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamnaya_culture
[7] https://web.archive.org/web/20130624005755/www.answersingenesis.org/contents/379/arj/v5/Abraham_chronology_ancient_Mesopotamia.pdf
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Siddim#Tidal
There's an old speculation that the names Brahma and Abraham might have a common source. It does seem unlikely that two separate civilizations would randomly converge on basically the same weird sequence of phonemes for some of their most central religious figures.
On the Indian side, the name Brahma only appears in the post-vedic period, even though he gets retrospectively identified with the vedic Prajapati. So the word might be a later borrowing, not a correspondence at the source.
A related argument you may enjoy is that Jesus's maternal grandparents were bodhisattvas. The immaculate conception of Mary runs counter to the idea that all people are born with original sin. Why was she different? Potentially, because both of her parents attained enlightenment, and thus were able to create life without passing on burdens.
Unfortunately I don't remember all the supporting details, but the high school teacher who argued this claimed evidence for her being from further east, and for Buddhist influence in Christ's teachings.
Some Gnostic theology declared to be heresy by the early Christian church scans as Hindu/Buddhist influenced.
“Abandon the search for God and the creation and other matters of a similar sort. Look for him by taking yourself as a starting point. Learn who it is within you makes everything his own and says, My God, my mind, my thought, my soul, my body. Learn the sources of sorrow, joy, love, hate. Learn how it happens that one watches without willing, loves without willing. If you carefully investigate these matters, you will find him within yourself.”
That sounds just like the Hindu-ish practice of self-enquiry. Score one for the perennial philosophy I guess!
The idea that Buddhism is an Abrahamic religion is absurd. Even if Ashoka is somehow descended from the mythical Heracles and the Spartans are really related to the Israelite, it doesn't follow that Buddhism is an Abrahamic religion. The Buddha was teaching around roughly same time (give or take a century) that the Jews were exiled in Babylon when the Jews began to regard Yahweh as a monotheistic god rather than a henotheistic god. So, it would be difficult to see how those two traditions influenced each other so early in their development. Likewise, the Buddha didn't care about god worship, and he was one of several Axial Age Indian religious movements that rejected the Vedantic traditions.
Although I no longer identify myself as Buddhist, this sort of speculation has a Eurocentric/ethnocentric tone that I find kind of offensive even not being a Buddhist.
Of course it's absurd, and everything you're saying is correct. I'm not under the impression that it's actually in any way reasonable to classify Buddhism as Abrahamic, nor was the original post. The point of the exercise is to take a deliberately absurd statement and seeing how apparently good an argument one can make for it. I tried to make it semi-explicit with the “But that’s not how it–” intermission, but I apologize if I failed to make it clearer.
That intermission as well as the note on YEC trustworthiness were absolutely clear about the intent of the post - a little too on the nose even, I would say.
What do you mean by YEC? And what do you mean by intermission?
YEC is an acronym for "Young Earth Creationist", used to be used online a lot back when creationism was the controversy de jure. Answers in Genesis is the preeminent young earth creationist organization.
https://graymirror.substack.com/p/more-reflections-on-the-kamala-koup
Biden hasn't been seen in public since July 17th. Anyone else ready to admit things are a *tad* odd rn?
Yeah, it seemed odd to me too. I was worried that he was very sick. Now my guess is that he was just being a stubborn fighter who let himself be talked into giving up, but didn't like it and still resents the people who pressured him.
How have you updated after his speech?
I still think it wasn't exactly "his decision" per se but he's now realized there's no point left in fighting it and so is starting to cooperate.
Yeah, I don't recall there being anything in his resignation speech about being unfit or too old, just about "what's best for the country". So I'm guessing that that's the face-saving rationalization that he was presented with.
The story I saw was that what finally pushed him over the edge was being presented with internal campaign polling that showed him massively behind in all of the swing states.
Neither has Trump. Where's Trump.
But Biden is back at the WH...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLk8yRf0ooQ
It's clear there has been a coup. We don't know whether the POTUS is dead or alive. This constitutional crisis has been manufactured by the Deep State due to fear Trump will be reelected. It's the only way for them to maintain power. Don't expect there to be an election this November.
Queue news footage of Biden returning to the white house. LoL!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLk8yRf0ooQ
Yes, the Illuminati have imprisoned him while he gets over his case COVID.
Don’t expect someone who takes Yarvin at face value to recognize irony.
The above linked Moldbug post may be the dumbest one I've read since he proved "by logical deduction" that Barack Obama was born overseas.
He turned up on video this morning.
And the 2024 take on this is - How do we know it isn't a deepfake? :-)
Because that would require competence. Have you observed any competence lately?
Well, the electric grid still works, but competence in politics - not so much... :-)
How do we know you're not a Russian bot? ;-)
You can never be quite sure... :-)
Some Things are Not Meant for Man to Know. :-)
Strictly speaking, _I_ can't know for sure. The small scale version of the simulation hypothesis could suggest that I'm a Russian bot who just _thinks_ that they are a human in South Carolina. :-)
Biden has COVID.
He sounded really good when he called into Kamala's campaign event (best he's sounded in a awhile, IMO)
Can our President not so much as indulge us with a Zoom call? (Masked up, ofc)
Biden hasn't been seen in a week, therefore we should switch to a monarchy?
That's an, um, interesting chain of argument there.
I’m beginning to think Sam is just trolling here.
I like to think I exist at the superposition of total trolling and totally sincere, tyvm
Biden hasn't been seen in a week, during one of the most consequential periods in recent political history, suggesting the way we thought things work isn't how they work.
Nancy Pelosi threatened "easy way or the hard way" - this is standard constitutional proceeding? Really?
Move aside Comrades, nothing to see here
Biden just returned to the White House from Delaware (below). His doctor has said he's mostly recovered from COVID and he's not contagious anymore. Meanwhile Trump has been MIA since the Harris announcement. Last week, the Cook Political Report spoke admiringly of how competent Trump's brain trust has been (compared to his previous clowns [errr advisors] who lost him the 2020 election). But the Trump brain trust seems to have been taken off guard by Biden's withdrawal. Biden just pulled a George Washington, and all that's been leaked from the Trump side is, "Yeah, we expected this" — but it's obvious that they're still thinking about how to respond.
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=356445010665279
Ugh.
I'm looking for the personal page of someone adjacent to rationalism, lesswrong and effective altruism crowd. I don't believe he is a completely obscure figure but search engines are completely unhelpful these days.
I vaguely recall him curating a list of what he considered to be some of the most pressing questions, covering topics involving AI, nanotech and so on. Maybe he even put forth some predictions related to those topics but I'm not sure. I believe he also had a strong interest in the ethical treatment of animals and may have been British or at least studied at a British university.
His blog had a Web 1.0 feel to it, possibly featuring a green background. It was definitely not a substack. Does anyone know who I might be referring to?
David Pearce? Richard Ngo?
Since you mention a UK connection, perhaps it was someone from the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_Humanity_Institute
https://www.cold-takes.com/ ?
Open slatestarcodex.com. The blogroll on the left-hand side might contain what you're looking for. If not, open slatestarcodex.com in archive.org, jump a few years back, to the time when it still contained those fun categories like "Those That At A Distance Resemble Flies" or "Those That Have Just Broken The Flower Vase".
Definitely not Gwern. It was someone less well-known than Gwern. His blog had a green background or maybe black with a green banner.
What positions would an ASX-approved politician likely take? Almost certainly they would be for legalizing prediction markets but what else? I can see the following as possible issues, but my epistemic uncertainty is high for many of them:
1. Pro prediction markets
2. Anti FDA?
3. Anti AI?
4. Pro plural marriage?
5. Pro high-skilled immigration?
6. Anti tariff and Pro free trade?
7. NIMBY for post 19th century architecture?
8. Pro nuclear power?
9. No idea regarding foreign policy w.r.t. Ukraine or Taiwan
10. Pro vegan/vegetarian?
What else?
Note that my question marks represent actual questions not assertions.
> What positions would an ASX-approved politician likely take?
Scott-approved maybe, but *commenters* on ACX have widely differing viewpoints on most topics. We even have Trumpists here. You're never going to get a consensus on anything.
I'll try to give you an answer if you can tell me what ASX stands for? I strongly suspect it's not the Australian Securities and eXchange commission. ;-)
Apparently I can't read acronyms. I meant Astral Codex Ten. (Is acronym blindness a thing? I often mess them up.)
LoL! I was really puzzled. But my take would be that no pol could win over the hearts and minds of the diverse ACX crew.
"plural marriage"
Ah, is this the new acceptable term? Thanks, I do need to keep on top of "what you can and can't say, even if you could say it ten minutes ago but now you are a monster if you do" terms 😁
Can we adopt more recondite linguistic terminology? I support the Aorist movement! (Whatever it turns out to be.)
I think Mormons have used the phrase for a long time.
Pro home schooling.
Rationalists and the Christian right align once again.
I think it's worth considering if rationalists and the Christian right have rationality in common. It's the bootstrap axioms that are different.
That's true. But I actually did homeschool my daughter through 7th grade, and the homeschoolers in my area were mostly of 2 sorts: Fundamentalist Christians; and well-educated parents of exceptionally smart kids who also had a lot of extreme sensitivities and oddities. Second group is a reasonable approximation of ACX. My point is that there are groups of people who arrive at being pro- homeschooling without traveling some my-beliefs-must-prevail path.
This sounds suspiciously like "horseshoe theory". ;-)
If ACX were a sufficiently narrow place that it could endorse a single candidate, I wouldn't bother posting here. I value the fact that ACX is a politically diverse place where reaching consensus is an anti-goal.
(On your list I would be weakly in favour of 1 and 8, and some version of 5, not particularly keen on the others while also not keen on the exact opposite.)
I was more or less responding to Scott saying he wants to put together an ASX local ballot for other cities and states. So it's really trying to guess what Scott would favor not what the community of readers would.
Huh. Well, it's Scott's place I guess he can do what he likes.
Well, if Hulk Hogan is going to be Mr. Trump's Secretary of State, he'll need to improve his wardrobe. From what I've seen, he's as careless as Fetterman.
Ted Nugent is just too excitable.
It's all about those private one-on-one negotiations...
There are many Cabinet positions I think The Nuge would be an excellent fit for. Education, Homeland Security, HHS, so many crying out for Uncle Ted to put them in a Stranglehold, I'd want him to Wango Tango through each one for ~3 months. Pretty sure the before/after headcount would be exactly like Elon Musk's housecleaning at Twitter.
State Department, diplomat, not so much. White House Press Secretary would be fun, but the tag team of Tucker Carlson and Vivek R already have that locked up.
I continue to wonder how many nerds have an irrational fondness for Ted Nugent due to reading You Awaken In Razor Hill, despite having nothing in common socioculturally otherwise. (Scratchfever would be a great First Pet name though.)
I saw Hogan walking around a Minneapolis lake back in the 90’s. (Think of the beginning of the old Mary Tylor Moore show.) He was walking with a very blonde woman counterclockwise around Lake Calhoun and I was running around it clockwise.
As we approached he cut such a ridiculous figure I had a hard time keeping a straight face. He gave me a pro wrestler scowl in return.
I'm impressed. That's almost like meeting the pope! My sister, a conservative in Democratic Minnesota, is constantly stressed over the political theatrics. In addition to homey Garrison Keillor, they had TV wrestler for governor for a time. She doesn't put out political signs on the lawn.
Yeah the whole governor Ventura thing was wild. He didn’t do anything crazy during his single term in office though and I think the guy has a good heart. He’s very happy that Minnesota legalized cannabis recently and made a point of being around when the bill was signed into law.
Do people enjoy repetitive physical exercise? I find strenuous exercise to be painful — and it's not the "feel the burn" lactic acid burn, it's like thorns in my major muscles with a pain level of about 3 on a scale of 10. Oh, I force myself to get through the pain, but I've never experienced the endorphin high that people talk about. But after 15 miles on my bike or 10 laps in the 50-meter pool, I'll feel nauseous for 15 to 20 minutes after exercising. After the nausea retreats, I feel pretty good. Do other people experience what I've described?
Repetitive, not really. I like variation, and goals that let me focus on what I'm doing and why. If I'm just doing the same thing repeatedly, my brain eventually tunes it out, so my performance suffers, plus I get bored.
Somehow I can usually manage to work alongside the "good" pain, though.
If you're doing what appears to be very light exercise, and you're having symptoms that only show up when doing heavy exercise under e.g. heatstroke conditions, then that seems out of normal range.
There are conditions (like thyroid problems) that feel like all-over fatigue that lasts for years and are easily cleared up with iodine, just as an example. I'd suggest a blood workup. Something's up with your system and it'll help you out to know what.
I mean, I don't. It's fine, I just add weight until I go to failure durring my willpower window.
Aerobic exercise is harder; I have to play games there to keep myself entertained. I run with the dog or practice falling and rolling in the park or I do heavy bag sprints because they all are just entertaining enough to avoid complete boredom.
>I force myself to get through the pain,
You're not supposed to do that. You push through the burn, not actual pain, actual pain is a sign that you're doing something wrong and could injure yourself.
I really enjoy work-related exercise. Had a job stocking shelves, lots of squats and low-effort arm movement, and it was a great time. Temp job unloading delivery trucks, great time. Not so much exercise for exercise's sake, that's always been tolerable at best.
That's the common wisdom. But I can't move at much more than a gentle walking pace without feeling pain after a short number of repetitions — say a minute or so of aerobic exercise. And it's not the lactic acid "burn" because the pain stops when I stop moving (and the burn will remain after the workout, and is less intensely uncomfortable than the pain). So I'm faced with the option of not exercising at rates that work my cardio, or enduring the pain. I've been enduring the pain for over forty years now. AFAICT it hasn't done me any physical harm. But I just wanted to check to see if people *really* get any pleasure out of exercise.
Depends.
Weightlifting is very enjoyable and calming. Like, very often my brain will get too loud and have too many conflicting thoughts. If you put 200 pounds on a metal bar over your chest, you can't think any thought except lifting this heavy bit of metal up and down without crushing your ribcage. Add in some nu metal at max volume and it's very zen.
Cardio sucks. Cardio always sucks and people who like cardio are liars or mutants. :)
What’s your body’s response to weightlifting and other kinds of strength training rather than cardio?
Pain. Lots of pain.
Sorry to hear that. I basically agree with the response Theophylline just posted above.
What's your experience with weightlifting? I empathize with beowulf888, lifting weights hurts. Isn't that the point? No pain, no gain, pain is just weakness leaving the body, and all that? Why do you think most people don't exercise as much as they should, because they don't have time in their schedule?
I enjoy weightlifting. There's good pain and bad pain. Bad pain usually comes from poor technique, trying to lift too much, overtraining, or injury.
I don't know what good pain is. All pain is bad to me. ;-)
I enjoy outdoor biking quite a bit. On hot summer rides I get pretty dehydrated. I can’t seem to drink enough water during a ride. Post long summer rides are about the only time I really like the taste of beer. A couple of weak American lagers really hit the spot.
I don’t get the same buzz of euphoria that came from actual long runs. I gave that joint pounding activity up a long time ago.
Running to physical limits usually involved a degree of pain. I’ve never experienced any nausea or anything approaching actual pain while biking though, just ordinary fatigue.
Wintertime indoor turbo trainer rides are just tedious.
Whether I enjoy it depends on my mood and what the exercise is, but I've never felt anything like thorns in my major muscles! The pain part for me isn't pain, precisely, it's the unpleasantness of pushing back against reluctance to go fast, dislike of being out of breath and/or fatigued. If I'm enjoying the exercise, or am listening to energizing music I like then the painful craving to stop and rest shrinks a lot, or occasionally goes away completely. And I don't feel nausea after -- just feel sweaty and fatigued. I'm pretty sure that what you're feeling is quite unusual.
If you're feeling nauseous every time, you might be pushing yourself too hard. How regularly do you exercise?
I just started biking again after a year+ hiatus to let my hip heal up (tendonitis). But when I was exercising previously, I'd do 12 to 15 miles my mountain bike (mostly flatland trails except for a couple of hill climbs) two to three times a week. And I'd swim a kilometer at least 3 times a week until I messed up my shoulder (rotator cuff issue) a few years back.
I'm up 9 miles on the mountain bike (approx an hour) two to three times a week. And I swim half a klick (with a lot of rests) in the pool 3 times a week (and my shoulder seems to be behaving). I haven't gotten my old form back, though. Which is frustrating.
But I felt the nausea during my previous exercise regimens. And I'm feeling it again now after restarting workouts. And I've come to (re)appreciate how unpleasant physical exertion is. ;-)
But what about the level 3 pain feeling of thorns in your muscles? I don't understand why more people aren't commenting on that. I don't think I or anyone else I've compared notes with feels any muscle pain at all, except of course if they are sore from yesterday's exertion or have an injury. I cannot think of a single time I have felt that. Even when I push a muscle to its limit -- for instance, doing my absolute best to crank out one more rep, and failing because the muscle is exhausted -- I don't feel pain, just that "ugh, exertion" feeling really strongly. Oh, and about runner's high. Yes, I've felt especially peaceful and contented for a couple hours after a heavy workout -- I'd say I feel it about 10% of the time after heavy workouts -- and it's a very pleasant feeling. I wouldn't think of calling it a high, because it's not ecstatic and there's no buzz -- but it's a recognizably different state.
I begin to feel this pain in the muscle groups that I'm using after a certain number of repetitions — and they either have to be quick repetitions or repetitions against resistance for it to manifest itself. So I'm pretty sure it has something to do with the oxygen uptake (or lack thereof?) in my tissues. People say, "Well, that's the burn you're feeling." But I also can feel the lactic acid burn after a certain number of repetitions, and yes that feels like a burning sensation. But this other pain feels like something stabbing my muscles, but, unlike the burn, it goes away immediately when I stop the repetitions.
There were two times I didn't feel this sensation...
After having two of my wisdom teeth out the dentist prescribed me a three-day supply of Percocet. I went running on the third day on Percocet. I felt the burn, but not the pain. So this pain can be mediated by opioids. I'm not sure I want to become an opioid addict just so I can exercise comfortably, though. ;-)
And now for the inevitable LSD story (sorry, if people get bored of these) — I went on a run with some friends while tripping. I'm usually the slowest of the pack, but the psychedelic made me feel "in tune" with my body. I had the impression I was moving perfectly, not only did I keep up with the pack, I didn't feel either the pain or the burn. And I had what seemed like an endorphin high the entire four-mile run. It was a memorably pleasant experience. The next day I had no stiff muscles.
Yes, I think you must be right -- something to do with oxygen uptake, my guess is that the thorns hit in spots in the muscle where amount of oxygen falls below some threshold. That's game of you to have pushed through it some many times. I'm pretty certain it's unusual, but if it meant there were something weird wrong you'd know by now, so probably just a bodily idiosyncrasy. Just for the record, here's what I feel when my muscles are out of oxygen: There is one long steep hill I can elect to ride up on the way home, and unless I'm near being in my best shape, I am forced to walk the last bit. What forces me is that I can actually feel my leg muscles run out of oxygen -- my legs get numb and tingly, and will not obey my demand that they push hard. And of course I am very out of breath by that point, too. The state is very unpleasant, but there is no actual pain. I'm pretty sure my body is doing the typical thing, & yours is the quirky one.
I experienced a runners high once, but it was after a 5 hour hike in the mountains where I realized I needed to get home sooner than expected and so really pushed myself to move fast for half of it. I was extremely exhausted, but I did feel very happy and at peace for a while afterwards. So I think to try to reach that high you have to really, really, reaaaaally push your limits.
I run for 15-20 minutes every day and it feels terrible every time. It does feel good to be able to run farther and faster over time, but the running itself still sucks.
Yes, that's almost exactly my experience (well, minus the nausea). I've never experienced a runner's high despite being a competitive swimmer for many years. When I'm in shape the first few minutes of a workout can feel good in a "it's nice to be moving" kind of way, but once I burn off the first few minutes' worth of energy it's always just an unpleasant slog. But it's worth it because a hard workout always makes me feel great for the rest of the day.
Yep, the reason I do cardio is the same reason the man from the joke was banging his head against the wall: because it feels so good when you stop!
Yes. That's my experience. Afterward, I feel great. But it's a slog to get there. Thanks!
>And ideally you shouldn't have muscle *pain* at all I don't think
This is pretty foreign to my experience: the only way to exercise without pain is to walk, if I'm running or jogging for longer than three minutes my body is going to hurt and I'm going to want to stop; which is what I did for years and years. Now that I'm jogging every day I hurt less then when I started, but my muscles still hurt.
Sorry you're in the same boat as I am. But I'm glad I'm not alone in finding that exercise is painful
So I'm an intern working on developing an iOS app (no, I'm not going tell you what it's for) using SwiftUI (which is practically mandatory if you want to make an Apple ecosystem app of any sort), and suffice it to say there are a lot of things about SwiftUI that I am already starting to dislike. In no particular order:
- SwiftUI is very verbose. It's more verbose than React or Svelte (which I also know), and *much* more than HTML.
- A View has to be declared as a struct, which are supposedly immutable, but to add state (which is also practically required), you tag properties with "@State" instead, which seems like a hacky workaround.
- The entire library is closed source (despite Apple's rather extensive set of documentation) so we don't really know what actually goes underneath the hood.
- There are few opportunities to add print statements which are my favorite way of debugging things. In particular I don't think they can go into the `var body: some View` statement.
> which are supposedly immutable...
I like "immutable by default", and you have to go through extra hoops to make it mutable, so the lazy solution would usually be to use immutable over mutable. The more immutable parts you have, the easier the dataflow becomes, i.e. you always know where a value was initialized, and you don't have to guess if/where it may have been updated.
But then why do we tag all the state variables with @State?
That’s the decision that Apple made? @State is a global state albeit one associated with the view.
If it distresses you you can use a view model which would always be a class. As views get complex most people will do that.
The most common way to produce iOS apps is UIKit still, although I imagine you would like that less.
We already have a member in St. Louis who makes one of these, so it'd be easy!
youth suffrage, that is the elimination of age requirements for voting. Knowing full well it will in many cases mean parents of young children get extra votes, I think that should be a bigger part of various groups agenda. I will leave aside the first principle arguments and just point out that it would be a very large systematic offset to the increasingly entrenched gerontocracy. Therefore any group that thinks that one of the main challenges to enacting their agenda is the number of older voters should consider youth suffrage as a potential remedy.
But aside from a few public intellectuals I don't see it in the mix. There are some scattered efforts to reduce the voting age to 16 in some places. Why doesnt for example, the group that wants free day care add this to their agenda, realizing if they get it, the free day care will in turn become easier to get.
It strikes me as weird that (18yo) kids can be sent to war by a government they've never voted for. Based on that principle alone I'd like [voting age] = [minimum draft age] - [maximum term length].
So you're proposing that the gerontocracy has too much power, so they should vote to reduce their power? I'm sure they'll sign up for that.
Well every past group of voters did that as suffrage expanded. It was a political fight every time, but it happened.
"Why doesnt for example, the group that wants free day care add this to their agenda, realizing if they get it, the free day care will in turn become easier to get."
That's not the youth vote though, that's the parents' vote and they're the older voters.
As to what kids would vote on, aren't there youth parliaments and the like? Something I was never interested in, so even if I could have legally voted at 12 or whatever, I wouldn't have done (so I suppose my mother would have used my vote in my stead).
https://eyp.org/
The parents interested in free day care would be mostly younger than 45. Thats not really the older voters i had in mind. And yes I am assuming the parents just takes the vote in many cases. And note i myself do not support free day care, but i think the group that does should also talk about youth suffrage.
Against gerontocracy, perhaps a maximum voter age? Should a 90-year-old vote, although he won't suffer the consequences of his decision a few years or decades later?
(I'm not really in favor of this... Impossible to find a good Schelling point.)
So for the first five or so years of my kid's life, I get to argue with my wife about what to do with the extra vote.
After that, the kid will start asserting their own right to do what they like with the vote. And the kids will be targeted with political advertising non-stop because they're the most susceptible voters. The average kid sees one ad for a toy and immediately wants it more than anything else in life, how are they going to react to a nonstop barrage of advertisements telling them that one party wants to give them ice cream and the other one wants to drown their puppies?
They'll vote the way their teachers tell them to vote: "Now class, global lack of sweaters for penguins is the most pressing issue of our day, so I want you all to consider the poor cold penguins. Wouldn't it be lovely to give them nice warm sweaters?
By the way, my cousin Bob is running for the Penguin Party and the next election is June 19th. Remember our last civics class on the importance of voting and how it's only by voting that change happens? So if you think penguins should have sweaters - and only horrible mean selfish wicked people don't think that - then you could vote for Bob if you want, but I'm not *telling* you to vote for Bob".
Or they'll vote against what authority figures tell them, because f*** you, I hate washing the dishes.
It is hard to find a Schelling point - some 25-year-olds are idiots and some 14-year-olds are completely rational - but I think the current solution of matching up the draft age with the voting age is sensible. I could probably be persuaded to lower it to 16 or 14 on the grounds that a 14-year-old may well find themselves drafted by the time a President they vote for is out of office. (But let's be honest, most 14-year-olds think going to war would be an adventure anyway).
"But let's be honest, most 14-year-olds think going to war would be an adventure anyway"
Eh; having lived in countries with active drafts, this is very much not the common view for 14 year old boys who think about this in near-mode.
1968 weird as hell film “Wild in the Streets”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_in_the_Streets
Popular rock singer and aspiring revolutionary, Max Frost demands the voting age be lowered to 14.
“14 or fight” becomes the mantra of disaffected American youth.
Something, something, LSD in the DC water supply and a constitutional amendment is passed.
I saw the film, but geez, 1968 was a long time ago so all I can add by way of review is that I found it funny at the time.
Just clicked through and saw their strategy for the congressional vote. We suck at politics.
"Youth suffrage" is an anti-democratic idea.
It's not so much that 16-year-olds lack the experience and knowledge needed to make an informed vote, though that is indeed a problem.
The big problem is that 16-year-olds are legally required to spend large parts of their day in an environment where they are subjected to government-approved propaganda. And yes, it is indeed propaganda, which a distressingly-high proportion of teachers are eager to subject students to.
Parents who are well-off may be able to avoid this by sending their kids to private schools, or by home schooling, but that's not an option for everyone.
So the effect of "youth suffrage" is to entrench the current governing ideology.
I don t associate private schools with a lack of propaganda. In the UK they churn out young Tories. As for home schooling, religious instruction is one of the main motivations.
It’s kind of a latter day Whole Earth Catalog hippie thing in the US too.
Arlo and Dylan across the alley from my place are home schooling. I’m not joking about their names.
That's one very small step from religious instruction.
I think I know what you’re getting at here but the kids seem to be fully aware that dad continually repairing a decrepit VW van and mom throwing pots are just engaging in lifestyle LARPing.
They both seem to be well adjusted socially and pretty sharp. If they learn enough to do well on their SATs I think they’ll be fine.
Absence of propaganda is certainly not guaranteed in private schools. Nor are parents guaranteed to instruct their children to think for themselves. But at least one might expect some diversity for these non-government options, rather than a uniform indoctrination in the government's ideology.
And as bad as it often is now, one can expect the level of indoctrination in schools to greatly increase once the students can actually vote.
You're making an assumption about the political direction the kids will break in, but I think once you start considering which kids will actually vote, things get considerably more muddled.
I am not taking any particular assumption about which way they would break here, though I do have my own opinions, but I imagine different interest groups might believe kids or parents taking their kids vote would break in their way, and therefore see youth suffrage as serving their interests on net.
Apologies, I misread your final paragraph to imply that the daycare groups should expect the youth vote regardless, whereas I now suspect you meant that the youth vote would affiliate with them, both before and after getting the vote, as some sort of reward for supporting their suffrage?
The kids aren’t going to be voting at age 6 on their own terms. The parents are going to tell them how to vote. Now work the rest out.
Sorry I admit to making one assumption about that in the post above. What I meant is that I am not making this post thinking kids (or their parents) would break in a high level red vs blue direction. But I think there are specific issues for which youth suffrage would shift the median vote in such a way to make those issues more politically viable. Furthermore, precisely because its not clear they would break in either a red or blue direction youth suffrage would be a more reliable way to boost those specific policies without worrying about the overall red/blue balance.
In the red camp, there is a group of people who want to reduce or eliminate public pension, but its politically toxic. They convince their party to flirt with the idea anyways. A group of voters who have 0 interest in preserving pension would make this policy less toxic and much more likely to advance completely irrespective of whatever policy preferences the new voters do actually have. So that group should take youth suffrage seriously
In the blue camp there is a group who want more government support for parents. I think its very likely that on net youth suffrage increases the number of votes for any candidate who promises that, in either party, primary or general, because parents would be more likely than any other group to vote for them and would heavily influence their kids votes. So that groups interests are served by youth suffrage.
But with youth suffrage, the gain in votes from parents exercising the vote on their children's behalf would be counter-balanced by the kids voting in their own names now that they're 13 or whatever, who will be vehemently opposed to giving parents more power or support from the government.
Remember when you were 14 and convinced your parents were brutal tyrants stopping you from doing what you wanted? 😀
Are you assuming some degree of rational self-interest?
I think my main assumption here is some form of the median voter theorem. Issues actually matter, and the voters interest's drive what the parties build their platforms around. They are self-interested, but rationality varies.
I'd say it hasn't made much progress for two reasons.
1. Entrenched interests. Who benefits if you lower the voting age? Depending on how low you go, probably Democrats. So automatically Republicans will be against it. Lowering the voting age last time required amending the Constitution, so it is exceedingly unlikely Democrats would be able to push it through on their own, even if they wanted to.
2. It sounds bad on paper; it's literally expanding the franchise to the least experienced and least educated demographic in the country. And how are you going to stop parents from casting their kids ballots? (Though Republican's might be in favor of lowering the voting age, provided that parents get vote for their kids until they reach the age of majority. Which makes some sense, they get to decide everything else about their kids lives until then anyway).
>And how are you going to stop parents from casting their kids ballots?<
By making the kids go in the voting booth alone, like everyone else that votes.
Everyone in my state gets mailed a ballot with their name on it. Are you going to outlaw mail in ballots too?
1 the world of politics is not limited to republicans and democrats, For one it is global, for two within parties their are many factions that pull those parties in different directions, surely there are some factions who believe their policy interests are more likely to gain traction with a large group of new voters
2 is getting into the first principles bit. And I agree there are arguments against this, but I think it it is defensible enough on paper that a group that saw it in their interests practically speaking should take it more seriously.
Individual states could lower the voting age without a constitutional amendment.
And who benefits? They don't need it in blue states, they're already blue. They don't want it in red states, that would help the blues. And in purple states you'd need both sides to co-operate.
> They don't need it in blue states, they're already blue. They don't want it in red states, that would help the blues.
I think kids tend to inherit the political orientation of their parents though. (In other words, blue parents tend to have blue kids, whereas red parents tend to have red kids.) So I don't think this is actually as valid of an objection as you might think.
Though I don't think Pew has polled under 18's on their political affiliation, the data we have is a nice trend that says, under age 70, the younger you are the more likely you are to vote blue. So even if it was the case that under 18 you suddenly get a lot of kids who will vote red, you can understand why the reds think otherwise.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/04/09/age-generational-cohorts-and-party-identification/
I think you're conflating two things as one thing: 1) gerontocracy, which is old people in most positions of power, 2) the interests of young people being weighed too little in policies. In any case I'm not entirely sure lowering the voting age would cause either a reduction in the average age of elected officials or policies that benefit young people.
Re your example, I'm not sure why 16 year olds voting would make it more likely that you get publicly funded daycare (note I used publicly funded instead of "free" for a reason).
In democratic terms, rule by the people, the voters rule, not the actual elected officials. So I would argue a gerontocracy is in place if the voters are composed largely of older people
Perhaps I put those 2 sentences close together. The point about 16 year olds, is that the only organized youth suffrage efforts are milquetoast. A voting age of 0 I would assume raises the political power of people with young children, many of whom might want free daycare. I am not advocating for free day care, so I describe it in the terms that the interest group would describe it, I understand the underlying economics.
I'm now imagining the hissy-fit the childfree would throw: "just because they spawned some rug rats, they get four votes while I only get one? this is not democracy!"
https://www.reddit.com/r/childfree/
It sounds like you would be opposed on first principles, but could support it due to its practical effects, is that fair?
Thats kind of my point. If many people would be happy with its practical effect, why isnt more of a thing.
As for this general reasoning as to why kids shouldnt get to vote, its basically identical to every past resistance to increasing suffrage right? The argument might be right, it might be more right than every past case. But the past expansions happened anyways I think largely for practical effect reasons. Is it just that kids are the one true use case of a people who shouldnt be allowed to vote that the practical effects dont matter? I am skeptical.
The obvious Schelling point would be that citizens vote, no?
The thing that bugs me most about Kamala is the way that reality is about to shift around her. Right now (or at least as of yesterday) most people seem to agree that she's a fairly unlikeable politician with no real achievements and a weird cackle, who achieved her position through a combination of failing upwards and [something else].
But culture is downstream of politics, and in particular culture is downstream of the short-term electoral needs of the Democratic Party, which means she's about to be beatified, canonised, and then deified in rapid succession. The things that people think they believe about her this week will be gone by the end of next month. She will be "America's cool aunt" or something, and the greatest politician of her generation. Her many flaws will be no more mentionable than Biden's senility was one month ago.
And for those of us left out of this rapid cosmic retcon, it will all seem very jarring.
As the man on the gallows said to his neighbor, first time?
>and a weird cackle
I don’t know why anyone who considers that relevant should be taken seriously.
You've got to remember that these are just simple voters. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new America. You know... morons.
Assuming this is serious, I disagree. My mental model of the average American voter is not "morons". That term was previously applied to people with IQ 50-70. It seems weird to try to claim that the average American has the aptitude to be an unskilled worker and no more. Isn't the average American in the IQ range 95-105?
Ah, sorry, I was paraphrasing a line from Blazing Saddles. In all seriousness, I think something like having an awkward laugh is the kind of thing that turns away prospective voters. I think it's one of the vibes based parts of politics.
I suppose Kamala will debate Trump in Biden's next scheduled debate? Or will there be some reason it can't be held, nor rescheduled?
Last I heard, Trump is saying "the deal was with Biden, not you -- if you want to debate me we gotta renegotiate" and demanding that it be on Fox News.
Trump's logic was solid, he knew that Biden was out of it and would look terrible no matter the debate conditions, so he set out a blanket offer to debate anywhere, any time, under any format, no matter how rigged.
Now the opponent has changed, his strategy should change too.
I can't blame Trump for wanting to ensure he isn't at a disadvantage, though I saw nothing wrong with the moderation of the previous debate. If the moderation is performed the same way, I see no reason to object. But can he be sure it WILL be just as fair? I can understand his doubts.
Would Fox News be favorable to Trump? I don't think they will favor Trump, and certainly seem unlikely to favor Harris.
Those who actually want to compare the candidates want a fair debate. Biased moderation will more than likely skew opinion toward the non-favored candidate. I think it's in everyone's interest for the overall venue to be neutral, and therefore Trump may grit his teeth and accept at least one ABC debate.
If they managed to retcon her pratfall run at being AI Czar, I'd take that bit of reality distortion happily. More realistically, waiting to see how my fellow San Franciscans and other Californians fall in line (or not). Once I see hopefully-former #Defund advocates glossing over her prosecutorial record...well...there have been a lot of those kinds of moments over the last fourish years. Sad how fast one gets used to being jarred.
Whats the theory as to why Biden endorsed her and not say the governor of Pennsylvania. He basically had the option to endorse who ever he wanted, and and he went with her.
1. He earnestly thinks shes great. Thats why he chose her as VP in the first place
2. He earnestly thinks she should get a chance for essentially woke reasons.
3. A la I, Claudius, he kind of wants his replacement to fail, out of bitterness of being forced out.
4. He is senile
5. It seems safer, legacy wise, even if its EV isnt so great.
???
6. Biden doesn't think Kamala Harris is "great", but he knows and trusts her. He doesn't really know any of the other contenders very well, and he's not at a place in his life where he wants to have to get to know new people in a high-stakes environment.
7. Biden knows that not everybody is just going to do what he tells them to.
Kamala Harris was already the Schelling point for a Biden replacement; she's the Veep, and there's nobody else in the Democratic Party that really stands out. For a significant number of Democratic voters, that's going to count for more than "the senile guy told us to vote for Gretchen Newsom" or whatever. So if Bidenendorses Kamala Harris, half the party supports her because she's the obvious choice and half the party supports her because Biden endorsed her, which adds up to the whole party supporting Harris. If Biden endorses anyone else, half the party supports Kamala Harris and the other half supports whoever Biden nominated, and the party is divided going into peak election season.
He's the President, she's the Vice President. If he leaves, she's already officially signed on to take his place.
She's already been out campaigning in this election, as the Vice President.
If she loses, she'll take the least damage because she was forced by circumstance into trying in the first place. If someone else loses, they and Kamala will both be heavily damaged, because the Party thought Kamala was so bad they junked her in favor of a rando who still couldn't make the cut.
This where I think its important *Biden* endorsed her, not some version of the party establishment. I agree if Biden was blocked somehow at the convention, or if he dropped dead, inertial reasons would basically force them to make her the 2024 nominee. But Biden had some wild card optionality here and he chose not to exercise it. So I am interested in the Biden's internal reasons for making that choice.
1. He knows Kamala. I don't know how close they are, but he probably has more interaction with her than any of the Democratic Governors, Senators, or Congresspeeps.
2. She's already on the ticket. Those 90+ million dollars in the Biden-Harris war chest will be easy to transfer over to Harris/VP-X ticket. The Rethuglicans say they're going to challenge this with the FEC, but the FEC is split 3 to 3. Good luck with that!
3. Biden wants to avoid a convention fight for nomination that could split the party. Notice that Biden and Harris were already calling delegates before the announcement was made. Reportedly everyone has fallen in behind her and Harris has the nomination tied up. Harris is well-liked by the party. And Dems had been urging Biden to give her a larger portfolio to groom her for the 2028 election. Well, she just got a larger portfolio!
4. Harris has better name recognition than all except a few other Democratic pols. Gavin Newsom, Chuck Schumer are the only ones (off the top of my head) that have similar name recognition as Harris. And Bernie Sanders. But Bernie is older than Biden and he's not really a Dem — plus he's already endorsed Biden was quick to endorse Harris.
5. Harris will get the black vote and probably the majority of the women's vote.
6. Although she's 59, Harris comes off as much younger. So, now Trump's cognitive decline will stand out. As for the other potential candidates, Schumer is in his 70s. Newsom is a few years younger than Harris, but his candidacy wouldn't play well outside of California. It will be fun watching Harris debate Trump (if he doesn't chicken out). She's sharp, and as a former prosecutor she's already made it clear that his criminal record will be a talking point.
"Rethuglicans", and I promptly stop reading
Less of this, please
I lean Democrat and I agree as well.
Yes, I'm such a meany, but it's hard to take anyone in the current GOP seriously.
Trump's primary talking point against Harris is her laugh...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQcc5W4MMt0
And Congressman Andy Ogles of Tennessee just introduced articles of impeachment against Kamala Harris.
https://x.com/donlemon/status/1815847403179925514/photo/1
Really?
+1
Like "cuck," it's a marker that means "don't take me seriously, I don't have much worthwhile to say."
I assume Biden still wants the Democratic Party to succeed, and their reasons would be his reasons.
6. This race is a total train wreck, and Harris was the only one willing to risk her political prospects in 2024, instead of waiting for 2028 when Trump's gone and they can run a normal campaign.
As a voter, I rather wish he would do that. As it stands, Harris has only been covered quite lightly by the news media. And most of the coverage that they've done has been horse-race coverage, not policy coverage. It would be at least somewhat helpful to see what she actually does as president.
This is such a lazy sentiment.
Are people who were shilling for someone else now going to start shilling for her? Of course. She's a presidential candidate of a major party. Lots of folks who formerly didn't have a vested interest in her success now do.
Does that distinguish her in any way from other Presidential candidates? No, of course not.
The things that people who liked her three months ago liked her for are still mostly going to be the things that are put forward about her as positives moving forward. If those are different than the things people thought about her four years ago (which was about the last time I seriously thought about her), that wouldn't be shocking.
I'm not really complaining about the fact that a bunch of Democrat voters are going to decide to support her.
I'm complaining about the fact that the supposedly-neutral arbiters of American culture are about to rearrange the way everyone thinks in order to make Kamala more popular. They're not going to make Kamala cool, they're going to change the definition of cool until it matches what Kamala is. Watch as her out-of-place laughter and dancing become unbridled joie de vivre. Watch as her ridiculous catchphrases start to seem like deep wisdom. Watch as people start to drastically use the word "unburdened" in their day-to-day speech. Watch as the silly things that Kamala believes become the things that everyone has always believed.
The whole culture will shift thirty degrees askew to benefit her, and it will seem like it has always been that way.
> The whole culture will shift thirty degrees
I guess that might apply to people whose cultural center of gravity are the top politicians of the day and their battles. There's a big world and a lot of culture beyond that!
->Watch as her out-of-place laughter and dancing become unbridled joie de vivre. Watch as her ridiculous catchphrases start to seem like deep wisdom. Watch as people start to drastically use the word "unburdened" in their day-to-day speech.
This makes me realize you must be on a completely different cultural channel than I am. I'm unfamiliar with any of the above tropes about Kamala. The only Kamala trope I know is that she's been basically hidden away and silenced the past 3.5 years. I mostly picture her as the most obnoxious grandstander during the Kavanaugh hearings, but that doesn't seem to be what you are talking about.
ADDED: I did just hear CNN say that Kamala's social media team is trying to flip memes about her on their head... something about a coconut tree comment and turning it into a positive message. But if that's what you mean, we aren't talking about "supposedly neutral arbiters" but about Kamala's social media team.
Who are the supposedly-neutral arbiters of American culture?
>it's that if you disagree about her awesomeness it's because you hate her gender or her skin color or her immigrant parents.
Jeez, I don't find that most people are that stoopit. I have said to at least a dozen people in the last week that Harris is just unimpressive as a person, and I think every single person I spoke to was a democrat. Several sighed and nodded. Not one of them came back at me with anything implying I was prejudiced against one or more of her demographic credentials. Maybe a silly woke undergrad would have. Seems to me you're caricaturing your opposition.
Right, but that was last week. I'm predicting that if you do the same thing in three months you'll get a very different response.
Yes, I can believe that, but I don't think it will be a wokeness-based disagreement.
Yeah, it'll be political campaign mudslinging. You, a Democrat voter, saying that privately to other Democrat voters before the campaigning starts? Sighs and nods.
Republican campaign/Republican voters saying it during the campaign? Anti-immigrant racist sexism!
What I'm wondering about as straws in the wind is some of the online stuff I've seen about her past as Californian DA, e.g. one X/Twitter thing about "Kamala put lots of poor black people in jail; Kamala is anti-trans because she put trans women in men's prisons".
Will that run at all, or will the trans activists suddenly find themselves being told to sit down and shut up and get with the party line?
If by "beatify" you mean "the media is going to push stories about literally any possible candidate who's not Kamala to preserve the potential drama of a contested convention," then yes, I suppose the media is beatifying Kamala.
(My Bluesky timeline is currently busy laughing at the NYT editorial saying that Biden should choose Mitt Romney to woo the Nevertrump Republicans.)
Yeah, that is *never* going to happen. Is the NYT suddenly getting a rush of blood to the head or what? They're starting to run opinion pieces that would never have seen the light of day before this.
They can't really preserve that potential drama even another day since every plausible contender has now endorsed her.
Actually, she has a lot of political experience as prosecutor, attorney general, and as a VP.
Just noticed this on TwiXter...
https://x.com/Kaylan_TX_/status/1815113269075685708/photo/1
And who are the "most people" you're talking about who think she's unlikeable? Do you have some polling to back up your claims?
A couple weeks ago she was trailing Trump by 2.9 points in the polls. So less likable than Trump at least, by a bit. We'll see what the polls say now that she's likely to actually be the candidate.
https://www.natesilver.net/p/the-case-for-and-against-kamala-harris
I know plenty of "likeable" people that I would not want to be President. I think you're confusing two things here.
He asked for polling evidence that she’s not “likable” and I provided some. If you think likeability doesn’t matter then you should reply to the OP.
Her being unlikeable is... irrelevant, as long as she wins? The Presidents job is to manage the administrative state. Posing for cameras and giving speeches is a distraction from that job.
I have no idea how competent she is at managing bureaucrats but I genuinely couldn't care less about her charisma.
Charisma matters when you're on the campaign trail mixing with the hoi polloi. Hillary may have been competent (citation needed) but she had the charisma of a bucket of wet sand, and that made her attempts at "I'm just folks" fall flat on their face.
Dull but competent is fine when it's behind the scenes promotions for the administration. When it's "grab the voters by the ballot box", it matters if they like you or think you're a finger-wagging schoolmarm.
That's what Ludwig II of Bavaria thought. In his last years, he still managed the administration, signed papers and so on. But he disappeared completely from the public, set no foot in the capital, gave no speeches, skipped the Corpus Christi procession; he was only sitting in his castles and planning to build more castles. So he was wrongly declared insane (and even after being imprisoned in Berg Castle, they still gave him papers to sign, which he did)
>Her being unlikeable is... irrelevant, as long as she wins?
That's like saying speed is irrelevant as long as you cross the finish line first.
>The Presidents job is to manage the administrative state. Posing for cameras and giving speeches is a distraction from that job.
In a practical sense I think that's exactly wrong. Having a charismatic president that's able to sway public sentiment is the single most powerful political force in our system.
"most people seem to agree that she's a fairly unlikeable politician with no real achievements and a weird cackle, who achieved her position through a combination of failing upwards and [something else]."
I know what you mean and you may well be right but what do you mean by "most people"? I'm guessing (based on nearly zero evidence, I fully admit, so I might be totally wrong) that your peer group isn't composed of median democratic voters and you're not an avid consumer of CNN/MSNBC type media. Mine isn't and I'm not, but I'd be surprised if the anti-Kamala sentiments you're describing are widespread in that milieu.
(Don't get me wrong, I don't think she's a strong candidate.)
They thought she was a cringe nae nae baby/fucking pig Copola harris they heard the news, but now they will think that she is a sober, steady hand to guide the tiller of the state (at least until the election is done).
I know this because they are me. I think that.
My actual opinion is that she is an unremarkable centrist other than having the brain injury that makes you a cop without even wearing the uniform, and that the wrong types of people are gonna be REALLY mad about her getting a shot.
Yeah talking to my daughter today, this is fully underway already.
What does that mean? I mean it makes sense that Democrats are extremely happy that Harris will be the candidate instead of Biden and that they would rally behind her with enthusiasm. I was no Harris fan in the past, but given she will be up against Trump, I'm rooting for her like hell.
Or does "this is fully underway" mean something other than Democrats are understandably very happy today? It's not that we think Harris is suddenly the favorite. It's more like when your team is down 1-5 but now you've come back some and it's 3-5. You cheer loudly because now the score is closer and maybe your team will even win. That would be the normal reaction of a typical fan even if the players who scored are 2nd-stringers and you don't have any stars left on the field.
That you automatically assumed they were talking about Democrats helps prove their point. Melvin and George were referring to how the ostensibly non-partisan tastemakers of society will now suddenly forget all of Harris' flaws and beatify her, and you respond with "of course Democrats will rally behind her with enthusiasm".
OK, troll124, try reading what I wrote. (Hint: my post is a question.)
I read it, namely how you seamlessly substituted the media, experts, and the rest with Democrats. It proves his point, ie "But culture is downstream of politics, and in particular culture is downstream of the short-term electoral needs of the Democratic Party..." The partisanship is so embedded that you didn't even see a distinction between them.
Dude. I asked George a question. It was about what he meant by:
>Yeah talking to my daughter today, this is fully underway already.
Now maybe George meant his daughter said she was witnessing something to the effect of what you are saying. It seemed plausible to me that George's daughter was suddenly excited about Harris and he took that as a sign of something to the effect of what you are saying. As George hasn't responded it's not clear what his daughter said and whether George took his daughter to be a witness to the phenomenon or a product of the phenomenon or something else.
You jumped in to say my question has loaded assumptions embedded in it, but I didn't make any assumptions in it. I did offer a possible meaning for what he might have meant, but asked if that possible meaning was correct. You could have told me, assuming you knew what George meant: "No, he means X, Y and Z".
But here you are continuing to respond in a way that isn't at all responsive. You haven't helped me one bit in understanding what George meant.
That's not very nice.
That guy seems more interested in scoring internet points than in civil discussion, so I have trouble with the generosity thing in my replies to him.
Meh....I'm no Harris fan, nor is my brother who's lived in SF for 30 years. But you're overstating the case. Matt Yglesias has just posted some thoughts which seem pretty common-sensical:
===
Harris has a number of fundamental problems:
- Her approval rating is bad
- Her instincts as a candidate in 2019-2020 were often off-base
- Her whole career as a politician in San Francisco and California didn’t involve trying to appeal to swing voters
- Her electoral record, while fine, is not impressive relative to the partisan fundamentals
- She is tied to Joe Biden’s unpopular administration.
To win, Harris needs to find ways to moderate her image, and critically, she is going to have to be allowed to do that by her supporters.
Donald Trump is in many ways a bad politician and a bad candidate. His numbers are terrible, his manner is off-putting, and his record is plagued with scandal. But his “be allowed to do that” score is off the charts. If it’s convenient for him to start saying nicer things about electric cars in exchange for Elon Musk’s money, he does that. If it’s convenient for him to pretend the Republican Party isn’t deeply committed to banning abortion, he does that.
Every progressive I know recognizes that these Trumpian stabs at moderation are good for Trump, and that it’s good for the left to try to expose them as lies. The progressives who recognize that need to see the symmetry here.
Without knocking Harris too hard, she is clearly not an optimal candidate. Democrats have the option of running a ticket featuring the popular governor of Michigan plus the popular governor of Pennsylvania, which would be a very good way to win.
It appears that neither of the governors in question is interested in challenging Harris, and I can’t imagine anyone else being a formidable challenger. I think that this is a little bit short-sighted on their part. I get that from where Gretchen Whitmer is sitting right now, she has the inside track on the 2028 election. But these political moments pass quickly.
The good news for Harris is that her basic political problem — she is perceived as more liberal than the average voter — is extremely fixable.
She needs to fix that by saying and doing some things that help make her public image more moderate, ideally things that are either true (“some people belong in prison and it’s that simple”) or lacking in policy substance (“my parents moved to this country because it’s the greatest place on Earth, and I think my party and our school system need to get back to teaching kids patriotism”). But it also wouldn’t hurt to throw people a bone on a relatively unimportant policy issue (Bitcoin?) or two that demonstrate separation from Biden.
If Harris does the right thing and moderates, a big question for the left will be do they let her get away with it (as the right has let Trump say whatever he thinks he needs to say on abortion) or will they spend the whole final stretch of the campaign whining (they way they did with Hillary)? I think the Biden formula of prioritizing unity over all else basically failed, but he was right to perceive that dissent from the left hurt Clinton. Progressives need to decide if they want to win.
===
"Her whole career as a politician in San Francisco and California didn’t involve trying to appeal to swing voter"
Trying to be as diplomatic as possible, her career in San Francisco is shadowed by allegations of clientelism.
There's a rather po-faced mention in this article:
https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/how-kamala-harris-political-trajectory-was-launched-in-her-native-california/
"In 1990, Harris was hired as a deputy district attorney for Alameda County, where she worked for several years and also served on two state boards. The appointments were made by then-California Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, with whom she had a brief relationship. During that time, she made many connections that would later help propel her political career."
The 'brief relationship' with a man thirty years her senior lasted long enough to get her a foot on the ladder:
" In 1994, Speaker of the California Assembly Willie Brown, who was then dating Harris, appointed her to the state Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and later to the California Medical Assistance Commission"
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-11-29-mn-2787-story.html
"Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, continuing his rush to hand out patronage jobs while he retains his powerful post, has given high-paying appointments to his former law associate and a former Alameda County prosecutor who is Brown’s frequent companion.
Brown, exercising his power even as his speakership seems near an end, named attorney Kamala Harris to the California Medical Assistance Commission, a job that pays $72,000 a year.
Harris, a former deputy district attorney in Alameda County, was described by several people at the Capitol as Brown’s girlfriend. In March, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen called her “the Speaker’s new steady.” Harris declined to be interviewed Monday and Brown’s spokeswoman did not return phone calls."
What's even more fascinating, though, and something I did *not* know is that Kamala is every bit as tied in to the wealthy, socialite SF circles as Gavin Newsom. So I wonder how that will play out with the narrative of "daughter of immigrants, raised by a single mother":
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/08/09/kamala-harris-2020-president-profile-san-francisco-elite-227611/
Speaking about *another* Getty wedding in 1999 -
In the summer of 1999, in the monied Napa Valley north of here, a bejeweled bride rode sidesaddle on a speckled horse into what the press would label “the Bay Area’s version of an outdoor royal wedding.” The lavish nuptials of Vanessa Jarman and oil heir Billy Getty—replete with red carpet, hundreds of flickering votives, and “a fair amount of wine,” according to one deadpan attendee—featured a 168-person guest list stocked with socialites and scions, philanthropists and other assorted glitterati.
This coterie of the chosen included, as well, a 34-year-old prosecutor who was all of a year and a half into her job in the San Francisco district attorney’s office. And she wasn’t just some celebrity’s all but anonymous plus-one. She was featured in the photo coverage of the hot-ticket affair, smiling wide, decked out in a dark gown with a drink in hand.
“Kamala Harris,” the caption read, “cruised through the reception.”
Well before she was a United States senator, or the attorney general of California, Harris was already in with the in-crowd here. From 1994, when she was introduced splashily in the region’s most popular newspaper column as the paramour of one of the state’s most powerful politicians, to 2003, when she was elected district attorney, the Oakland- and Berkeley-bred Harris charted the beginnings of her ascent in the more fashionable crucible of San Francisco. In Pacific Heights parlors and bastions of status and wealth, in trendy hot spots, and in the juicy, dishy missives of the variety of gossip columns that chronicled the city’s elite, Kamala Harris was a boldface name.
Born and raised in more diverse, far less affluent neighborhoods on the other side of the Bay, Harris was the oldest daughter of immigrant parents, reared in a family that was intellectual but not privileged or rich. As a presidential contender, running against opponents who openly disdain elites and big money, she has emphasized not only her reputation as a take-no-prisoners prosecutor but also the humbleness of her roots—a child of civil rights activism, of busing, “so proud,” as she said at the start of her speech announcing her candidacy, “to be a child of Oakland.”
Her rise, however, was propelled in and by a very different milieu. In this less explored piece of her past, Harris used as a launching pad the tightly knit world of San Francisco high society, navigating early on this rarefied world of influence and opulence, charming and partying with movers and shakers—ably cultivating relationships with VIPs who would become friends and also backers and donors of every one of her political campaigns, tapping into deep pockets and becoming a popular figure in a small world dominated by a handful of powerful families. This stratum of San Francisco remains a profoundly important part of her network—including not just powerful Democratic donors but an ambassador appointed by President Donald Trump who ran in the same circles.
...“A well-qualified prosecutor with a lot of ties to the Pacific Heights crowd, Harris should have no trouble raising money,” the San Francisco Chronicle noted that November, and so it was: By the close of the calendar year, Harris had raised $100,560—nearly 23 percent of which came from the three ZIP codes of Pacific Heights. It’s a roster of early donors that reads like a who’s who of the city. “That crowd really got her started to be taken seriously,” Buell said.
“… Kamala Harris, an Alameda Co. deputy D.A. who is something new in Willie’s love life,” Herb Caen wrote in his column in the San Francisco Chronicle on March 22, 1994, making public her romantic relationship with Willie Brown, who was still married (albeit long estranged), 30 years older than Harris and by then approaching a decade and a half into his unprecedented reign as speaker of the California State Assembly. “She’s a woman, not a girl,” Caen continued in his signature three-dot style. “And she’s black …” Beyond the wince-worthy language, it’s hard to imagine in that time and space a more spotlit debut.
Caen, for his part, was at the tail end of a nonpareil, nearly 60-year career. Six days a week, he two-finger-typed a thousand or so of the most-read words in San Francisco. “If he put your name in boldface, you’d get calls from everyone you knew saying, ‘I saw you in Herb Caen today,’” Jesse Hamlin, one of his former assistants, told me. “If your name wasn’t in there, you weren’t anybody,” longtime local press agent Lee Houskeeper added. In his columns, Caen called Harris “attractive, intelligent and charming.” He called her a “steadying influence” for Brown. And in December of 1995, when Brown was elected mayor, Caen called her the “first-lady-in-waiting.”
It’s hard to think honestly about the origins of the rise of Harris without grappling with the reality of the role of Brown. He helped her. He put her on a pair of state boards that required not much work and paid her more than $400,000 across five years on top of her salary as a prosecutor. He gave her a BMW. He helped her, too, though, in a way that was less immediately material but arguably far more enduringly important.
“Brown, of course, was the darling of the well-to-do set, if you will,” veteran political consultant Jack Davis, who managed Brown’s mayoral campaign, told me. “And she was the girlfriend, and so she met, you know, everybody who’s anybody, as a result of being his girl.”
“I met her through Willie,” John Burton, the former San Francisco congressman and chairman of the California Democratic Party, said in an interview. “I would think it’s fair to say that most of the people in San Francisco met her through Willie.”
“He was the guy that put her right in the ballgame,” said Dan Addario, the chief investigator for the district attorney whom Harris ultimately would topple."
If this is all "no big deal" for Kamala, then it's no big deal for Trump that "he got his start with daddy's money" and the rest of the whinging that the left has been going on about, including Hillary's "not a real billionaire".
That's the main impetus behind the Orgy of Vengeance: what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, and now your goose is cooked.
And Kamala getting her start because she dated the guy with connections, so she was able to hang out with the richies who funded her initial forays into politics, undermines any image she seeks to project of "I'm African-American child of immigrants who was raised by a single mother".
As that Politico article states, she may have based her campaign headquarters in the poor(er) sections, but she mixed and mingled and raised the money and influence amongst the white wealthy:
"Harris, whose campaign did not respond to a request for comment for this story, put her headquarters in the Bayview, a poor neighborhood six or so miles south of Pacific Heights and a world away, and she would earn the backing of a swath of the city’s black, Chinese and LGBT leaders. But in January of 2003, she also was on the cover of the Nob Hill Gazette, the monthly paper of record of San Francisco society—one of the faces in a collage of people deemed to be the crème de la crème."
Pushing as your talking point "my opponent believes in tax cuts - for the wealthy!" has less sting when you're a big pal of the wealthy yourself, and depending on their continued help and donations. Not very working-class to be breezing around Getty weddings, now is it?
Is that from his substack? I'm not seeing it on TwiXter, but I haven't purchased access to his substack feed.
It was a free post on Substack.
I think the biggest issue is that I think the Democrats appear to be planning to make this a "prosecutor vs felon" thing, in the mistaken impression that will not immediately turn into an unmitigated disaster.
Why, do you think Trump is not a felon?
See my reply to the other comment.
Sex predators, which seems to come down to:
(1) "Grab 'em by the pussy" remark
(2) The E. Jean Carroll trial
(3) Allegations around Epstein
(1) is true and bad. (2) is, in my opinion, 'he said/she said' and definitely politically motivated - recently learned that the guy who bankrolled Carroll to take the case is a big Democratic donor, whose mouthpiece shot off a remark about how the assassination attempt could well be a Republican false-flag operation and (3) is the same kind of murky association that a lot of famous/celebrity people had at the time. Never mind the probably fictitious accusations of "he raped a 13 year old" which was something trotted out, excited a lot of people, then when it began to be investigated went nowhere - and which I am now seeing referenced again on social media as absolute truth.
The "convicted felon! on 34 counts!" stuff makes me laugh more than anything else. Oooh, he paid off hush money to a hooker out of the wrong bank account! What a major crime!
The "owned by big banks" thing doesn't sit well with "he tried defrauding the poor big banks with his fake mortgage application" case taken, again, by NY. So which is it, Kamala? Not to mention that you have deep pocket rich donors who may or may not be on the boards of banks, among other things.
"I got shot at while the police stood by and did nothing, just let it happen. They come after me over and over for made-up crimes, everybody knows they just make things up about me ..."
Yeah that doesn't have the potential to backfire on them massively. Granted that requires somebody in Trump's campaign to be competent, and I have yet to observe competence on anybody's part.
Nah. What you're describing is already baked in.
Also you're overlooking the degree to which Harris leading with this line of attack represents clear focus and energy as a campaigner; and "if you're playing defense you're losing, always play offense"; and it has the large virtue of being organic to the candidate (she really was a prosecutor and then an attorney general). Starting from 100 days to an election it's very strong campaign-tactics choice, miles better than anything the Biden campaign had come up with in literally years.
If it was 200 or 300 days to the election then the Trump campaign would have time and space to make this approach backfire on the Dems in the ways you describe. But (a) it's 100 days out, and (b) there is little indication that either Trump himself or the people working for him possess that kind of agility or tactical adaptability. They have the couple of hammers that they're used to and will keep swinging them the same ways they're used to.
It looks offensive because it is going after Trump, but that's basically just political campaigning in general. As a campaign strategy, it's a defensive rearguard action to shore up voting blocs she should, in a normal election year, already have.
“Progressives need to decide if they want to win.”
I think we… know? the answer here? Of course they won’t want to win, it’s terrifying to lose your identity as the oppressed, and with it your reason to exist.
There's some truth that statement.
Luckily most Democratic voters aren't progressives. (Evidence: Joe and not Bernie or Beto or Warren won the 2020 primary.) Matt is of course trying to persuade his progressive readers to behave a certain way. But it's really Harris who needs to ignore the progressives however they may react and move to the center on the campaign trail.
Ah, poor old Beto. A glittering future behind him. Always the bridesmaid, never the bride. Any chance he could be Kamala's VP? 😁
Agreed. The problem is that the election is going to be tight, and every progressive in a key state refusing to hold his/her nose and vote for Harris is a vote she will have no room to lose.
Are you for real? Are you trolling right now?
Before I commit to a response, I need to know.
I try to live by “let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No.’ For whatever is more than these is from the evil one.” So yeah I mean what I write.
Correct. So long as he delivers liberal tears, all else is just details at best. That's always been the case, and Trump's superpower is that he intuited it and has stuck with it regardless of all other distractions.
Keep this sort of disillusion in mind the next time the national media converge on a narrative that seems implausible to you. The news has very little relationship to truth anymore, it's mostly politically-driven propaganda. And yes, I do think that's a relatively new thing. At the very least the ideology that drives the narrative is objectively worse than it used to be. I'll buy the argument that the public discourse has always been a fairy tale to some extent, but I'll counter that at least the old stories had useful pro-social goals.
I don't think one can become a member of the Senate from California by falling upward. She got there by being very good at playing the game of politics.
Many didn't like her regular grandstanding in the Senate or her performance in the 2020 primary. Well, those things are behind her now, and most voters who decide elections don't remember those things. (And she wasn't bad in every primary debate, she just seemed to give up in them after she wasn't emerging as the obvious winner.)
That said, no, she's not some star politician or spectacular orator. But this is a game of lesser evils. Trump is very unpopular with the American public. Biden managed to become even more unpopular than Trump. Harris may plausibly be less unpopular than Trump. That's all she's gotta do.
Here's hoping that trust in the media doesn't stop getting lower for a while yet.
And we should know better than to question DEI appointments. What are we, racist?
Seen on Hacker News recently: https://www.endeavorrx.com
It is, supposedly, the only video game that can be prescribed for ADHD. In my (informed but non-credentialed) opinion, it's not particularly good at anything. And it costs $99/month.
Does this price reflect the (ridiculous) costs of FDA approval? Is it massive rent-seeking allowed by gate-keeping? Or is it structural insurance fraud?
I'm not sure which is worse.
Huh. From the landing page it's pretty clear that... "it's a generic endless runner indistinguishable from a thousand free-to-play mobile games being sold at 10,000% markup" would be mean, presumptuous, and judgmental. So let's say instead, they clearly aren't marketing to a heavily enfranchised gamer audience.
https://www.endeavorrx.com/the-research/
Okay, there's a research page. They claim an RCT with 600 kids found significant effects.
One study the maximum amount of time I want to invest in this when I should be working. This looks like the subscript-1 source:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landig/article/PIIS2589-7500(20)30017-0/fulltext
Look, I'm already talking myself out of even reading this thing, because the methodology doesn't look any more credible than all those supposedly double blind RCT studies that find evidence of ESP or whatever.
Some theories in no particular order.
1) The researchers and/or company are well-meaning people who managed to produce a false positive finding via generic social science fuzziness
2) Grift
3) They accidentally discovered an anti-treatment. The game is nothing special, but the "digital control" given to the non-treatment group somehow makes ADHD worse, or at least is notably less helpful than the median video game. This would be sort of surprising, since the control per the paper is apparently some sort of word search game which at least sounds vaguely education-coded
4) Calvin's Dad Effect. The game sucks, and that's the point. Having to sit down and focus on a thing you hate somehow improves executive functioning in what previous generations called "building character"
5) It somehow actually works
Is it just me, or are Calvin and Hobbes references increasing lately? Not that I'm complaining, I love that comic, but I'm seeing more Calvin & Hobbes memes, and "Calvinball" and "The Noodle Incident", coming up in various places to reference their respective themes.
A Calvinball cheer from me!
James C Scott, author of Seeing Like a State (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-like-a-state/), Against the Grain (https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/14/book-review-against-the-grain/), and many other works, has died. I hope there is ungovernable hill country somewhere in heaven.
It wouldn't be heaven if there weren't.
Has anyone here switched from a white collar job to the trades? After leaving the military as an officer, I’m working for a big gov contractor working from home… I get paid lots of money but do absolutely nothing useful. I live in a rural area so getting a local white collar job is basically impossible.
I really like working with my hands and building things and am considering a plumbing apprenticeship. Salary will drop about $100k at first then probably cap out near a $50k drop. I have no debt besides a mortgage so should be able to live off what I’ll make plus dip into savings as needed for the first few years. Sending money to retirement will take a big hit, but apparently the Union pension is worth several thousand a month so I’m not horribly worried about that.
I find my tradesmen friends to be incredibly intelligent in ways that I am not when it comes to fixing/building things, which I highly respect and is highly respected in my rural area. I find this to be a great opportunity to have a career where I’m continuously learning and have first order effects on the world.
Thoughts? Am I romanticizing trades too much? Am I discounting the value of a high salary despite a useless job?
Demand for plumbing seems to have strong regional variations (you might find higher demand in an urban area), and might not be as rewarding as a more specialized field like heat pump installation/maintenance: involves both plumbing and electrical, likely to see increasing demand over time, and reputably is less well understood so someone motivated should be able to stand out as unusually competent. Similar comments seem to apply to A/C and heating systems.
Wouldn't the best of both worlds be working your way up to owning a plumbing business?
That would mitigate the physical toll AND the financial toll (with plenty of headroom for making more than you are now), and you'd be doing stuff that's actually positively impacting the world. And the bigger you grew your company, the more positive impact out in the world and the more financial upside for you, so pretty win / win.
Just wanted to put that out there as a signal boost to **Ajb's** suggestion.
I think this ultimately would be the way to go! Lots of demand for trade business work basically everywhere, including my rural area.
I mostly don't regret leaving my comfortable-but-utterly-bullshit desk job for blue collar work*...took a 75% haircut on pay, which definitely sucks a lot. Only recently got back up to making half the original amount, after 6+ years of trying way too hard to never miss a raise or bonus. It feels really good to Actually Do Something Meaningful though. Tangible, immediate feedback, surprises every day (I don't exactly like dealing with customers, but they certainly keep things...interesting), much more interesting peers, always more parts of the job to learn. Honest work for honest pay; not feeling guilty whatsoever about cashing paychecks. "I earned this, by the sweat of my brow!" People actually noticing a lot when I'm not there, rather than being some faceless cubicle drone interchangeable with any other. That is - because so few, ah, ACX-grade people work in my industry, it's super easy to stand out with what would be an utterly banal office performance.
That being said...the non-mostly part is, well, it's hell on the body. Sooner or later almost everyone gets planar fascist, carpool tunnel syndrome, sciatica...even "just" concussions, or thrown backs, or the myriad cuts, scrapes, and contusions take a toll. My hands are always sandpaper, and that's frankly embarrassing for a lady. It's frequently kinda depressing the level of constant background aches and pains I deal with - White Collar Me wouldn't have been in this bad way until well into 40s or 50s. And, not gonna lie, not having a frivolously high salary anymore to make trivial inconveniences disappear via money...it's a hard adjustment. Good to pick up those frugal habits, for sure, but those days of "I'll subsist on food delivery for a week just cause I'm feeling lazy" or whatever are firmly in the rearview.
d20/d20 hindsight, I think it woulda made the most sense to keep the bullshit job and seek meaning elsewhere. The classic 80k Hours path, FIRE, whatever. Never gonna get that rate of pay again with so few qualifications - at minimum I'd need to bend the knee and pay credentialism fealty to the higher ed racket. It was a steep price to pay for freedom and fulfillment. (Sure, you can't really put a price on those - but it was hardly Pareto-optimal.)
*not literally trades, but strongly in that same cultural milieu (and tax bracket if one seeks promotions), so I think it still applies
> planar fascist, carpool tunnel syndrome
Autocorrect or intentional joke?
I thought it was funny either way
Sometimes I unconsciously intentionally misspell things for the same reason Scott occasionally does the the the thing. Intentional in that, if I do notice the error later, I often won't bother correcting it. I'd like to blame it on Unsong rubbing off on me, but realistically it's probably old 4chan habits. The shitposting trolls were annoying and often destructive, but darn if they weren't occasionally great at levity. Always get a kick out of the occasional pedant who steps in with the "Acktually, it's spelled ________" schtick too. I know! Missing the forest for the breeze...
I recall having a brain fart and saying something like “I wonder if it’s the beginning of old timers disease,” and some humorless coworker said, “You know you are saying it wrong, it’s Alzheimer’s.” Oh boy, remind not to try get a laugh out of that guy.
Yeah I feel you. I just did the math and the lifetime loss of earnings would be ~$1M (in future dollars)… which is a lot. Could buy a real nice house right before retirement with that. But I just bought a house on a couple acres that’s not bad… I’m not sure an upgraded house would bring me that much utility, but I believe switching jobs would bring me a *lot* of utility.
In any case I could still retire with ~$2M in today’s dollars at age 62, providing plenty of cushion for myself and likely future family.
At the end of the day—to me—the question is “How much money/goods is enough?” because if I can meet that level, there’s no need to decrease utility in other aspects (work, community value, etc.) to get above that level.
Yeah, as much as Death Is The Enemy(tm), the whole...how's it go..."you can't take it with you" mindset is rather clarifying. Different with dependents like family or whatever (I've heard some argue sincerely that they plan on leaving nothing behind for heirs, which seems...weird). And of course the marginal utility of money doesn't sharply plateau until a fairly decent level. Still, as long as one makes it past the...finish line without undue hardship, that's Good Enough.
(Plus, honestly, even if immortality were on the table...I'd rather die and be reborn to experience that Good End from scratch. Not carry on with this degrading bag of bones which is of no particular consequence.)
You are romanticizing the hell out of it.
You will get fucked by customers, fucked by bosses, and fucked by crew. There is a good chance you will retire late and crippled. You will not accrue capital at the same rate you are at your current job, you and your kids will be poorer than you would have been.
That said: your current job probably does nothing for anyone; your standard MBA exists as a dead weight parasite on the corporate organism for 7.5 hours out of an 8 hour shift.
You are the only one who knows If the psychic pain of that is too much for you.
I just know from the software industry and not white-collar generally, but customers, bosses, and crew can screw you in any job. The question is - what are the odds for your specific case.
Having done both: WAY higher on the whole, but the dudes you find who are solid stay solid; where as in white collar and tech all is as dust.
LoL! But there might be some trades that are exceptions. I have a friend with a PhD in biochemistry. He quit academia and became an auto mechanic. He was able to buy a house and raise a family on what he made from being a mechanic (although his wife worked, too — but that's true of most families these days). He retired a few years ago and his son with an MBA took over the business. He enjoyed his work. It didn't cripple him. And he made a better living than he did as an assistant professor.
OOF at assistant professor; speaking of jobs that will cripple you and also don't pay for shit.
Yeah, it's not all trades and all white collar work, but the averages bear out.
Good points, thanks.
I went from a field engineer for the state gov (basically a useless redundant administrator) to a heavy equipment fleet mechanic. I’m basically at the bottom of the totem pole now, making roughly half the money I was. At the risk of overselling it, I’ll start with the bottom line: it’s sort of worth the pay cut, but just barely.
The upside is I work a 4x10 schedule and don’t have to worry about anything after I clock out. My coworkers are people I actually like, and I’m blown away by how much general knowledge/intelligence they have about things not related to the job. They’re laid back, more fun to be around day after day, but also hard working when it’s called for, in a way the government workers I knew just weren’t. The work can be dirty and frustrating, but that lends to sense of satisfaction at the end of the day. On my days off, I have full access to a shop and tools/equipment that a hobbyist could only dream of.
That being said, it’s a 50% pay cut, which is a shitload. If you get on it as a career track, eventually it catches up pretty well as you gain experience, but as someone doing it relatively short term (3-5 years) it’s a substantial sacrifice. Basically it’s not like “this job is so great I don’t care what I’m paid”, but you do get some perks in exchange for the pay you sacrifice, and I’m glad to be in a position where I can take the cut, enjoy the perks, and use it as an awesome learning experience.
Thanks for sharing the experience… I’d expect mine to be similar. I’d be in it for the long haul so would eventually catch up on some wages as a journeyman/master plumber.
As to your point about your co-workers… I joined my local volunteer fire department and it’s wild how much more adept those dudes/girls with mostly no college degrees are at most things, compared to high(ish) IQ folks I work with currently.
Check out Shopcraft as soulcraft by Matthew Crawford - a physics and philosophy graduate who decided to leave his bullshit white collar job to become a motorcycle repairer.
How long would you need to work as a plumber to qualify for a pension? How does that compare to how soon you'd be able to retire if you continued working your current job and invested the difference in take-home income?
I also think there are probably more options for local white color jobs than you think, or at least there will be once the job market warms up again in a few years. Even if there's absolutely nothing local, odds are your current position isn't the only full-remote position you qualify for.
I’d need to work for about 30 years to have a pension worth about $1M in today’s dollars. On top of my other retirement sources would be more than enough, but much less than what I’d end up with in my current role.
I could probably get a different white collar office job at a bank, but for a pay level at about what a journeyman/master plumber would make. Of those two options I’d rather be a plumber.
And I absolutely hate working from home (only started <1yr ago)… I’m fairly extroverted and would very much prefer to work in office.
I can't speak to what the job is actually like , but one issue, I think, is personal injury. Even if you aren't macho and use PPE properly, there's still a risk of making an error (or someone else doing so) and ending up with a lifechanging injury; especially doing the learning phase without the fast recovery of youth.
One way of mitigating that is to eventually employ other tradesmen and become the business owner and project manager (good trades businesses eventually max our their capacity with word of mouth and stop needing to tout for business). A few years ago I employed a builder to fix my house. He was in his eighties, still running his business (not actually doing the jobs himself, obviously) but still wanted to work and appeared to enjoy it. N=1, of course. Did a good job, too.
I agree… bodily wear and tear is probably my biggest fear outside of money. Though you’re right… there are ways to mitigate that. I also do feel like the health increase from being generally more active cancels out some of the edge risk.
I am in a similar position. I live in rural OH while working a SV tech job. I've done a number of building projects and developed some skills in various things, including building a few houses with family members, and my nearby family is mostly in the trades.
Like you, I really wanted to shift into something more hands on. After experiencing a few projects, my advice is to be sure you really, really like it before making any moves. The trades have just as many ridiculous barriers to entry, red tape, and weird edge case problems as tech (probably more so). What you end up with is a job that's just as frustrating as a tech job, but pays less and requires much more effort.
Best thing you can do is stack some cash while working the office job, that will give you many more options to find something you like if you decide you can't take it anymore.
Was going to say more or less the same. A tech job (if I understand right that that's what you already have) is already a trade, you're just building stuff in virtual space. I don't see how putting pipes or fixing toilets can be any more interesting once you're past the novelty.
I'd strongly suggest keeping your high paying job as a money maker, thinking of it as a combination of "playing with legos" and "paying the bills", not asking emotionally more of it (which is not easy, it means not making it a condition of your sense of fulfilment), and making sure you have plenty of time and energy left do the things you actually like.
I’m not really in a tech job… more like a tech governance/policy role. Anything my team or I build (policy, white papers, etc.) is thrown around by the bureaucrat government customers for months in meetings and rarely (so far never, but that may change eventually) implemented.
I see, that does sound quite unrewarding.
People in this forum will often talk of mission jobs, like working on clean energy, AI safety, factory-farmed-meat alternatives, efficient charities, etc. If you did have a sense of mission that should give you a direction and a good reason to abandon a boring job that pays well. But if your first choice of an alternative job is plumbing, my guess is that you're probably better off keeping your existing job as a decent worry-free money maker, and seeking fulfilment in your free time. Of course that only works if you can keep your work confined its working hours and forget about it the rest of the day.
On a previous open thread I asked about Donald Trump (haven't really changed my mind too much but I appreciate learning how much of a media bubble my side/others might be in).
So another question: why are some people here pro-monarchy? Is a lack of belief in democracy? What are the best arguments for it?
Here's how I see things.
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First Principles:
#0: Uncle Ben's Adage: "With great power, comes great responsibility".
This is best-practice for negotiating any sort of contract (including a social-contract). I.e. when you grant someone rights (aka power; options; privileges), it's generally a good idea to reign them in with obligations (aka responsibility; guarantees; promises). A CEO for example, typically has an enormous amount of power over a company. But they're also under an enormous amount of stress, because they have a duty to stakeholders to perform. And a monarch is just the CEO of a security company. A monarch gets a special name though, because governments are unique among other types of business in that they trend towards monopolies on violence.
Now, do Modern Liberal Democracies follow Uncle Ben's Adage? Negative, goat-rider. *In theory*, the government is supposed to be responsible to "The Will of the People". And the executive/legislative/judicial branches are supposed to reign each other in with "Checks and Balances". *In practice*, everything is done by committee. Committees are quite adept at obfuscating: A) who *actually* makes decisions; and B) who is held *nominally responsible* for decisions. In other words, committees decouple power from responsibility. I like to think of this as "decision laundering". Although Moldy likes to use a "leaking nuclear powerplant" analogy.
(Sanity check: when was the last time something incredible was accomplished by a committee?)
(Sanity check: Some years ago, I was gifted a book for Christmas (I think?). I think it was called "Accountable" or something. It had Obama's face on it. IIRC, the synopsis on the backside said it basically compared Obama's campaign-promises to what he'd actually accomplished. In order to "keep politicians accountable". I've still not opened it. Imagine that every person in the U.S. were forced to read this. Do you believe this would realistically improve the U.S. government in any way? Surely, all those corrupt politians would be FINALLY voted out of office, if only the populace read "Accountable"... right?)
#1: The Fundamental Theorem of Freedom: "Someone is always the sovereign".
I.e. someone is always in charge. I.e. someone is always at the top of the hierarchy. I.e. someone is always the originator of decisions. In a monarchy, the monarch is sovereign. In a modern liberal democracy...
Who's the sovereign in a democracy anyway? "Surely, it's lies with the citizens. Because the citizens tell the government what to do. Right?" In theory, yes. In practice, no. "Then it must lie with the executive branch? Or perhaps the legislative or judicial branch?" Consider: what particular entity do heads of government lose sleep over. Is it... "The People"? Nay, if you listen to them, the source of their anxiety is actually "The Press". I.e. the Fourth Estate. It is, in fact, the Fourth Estate which tells "The People" and "The Government" what to think and feel. It is The Fourth Estate which is the highest power in the land. It is the Fourth Estate which is truly sovereign. They may not be on the government's payroll, but that doesn't mean they don't work for the government.
I think this perspective offers quite a bit of explanatory power. Maybe it sounds hyperbolic to you. But consider: The Press is the very heart of the Big Three modern ideologies: Modern Liberal Democracy, Fascism, and Communism. They were all Nationalistic movements. And Nationalism could not have taken off without the advent of the printing press and all the propaganda that entails. The Press isn't just a component of Modern Democracy, it's the sine qua non.
(Sanity check: suppose you awoke next morning and decided to run for president. Is this realistically feasible? I mean, if you're the bestest and most qualified candidate, surely the Vox Populi would put you in office... right? [0])
In sum, the branch with the *most* power has the *least* responsibility, since those who've bought into the civic religion called "Nationalism" are unable to recognize The Press for what it really is. Some of the conservatives are slowly realizing that their "democratic" institutions are not what they seem, though they still have a ways to go.
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FAQ's:
> But Lord Acton said that "power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely".
Um... no.
A) Power per se is neither inherently good nor evil. It depends on the person wielding it. And does not the line between good an evil run through the heart of all men?
B) Virtue without power isn't actually virtuous. It's just weakness. I.e. being a good person doesn't mean being a useless wimp. It means actually making things better. Which requires agency. Which is a synonym for power.
Yes, you should definitely be wary of people who have lots of power. Yes, it carries temptation. But to say "all concentrations of power are bad" is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
(Sanity check: I've worked under a variety of bosses, and very few of them I've thought of as "diabolically corrupt" in any meaningful sense. What percentage of people you've met in meatspace, who held positions of power over you, were meaningfully corrupt? I acknowledge this varies by country.)
> But what prevents a monarch from royally fucking things up (and/or being generally tyrannical, as some other commenters ITT suggest)?
Nothing. It's the monarch's prerogative to royally fuck things up. You can't give someone the power to make things better without necessarily giving them the power to make things worse. 'Tis a necessary evil to bite the bullet. Cest la vie.
> Ok, but then why is Monarchy better than Democracy again?
No plan survives contact with the enemy. Things can and will go wrong. But at least with a monarchy, you know exactly who to blame when things go wrong. Whereas with Modern Liberal Democracy, when things go wrong, you won't know who to hang from the gallows since the bureaucracy is so byzantine and kafka-esque. It's a matter of engineering sane feedback-loops. And in a Modern Liberal Democracy, not only are the incentive gradients opaque, but they're also often myopic.
> Doesn't this whole Monarchy thing kinda reek of Fascism?
Do you remember watching The Lion King? Remember how repulsed you felt when Simba reascended Pride Rock? Like, did Nala even get a vote? And remember Aragorn from the Lord of the Rings? Do you remember literally crying and shaking with rage toward the end, when Frodo bent the knee to the newly minted King of Gondor? Of course you don't. Because you didn't behave that way at all, did you. Because you compartmentalized it away from your Western education, despite the West's insistence that "autocracy = literally Hitler". I.e. you've been fed propaganda about a basic Jungian Archetype. Feel free to take a seat and stew in the cognitive dissonance for a while.
History is written by the victors. You know who wasn't a victor? The Fascists. The West's insistence that anything and everything it doesn't like is fAsCisM is an allergic reaction to WWII. I.e. the West is still beating a horse that's been dead for almost 80 years now. "Better give it another 10 billion whacks just to make sure." Let's see if you can figure this one out on your own: might there be any advantage in reanimating the dead corpse of one's mortal enemies?
And as I've opined before [1], the Third Reich wasn't just an autocracy. It was an unintentional *compromise* between democracy and autocracy, which resulted in the worst of both worlds. So actually, Fascism is relevant after all. But not in the way you think.
> Okay but, doesn't this still seem rather... radical?
From a historical perspective, it's advocates of democracy who are the radicals. Monarchy is the default. Meanwhile, the founders of modern liberal democracies were nerdy terrorists. E.g. whereas the U.S. sees its founders as brave heroes, the Brits see the U.S. founders as clones of Ted Kaczynski.
> So what you're saying is... you're rooting for God-Emperor Trump?
IDGAF about Trump. He's just a mortal man with pros and cons. The MAGA fans, the Libs, and the Progs have way overblown his importance. I'm tired of hearing about him.
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There's more going on (much of which I don't quite understand as well as I'd like to). But this is probably a good start, for now.
[0] https://xkcd.com/635/
[1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-320/comment/52029806
Are you referring to the proposal to make Donald Trump the King of USA? https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/my-presidential-platform I think this was more or less a joke.
It’s like the argument for homeownership — one guy owns everything and runs everything so in theory there’s no conflicts of interest.
Your interests do conflict with the King 's: it's just that you can do nothing about it!
I just...never really managed to shake the childish ideal of the Benevolent Dictator. Yeah, tons of problems, hasn't worked well in practice, inevitable succession concerns, Seeing Like A State epistemic issues, etc, etc. But like...watching the wages of "democracy" for the last decade or so has really made me question the whole endeavor. Are we really capable of so little? Is our polis truly so benighted? It's sort of like the endless Rationalist obsession with game theory - if only everyone was better at cooperation and coordination, we coulda beat Moloch yesterday! If only, indeed...
"Best worst system" is just not much of a basis to believe in something anymore, at least for me. I think that's part of the monarchical appeal too - part of the strength of a governing system is whether it inspires self-recommending belief, if not actual hope. One of Matt Yglesias' takes that really resonates with me is his assertion that it was a huge mistake for the left to cede "patriotism" and its associated rah-rah feelgoods. Just like that old saw about the most fervently pro-American citizens being recent immigrants. My family didn't come here to be ashamed of putting up the stars and stripes in our yard, dammit! If it takes a monarchist (or a Trumpist, or a "far right-winger", or a -phobe) to appreciate that sentiment, then, yeah, I'm gonna be more sympathetic to them than I would be otherwise.
I'm pro-Monarchy in the weak sense of supporting the Constitutional Monarchy in Australia/Canada/UK and whatever other corners of the world Charlie Battenberg still reigns in.
Every system needs a failsafe. In any system based on separation of powers, there needs to be someone with the authority to step in and resolve disputes between different arms of government by sacking everyone and starting again. But this is too much power to give to a politician. The trick is to give all these "reserve powers" to the monarch, who has to follow a centuries-long tradition of not actually using them.
Countries without a monarch need to muddle through this kind of issue without a failsafe, which leads to bad outcomes. Recently the US figured out that the power of anyone to sack a President who is incapable of doing the job but not quite incapacitated doesn't really exist, it's an edge case not quite considered by the 25th amendment.
The monarchies in these countries are not really fail safes though.
I'm all for absolute monarchy, as long as we can hold a national plebiscite every five years. If the monarch loses the plebiscite we get to behead him.
>why are some people here pro-monarchy?
I'm gonna say that it's because a) 'benign dictator' is the best possible system and b) people who make this argument never imagine the monarch being the politician they hate. If you ever encounter a real person like this then just determine their political leanings and ask "so you'd be fine if the monarch was <most hated politician in opposing party>?"
+1
Pro-monarchy, is adjacent to pro-Caesar, some strong man to take control and make the trains run on time. When people get sick of the BS tribalism of democracy they can start to think positively about such a thing.
I don't know if this is a joke or pure desperation, but if anyone thinks a monarchy is a cool solution to a country's problems I'd invite them to read on the recent history of Nepal.
Nepal is a parliamentary democracy, isn't it? What happened in Nepal? Or we talking the transition to parliamentary democracy back in the 20th Century?
Yeah, I mean the last 20th century transition. To summarize the to the point of caricature, they had a hereditary monarchy, at some point the king was reasonably good and well-liked. Shit happened, there was a new king, and he was such a nasty piece that a decade-long civil war ensued to get the monarchy out and stabiliize the country again. It seems like a good case study of what can go wrong when you concentrate power on a basically single random person.
It was just curiosity. I was initially very against the idea, and don't really think what people have commented so far really changed my mind at all, but I now understand the position better
Scott Alexander actually wrote a post explaining why some people want an absolute ruler not beholden to the people. https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy-in-an-enormous-planet-sized-nutshell/
To be clear, there's a lot of other stuff in the ideology too
There is no way to guarantee a monarch will be a good one: effective, making the country safer and more prosperous. But if there were, such a monarch would, of course, be a good idea. How could one object, especially as I worded it?
Different people may have different definitions of "safe" and "prosperous", though, and also some will win more or lose more even if the country as a whole benefits.
And as Cardinal Richelieu said, "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." No one is perfect.
I don't think I'm pro-monarchy, given my country's history, but yeah I'm torn.
I mean, I'm a Tolkien nerd which we have now established, thank you Rachel Maddow, is near-as-dammit Fascist. Also I have a purely sentimental hankering after the Stuarts. I even like Charles I, and Charles II was great fun. James II, we don't talk about.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWrfk5vxrMY
Not necessarily my views, but I can see the appeal. Letter of Tolkien from 1943:
"My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) – or to 'unconstitutional' Monarchy. I would arrest anybody who uses the word State (in any sense other than the inanimate realm of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights nor mind); and after a chance of recantation, execute them if they remained obstinate! If we could get back to personal names, it would do a lot of good. Government is an abstract noun meaning the an and process of governing and it should be an offence to write it with a capital G or so as to refer to people. If people were in the habit of referring to 'King George's council, Winston and his gang', it would go a long way to clearing thought, and reducing the frightful landslide into Theyocracy. Anyway the proper study of Man is anything but Man; and the most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity. And at least it is done only to a small group of men who know who their master is. The mediævals were only too right in taking nolo episcopari as the best reason a man could give to others for making him a bishop. Give me a king whose chief interest in life is stamps, railways, or race-horses; and who has the power to sack his Vizier (or whatever you care to call him) if he does not like the cut of his trousers. And so on down the line. But, of course, the fatal weakness of all that – after all only the fatal weakness of all good natural things in a bad corrupt unnatural world – is that it works and has worked only when all the world is messing along in the same good old inefficient human way."
"Theyocracy"...gosh, I like that turn of phrase.
Just recently finished reading The Last Ringbearer, so Tolkien's beknighted world been on my mind as well. Funny how fiction with Good Kings is "fantasy" and Bad Kings is "dystopia" (or maybe scifi). Talk about subconscious political desires...everything woulda been just fine if noblesse oblige hasn't gone extinct.
The original Nazis liked Tolkien's work, but it was not mutual. Tolkien himself called Hitler "that little ignoramus" and hated the whole movement - there's a famous letter draft (whether it was ever sent is unclear) in which he reacts in as much cold fury as a professor was allowed to show at the time to the question of whether he was of Aryan heritage.
If the modern far right reads his works without understanding the main point - which is very much incompatible with fascism - so much the worse for them.
Some that die deserve life, etc.
Anarchy doesn't work efficiently. For one thing, might makes right in such a government. For another, people with different opinions can make nothing whatsoever get done, such as when some people work to build a road and others think the same place ought to have farmland. Someone must make a decision, which will be good for some and bad for others, in order to get a group of people to work toward common goals.
Oh...we would really like to appoint one supreme executive who can fix really difficult coordination problems with executive fiat while also being directly accountable to voters. Like, imagine if the president actually ran the country the way everyone thinks he does. That.
Like that homeless thing Scott just posted about. Homelessness is really complex and there's lots of factors and different legal barriers and interest groups. Wouldn't it be nice if the people of America could just, like, vote every four years for one person with absolute authority who could force every state, county, and city agency to change their behavior and escape this horrific equilibrium? Like, I like committees...but it would be really nice to just appoint one guy in charge. Because whatever we're doing now ain't working.
Are there dangers to this? Absolutely...but there's also dangers to increasingly oligarchic system of different agencies, NGOs, and corporations only coordinated through, like, vibes and news reports. And we're closer to the oligarchic dangers than the monarchical ones at the moment.
Plus, it would be way more democratic in a real sense. Like, I'm smart, and to the best of my knowledge, if I want to solve homelessness in my area, I need to do a lot of research and figure out which NGOs are involved and which races are important and how these agencies interact with relevant laws and, like...I got stuff to do. Wouldn't it be nice if there were, like, two candidates: Jim Bob the evil heartless Republican who will throw all the homeless in jail and Susan-Peterson who will give all the homeless foot rubs and tents. And then we could just, like, vote for Jim Bob or Susan-Peterson and whoever we elected could actually just go do the thing, be it throw everyone in jail or give them foot rubs. Wouldn't your vote matter a whole lot more?
>Oh...we would really like to appoint one supreme executive who can fix really difficult coordination problems with executive fiat while also being directly accountable to voters. Like, imagine if the president actually ran the country the way everyone thinks he does. That.
I really have a hard time seeing this perspective. If, say, betting markets are far better at predicting outcomes than expert individuals, why would one think an individual would be better at determining an optimal course of action than a group of people? It seems to me the problem with large bodies of decision makers is a coordination problem that technology might solve, but the vagaries of any individual decision maker that can lead a country to ruin is nearly impossible to eliminate.
I like the idea of a robust governing body, not nearly as vulnerable to physical/mental illness, narcissism, impulsivity. The problem, to me, is our archaic means of coordinating timely decisions and actions from such a body.
> I really have a hard time seeing this perspective.
> I like the idea of a robust governing body, not nearly as vulnerable to physical/mental illness, narcissism, impulsivity.
Yes, high-entropy systems are stable and robust. They're also usually low-value.
> why would one think an individual would be better at determining an optimal course of action than a group of people?
A) Because e.g. Nancy Pelosi does not personally suffer consequences for being wrong.
B) N.B. The ruler is allowed a cabinet of advisors.
a koan: if democracy is so great, why are there hardly any workers' coops in the Fortune 500?
>why would one think an individual would be better at determining an optimal course of action than a group of people
The population is still determining the course of action by voting for a leader with a clear agenda. Having a powerful executive lets policy get pushed through the otherwise impenetrable web of competing gridlocked stakeholders.
I mean honestly I think a strong argument could be made that the best form of government is "Democracy most of the time, but then an absolute Monarch for 4 years every couple centuries to clean out the pipes." This might be the best possible justification for Trump and is probably what his supporters intuitively think, deep down.
>The population is still determining the course of action by voting for a leader with a clear agenda.
I understand election as a key condition to recent proposals in favor of a more powerful, single-person executive, but I don’t think wise governance is as much a matter of imposing an agenda as it is evaluating and reacting to unpredictable, complex circumstances. And I think multiple people have the potential to do this more reliably than a single person.
Sure, that's why the President always has a Cabinet.
A cabinet’s unelected and beholden to the president not the people. They’re presidential advocates. I’m not sure how any of this jibes with your premise that “the population is still determining the course of action.”
I’ve had moderate hearing loss since my 20’s. I picked up a pair of the new OTC hearing aids for $200. After getting used to them I came to really like them.
Does anyone know if the ‘real’ hearing aids that go for $4,000 and more are a significant step up?
I’d done a contract job for a hearing aid company automating their product testing a few years ago and came away thinking that the industry was pretty much a scam, spending lots of money on lobbyists to keep OTC products off the market and allowing their high profit margin hearing aids remain the only choice. Don’t get me started.
4K? My mom's first set of hearing aids cost 6.5K! However, Costco sells some first-rate hearing aids for about 1.5K. You just need to purchase a Costco membership which is something like $60/yr.
Thanks for encouraging this. I made a new appointment for testing there today. The prices are pretty reasonable. They do a real fitting there along with the audiogram. Good thing. I have unusual small ear canals. Non of the rubber ‘nipples’ that came with my OTC aids seem right.
Yeah I was just on the Costco web site. I’m thinking about stopping by my by my local store and seeing what they have.
This happens to be an area I know something about from the tech side of things.
The vast majority of the 4k cost goes to the audiologist cartel, nothing new there.
But there are interesting details from the tech standpoint:
20 years ago: the microphones for these things were literally hand-matched, there was no mass-production tech that allowed mass-produced accuracy. Also, the super-low-power processing required for these things was very cutting-edge and expensive.
Now: I cannot emphasize enough how much the smartphone is a juggernaut of innovation and cost reduction that bleeds into the least expected areas. Microphones are made by the billions, with intrinsic matching that needs little further testing; if needed, the extra testing is still automated so adds pennies, not dollars, to the product cost. The low-power processing is cheap and ubiquitous, and commonly-used Li-ion rechargeable cells are rapidly replacing old Zn-air prime cells for hearing aids.
What I'm driving at is that the performance of these $200 OTC hearing aids is no worse than that of $4000 ones from a decade ago. For any moderate hearing loss they should be just fine. For anything more advanced, there's still some value in going to the doc and having a fitted set of aids that will run into the 4-figures.
But - and here's the sad part - the extra expense adds very little in the end. This is because advanced hearing loss is fundamentally impossible to "correct" the way we correct, e.g., advanced myopia with fitted lenses. Once hair cells are damaged, the game is up.
So I think it's awesome that people with moderate hearing loss, the ones who benefit from hearing aids the most, can how have these for 1/10 of the cartel price, and enjoy their life.
Did I mention that these OTC ones actually look decent, too, not like misshaped globs of flesh that traditional hearing aids were "designed" to look? :)
Interesting stuff, thank you. My contract job was a few years ago about when the hearing aid company was just beginning to enable Bluetooth pairing with smartphones. I sat in meetings where people would talk about the project with ‘that company in Cupertino.’ It was somewhat under wraps at that point so they wouldn’t say the company’s name.
Yeah the idea of "everybody is carrying this powerful processing unit with 2...3...4 microphones in it already plus the two by each ear, can we do something with it to improve hearing" was totally floating in the air even a decade ago. Now every tool needed to calibrate these things is an app. I think direct augmentation still runs into latency issues, but it will be fixed at some point.
I am doubtful because of the inherent economics of small electronic devices, and none of the OTC reviews I see mentioned the hearing aid manufacturers bringing anything less than their A-game. I don't know about a $200 unit, but I would be surprised if the OTC high-end like $900 was noticeably worse than audiologist-exclusives (and if that is the case, I would expect it to be a temporary thing).
The main caveat is that if you have more than moderate hearing loss (if you need a 'power' unit), it seems like all of the good OTC manufacturers stay away and just won't serve you. If you buy one, the built-in hearing test will kick you out and tell you to return it. So you're stuck with going to an audiologist before you will be allowed to purchase one of them. (I am doubtful that this is necessary but no one has hacked/jailbroken OTC hearing aids that I've heard of to test this.) At least you can still go to Costco and buy one of their $1,500 hearing aids instead of going to an audiologist to buy the $3,000+ ones...
Luckily the hearing loss is not too bad. I did go to an audiologist for testing.
Thanks for the reply.
I've definitely read somewhere reasonably trustworthy that the expensive ones you get from doctors are not much better than the OTC ones, but I don't know for sure that's accurate. But your question reminded me of an experience that gave me a glimpse into the world of hearing aid prescribers. My mother started needing hearing aids when she was 70 or so, and as her hearing worsened they helped less and less. But she could still hear people quite well in a phone call. Didn't even need her hearing aids then. So she and I came up with the idea of buying one or more microphones that people talking to her could use, with wires running to headphones that she wore. Seemed like then and then she would finally be able to hear conversations well. (This was 30 years ago, when there was less tech around.) She said she didn't give a damn how conspicuous it made her, and that if it worked she'd happily use the setup even in public places. She just wanted to be able to hear friends and family without straining.
So I called up the doc who'd sold her her multi-thousand dollar hearing aids to ask how we could get a set-up like that. Was willing to pay him to find or prescribe the right equipment, even if insurance wouldn't cover it. It really did not occur to me that he'd refuse -- but that's what he did. There was an astonished silence after I'd gotten out the basic idea, and then, as I was filling in the details, he started launching objections, interrupting me over and over to do so. And none of them were valid, and many were insulting me and my mother. They were things like "your mother has $4000 worth of medical equipment in her ears and she's still complaining, and now you want to spend *more* money in the hopes of making her happy?" "everybody complains about their hearing aids," "you think this amateur idea of yours will work better than medical devices?" "you'll have wires running all over the place." He declined even to tell me where I could look for appropriate microphones, etc. WTF? I'm pretty sure my mom's and my plan would have worked, and pretty sure he knew that. It was like he was reacting to a horrible glimpse he was getting of a future where he wasn't the hearing assistance gate-keeper. (Plus there was some male-female stuff getting activated. This unwelcome idea was coming from someone with no MD *and* no cock?!?!)
So I'm all for you getting OTC stuff, and think there are probably simple way to tweak it if you need to.
Why would he know where to get microphones? I assume this was an audiologist, not an electrical engineer or a designer of audio systems?
I wasn't actually asking him to build the set-up or to tell me where to buy things. I was asking more general questions, such as whether the microphones in hearing aids had some special characteristics that we should try to replicate, and whether he knew why it was easy for my mom to hear voices on the telephone. Was it just that they were close to her ear, while other sounds were somewhat blocked by having the phone to her ear? I made clear that I was open to anything from him writing up specs for a company that could build what we wanted (and of course being paid for doing that) to me paying him his usual hourly rate for advising me as needed while I saw to getting the actual hardware.
Thanks for the reply. That was clever work with the self design stuff. And yeah, I’m not surprised you ran into a jerk.
Ah, the balm of empathy!
If you start finding OTC hearing aids unsatisfactory, maybe go talk to somebody who's a sound engineer or something, not an MD.
Looking for feedback on an idea. Please include whether you consider yourself religious and in what sense:
“To someone who believes in God, God is the realist thing there is. Thus, what ‘reality’ means to a materialist atheist or agnostic, is the same -concept_ as ‘God’ to a theist. The difference being the name, as well as the properties associated with the concept, and the relationship the person has with the concept.”
Gnostic?
>To someone who believes in God, God is the realist thing there
Theism is more than one thing (etc). There are certainly theisms along those lines.
>Thus, what ‘reality’ means to a materialist atheist or agnostic, is the same -concept_ as ‘God’ to a theist.
Its the the extension of "most real". That doesn't mean they actually understand the word "real" differently, they just differ about what exemplifies it.
Meaning is more than one thing (etc).
Distinguishing intension , and extension..
https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110810104854884#:~:text=The%20extension%20of%20a%20predicate,truly%20described%20by%20the%20predicate.
..people can disagree about who is the Most Beautiful..the extension, whoever exemplifies beauty the best ..without disagreeing about the intension , the "dictionary meaning".
Lukewarm theist raised conservative. When I think of what is "real" I think of what materially exists, is observable, etc. Under that interpretation I don't know any theists who would agree with your statement. "God is reality" sounds like something from Spinoza, which is generally considered heresy.
But skimming the replies below I gather you mean sometime like "base reality". That is, in explaining where things came from, an atheist might stop at the big bang, while a theist might say the big bang was made by God. That sounds like Newton's "first cause" argument, and in that case I guess many theists might agree.
Personally I would not: "the big bang", "fluctuations in the quantum foam", "it's all a simulation", "an infinite chain of simulations", etc. are all explanations of where reality came from. But there is to me what feels like an entirely different category for question: why there is anything to explain at all? There is no way to answer that question, but the question remains is why I am still a lukewarm theist. I admit it's a not a very defensible position.
Somewhere between "non-religious theist" and "very heretical Christian".
I'm not sure if I'm understanding your position, so I'll rephrase in my own preferred manner, and you tell me if it's wrong: instead of seeing atheists as "believing in a certain natural reality" and theists as "believing in that natural reality and ALSO believing in this additional supernatural thing called God", it may be better to see atheists as "believing the foundation of natural reality is unconscious, contingent, lacks intentionality or purpose etc" and theists as "believing the foundation of natural reality is in some sense intentional, necessary, and conscious, among other things, and calling that foundation God". (Obviously those "other things" will depend on what properties that particular theist takes God to have.)
If that is what you're saying, then I do agree, for the most part, regarding my own theology at least. Three points though:
First, I would go further and say that the difference between "a unified ultimate reality that is conscious" (theism) and "a unified ultimate reality that is unconscious" (pantheism) doesn't really seem meaningful to me. They're both right but they're also both wrong. If there really is a unified ultimate reality with some kind of necessity and intentionality, then being the foundation of everything it's also the foundation of all human consciousness in the first place, and thus is something conscious beings can relate to *as if it were a conscious being itself, in some sense*. But describing this reality (God) as actually being conscious feels like an absurd category error. And so does describing God as not conscious.
Tl; dr pantheism equals theism, and insofar as it purports not to it's incoherent
Second, my agreement with your characterisation of God is a big problem I have with most Christians (and probably other monotheistic faiths but I'm much less familiar with them). Christians frequently anthropromorphise God to an absurd degree. As if God is a man in the sky, who feels human emotions, like anger and love, and is a "person" who you can have a "relationship" with. Among other problems, this (1) is primitive, almost pagan, and is philosophically incoherent to an the extreme, (2) makes an easy target for atheist mockery for those reasons, almost as if you're taking the atheist strawman conception of God and actually proudly believing in it, and (3) seems even blasphemous, insofar as that's a useful word, since it treats God as something far far lesser than what anything called "God" should be.
I generally refuse to refer to God as "him", not for sexism reasons (though those are also valid objections) but because it encodes this ridiculous anthropromorphism.
Third, I think this foundational understanding of God is the main reason various arguments for God's existence are entirely persuasive to some people and seem completely stupid to others. Because of *just how fundamental* the concept of God is, you can't use less fundamental facts about reality to either prove or disprove God, to someone with the opposite view.
I think "these two concepts are the same except for the name, the properties associated with the concept, and the relationship you have with the concept" is a vacuous statement - it would be true for any two concepts. The properties are how you define a concept, if you change those then it's not describing the same thing.
"Cats to a cat lover and dogs to a dog lover are the same concept - the best pet. The only difference between cats and dogs is their name, the properties that their owners associate with the ideal pet, and the relationship the person has with their pet."
I can see how this works for cats and dogs - but by using this term “the best pet”, that _concept_ does seem to be shared between lovers of different pets. I do get your point though, which is that the properties and names associated with a concept are what make the concept what it is, not merely its position in some concept graph.
>God is the realist thing there is
Atheist here. 'Real' is a binary proposition. Something is either real or it isn't. 'The realist' is therefore a meaningless conjugation. God is viewed by the faithful as being the _most important_ thing that's real. That's not the same thing as being a different category of reality.
Expanded version of my previous response:-
Counterfactuals and possiblities.
Things that didn't happen are unreal, but not equally unreal. Things that could have happened but didnt, counterfactuals s are more real than impossibilities. Physical actualities --facts, for short-- are more real than physically possibilities. Physical possibilities are more real than physically impossible conceptual possibilities. If you toss a coin and it lands heads , it could have landed tails, but not have turned into a vase of petunias.
Social construction.
Money, marriages and mortgages exist only because society deems them to : they are not fundamental physical realities. Gold is a natural kind. The US dollar is not a natural kind, but is more real than monopoly money.
Virtuality and simulation.
In the simulation hypothesis , it's precisely the facts that the simulators cause us, and can terminate us on whim,...whereas can do nothing to them,...that makes our world the simulation , and theirs the more real. (They may also be unable to rule out being simulated).
Fiction.
A fictional character in a real book is less real.than a real person ,but more real than fictional character in an unwritten book, or a character that doesn't even exist in a fictional universes, such as Sherlock Holmes' wife. Of course, there can be fuctions within fictions, leaving to many gradations of reality.
Maths.
Even from a fictionalist perspective, some numbers are realer than others: the irrational square root of two can be considered more real than the rational root.
Physics
Quantum mechanical measure could be considered a real (actually, complex) valued level of realness.
Real isn't a binary category. There's socially constructed reality in addition to natural kinds, for instance.
That's just playing semantic games with the word 'real'. In the sense that OP used it, realness is binary.
It's identifying the actual semantics. In the sense that everyone uses it, it's not binary.
If the OP is apxhard, they are clearly not assuming instrumentalist as a matter of definition.
In my view it's simple equivocation. People don't use words in precise ways.
In any case your example doesn't really illustrate the principle. 'Social reality' isn't non-binary, it's just vaguely defined. If you were able to have a precise and objective definition of whatever you meant by social reality then that thing would either exist or not exist. The only reason it feels non-binary is that it's an imprecisely defined term so you can squint and make it look like whatever you want.
That amounts to.than saying there are a wh ole bunch of binaries In a whole bunch of contexts. So long as there is more than one context, the overall picture is nonbinary. Its like the way there are more than two binary numbers, even though there are only two binary digits.
Agnostic here. Because that's the only rational response to unfalsifiable propositions — i.e. creator vs no-creator or god vs no-god.
In my worldview, the reality that we perceive is mind-dependent. I'm a Kantian (transcendental) idealist in that the human mind shapes and structures experience, and while we can know the appearances of things, we cannot know things as they are in themselves independently of our perception. Actually, I should call myself an exponent of the Middle Way, because this is what Nagarjuna posited seventeen hundred years ago (if I've understood him correctly).
I would never accept that God with a capital G is the most real thing there is, because, for all we know, the entity that created our universe could be nonexistent now (i.e. dead). Unless of course the universe is functionally the mind of God. But that begs the question of whether God with capital G has a perception mediated by its god-like qualia. And if it does, what sort of filtering does it god-like qualia do?
Are direct perceptions more real than atoms or less? Are another person's perceptions more real than atoms or less?
It seems to be that you have to substitute degrees of probability for degrees of realness.
Sure, but I don't think 'degree of certainty' is really a synonym for 'degree of realness'. If it were then OP's claim would be exactly backwards: God is probably the least certain thing.
Thank you, this is a good point. I will translate “realest” into “the root cause in a causal model” for more technical audiences, since that’s what I mean.
Isn't that what 'prime mover' means? You could read some Aquinas to understand the Christian theological perspective on this.
Sure - do materialist atheists believe in first cause as well? I don’t think they’d use the term “prime mover”, but to what extend does “the big bang” play the same role?
To a certain extent, the Big Bang is as much a religious hypothesis as it a scientific one. Of course, astronomical measurements indicate that the universe is expanding (presumably from some compact state), and the background cosmic microwave radiation suggests that there was a high-energy event far in the past. The expansion rate suggests that the universe was a compact object about 13.5 billion years ago. The cosmic microwave radiation can be accounted for by when matter condensed from the previous plasma of the early universe (about 380 thousand years into the expansion (that is if time ran at the same rate it does now) — hydrogen appeared and high energy photons were released. Those photons have since cooled to a relatively (but not perfectly) distributed background of microwave radiation.
Combine those two observations and you've got the "Big Bang". Of course, there's now a huge amount of evidence that this event happened — but why it happened or how it happened is all speculation. The energy states of the early universe before 10^12 seconds (~30K years) after the bang are outside the experimental range of our instruments (like CERN's Super Collider). So we cannot experimentally verify what happened before that time. The data suggest that there must have been an initial expansion from a point source and that during that initial expansion, there was no matter nor energy until the universe was about the size of a watermelon. Then somehow, it went through a phase transition where the inflation energy mumble mumble mumble turned into quarks and gluons and the three plus one fundamental forces appeared. But the history of the universe before 10^12 seconds is all theory, sort of the mathematical equivalent of theology. ;-)
A cosmologist could no doubt talk convincingly about how theories of the universe before 10^12 seconds *are* science. But I'd argue that if you can't falsify a theory it's not real science.
And of course, what was there before the Big Bang is all speculation. And some like Stephen Hawking that the question of a before is nonsensical. There was no before because time appeared with the universe. I think this is cop out because it really doesn't explain anything. I am more sympathetic to Lee Smolin's view that time exists independently of the universe. But that's all speculation and should be taken with a grain of quark-sized salt.
What about non-Christian theological perspectives, OP?
This is a part of the question! I don’t know how to answer from the perspective of someone who holds believes I don’t have.
Having said this, I think this position as stated is more aligned with Catholic theology and a lot of Protestants might see it as being pantheism, for example.
What about them?
Well, the Vendantic schools (and I hope I'm not oversimplifying or mischaracterizing them) have the concept of Brahma, who is characterized as a creator god, but my understanding is that Brahma is identified with the force of creation. Brahma is continually creating new things and events, while Vishnu preserves them, and then Shiva destroys them. As such Brahma may be considered to be the first mover of this Universe, but I gather that some Vedantic cosmologies posit a multiverse, and every universe has its own Brahma.
I admit that most of what I've learned about Vendantic philosophies comes from Buddhist philosophers who were arguing against them. So, my understanding has inherent biases. If someone can improve upon my knowledge, I'd welcome some education here.
Christian. I think the idea as phrased is too vague to have an opinion on. I don't know what you mean by things being the same -concept- but having different properties, this sounds contradictory.
It’s a good question.
If we take predictive processing as a given - that our brains operate based upon predictive models of our future experiences, then two concepts are “the same” if the occupy the same point in a similar concept graph (of course, similar is doing some work there.)
So in this case, if you have a root concept to that predictive graph, it would be “the concept that influences or causes others but doesn’t receive any causal inputs”, ie the root of the causal graph.
So it's a question of figuring out causes retroactively?
I think I'm going to say 'disagree'; the God experiences I've heard of always start with God telling someone to do, or more often not do, a thing, and then events happening to drive the point home. God says "stop running heavy equipment," and the next time the guy runs heavy equipment his windshield is hit by progressively larger pieces of wood until one shatters the windshield and hits next to his head (and then he still didn't stop because he's stubborn as hell).
It's very important that that "do this/stop doing this" impulse be there first, which materialism doesn't cover. If that's not there first, I generally don't attribute the event to God.
Thank you - you’re making the point, I think, that for most people who do believe, it’s an imperative belief more so than a factual one.
Replying before I read other replies. Committed Theist, Non-Denominational Christian.
I think what you're describing is more like Pantheism - that the universe itself is God. My understanding of God is that he has thoughts, pursues goals, and works intentionally towards those goals (and within that has lots of very specific attributes, like being benevolent and loving, not lying, etc.). I don't think it would be accurate to ascribe those attributes to a materialist god, as described.
I do believe that an atheist or other materialist can value something as an Ultimate, similar to how I value God. Whether that's a moral value or material condition, or just existence itself. That's close enough that I can see what you're aiming at, but don't think there's enough overlap except in a very vague sense.
I agree with what you’re saying, once we start using the phrase “material reality” - at that point I think we’ve invoked a set of ideas now distinct from the idea of the root cause or initial source of all being. I would agree with the notion that i am articulating pantheism if I used the word “the universe”, but from what I can tell, “realty” means something subtlety different from “the universe”; chat gpt says that “reality” is broader in scope, encompassing _all_ that exists, whereas “material reality” seems to be synonymous in scope with “the universe”
Yes, I think you're phrasing things right. For a materialist the universe is equivalent to everything that exists, but to a theist the universe may refer to the thing that God created, which is not everything that exists. C. S. Lewis discusses this distinction in his book "Miracles":
"What the Naturalist believes is that the ultimate Fact, the thing you can’t go behind, is a vast process in space and time which is going on of its own accord. Inside that total system every particular event (such as your sitting reading this book) happens because some other event has happened; in the long run, because the Total Event is happening. Each particular thing (such as this page) is what it is because other things are what they are; and so, eventually, because the whole system is what it is. All the things and events are so completely interlocked that no one of them can claim the slightest independence from ‘the whole show’. None of them exists ‘on its own’ or ‘goes on of its own accord’ except in the sense that it exhibits, at some particular place and time, that general ‘existence on its own’ or ‘behaviour of its own accord’ which belongs to ‘Nature’ (the great total interlocked event) as a whole. Thus no thoroughgoing Naturalist believes in free will: for free will would mean that human beings have the power of independent action, the power of doing something more or other than what was involved by the total series of events. And any such separate power of originating events is what the Naturalist denies. Spontaneity, originality, action ‘on its own’, is a privilege reserved for ‘the whole show’, which he calls Nature.
"The Supernaturalist agrees with the Naturalist that there must be something which exists in its own right; some basic Fact whose existence it would be nonsensical to try to explain because this Fact is itself the ground or starting-point of all explanations. But he does not identify this Fact with ‘the whole show’. He thinks that things fall into two classes. In the first class we find either things or (more probably) One Thing which is basic and original, which exists on its own. In the second we find things which are merely derivative from that One Thing. The one basic Thing has caused all the other things to be. It exists on its own; they exist because it exists. They will cease to exist if it ever ceases to maintain them in existence; they will be altered if it ever alters them."
Religious here, this seems uncontroversialy accurate to me. I could imagine people quibbling on the wording (such as defining what "the realist thing there is" means) but certainly the theist believes God is real in the same way an atheist believes the material universe is real.
I (atheist) feel like this is something a lot of religious people might SAY they agree with, mostly because it seems to mean something superlatively positive about God, but in practice I think only the most fervent believers actually appear to think it.
I think you’re right. Many people claim to believe there is an all powerful, all loving being, but it’s rare to find people who consistently act as if this were true. I think people are saying what they think they ought to believe, rather than accurately describing the mechanism that governs their actions.
'Real' is a binary. Things are real, or not. The pencil on my desk is real, the paper it's sitting on is real, the desk below is real. There are no things that are partially real.
I don't think you can rank things such that any single thing is 'most real' or the 'realest'. So the statement makes no sense at all to me. I think even a Theist would say something like 'God exists and is greater than his creation, but he's not MORE REAL than his creation.
" 'God exists and is greater than his creation, but he's not MORE REAL than his creation."
Is Hamlet real?
How about Shakespeare? Is he more real than Hamlet?
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/god-necessary-being/
Hamlet is a real character, but not a real person.
Shakespeare was a real person.
Shakespeare the person is 'as real' as Hamlet the character.
You don't think Shakespeare is 'more' real or on a higher plane of reality than Hamlet, seeing as how Hamlet depends on Shakespeare in order to exist, but Shakespeare does not depend on Hamlet in order to exist?
Right I don't. The blacksmith can make a horseshoe, while the horseshoe cannot make a blacksmith. Nevertheless, they are equally real.
Capability to alter reality is not a prerequisite to being 'real'.
Consider the simulation hypothesis.
In the simulation hypothesis , it's precisely the facts that t he simulators cause us, and can terminate us on whim, where can do nothing to them, than makes our world the simulation , and theirs the more real. (They may also be unable to rule.our being simulated).
What does “reality” refer to, in this way of thinking? Is reality real?
I don't understand how your question is relevant. Can you explain?
Sure - if reality is binary, and there aren’t orders or degrees of realness, I don’t see understand what “reality” itself means or refers to, and hence I would think it’s not real.
The stack of papers on my desk is real. As is the pencil, and the desk itself.
The book report my child said he wrote, but actually didn't, is not real.
If Trump says that 90 million illegals snuck across our border during the Biden administration, but in fact only 5.2 million did, then 5.2 million illegal entries were real, and 84.8 million are not real.
Harry Potter is a real character in a real fiction series, but is not a real person. Tax accountant is a real thing a person can be. Wizard in the sense of the Harry Potter stories is not a real thing that a person can be.
Note that these are beliefs. If I'm wrong (There is a book report! Wizards exist and can wield the fundamental forces of the universe!) then those things were real the whole time and I was just wrong. The book report wasn't more or less real than my desk because of my beliefs about its existence, or its lack of completeness, etc.
Real or not real. It's not a spectrum.
>Harry Potter is a real character in a real fiction series, but is not a real person.
That 's an intermediate level of reality right there. A fictional character in a real book is less real.than a real.person ,but more real than a fictional character in an unwritten book. The US dollar is not a natural kind, but is more real than monopoly money.
I think I get what you’re saying here. But what process do you use to determine what’s real or not? Can you show how that process leads me to believe reality is real?
Religious here.
I think there's a slight difference, in that I presume a materialist accepts the physical universe as the most real thing, and themselves as part of that universe, but all running along the same lines under the same discoverable physical laws. So that, in one sense, there isn't a difference of kind between a star and a human, both are arrangements of matter and energy that come about in obedience to the laws of physics (or maths at the deep ground level of what substrate underlies the universe at the Big Bang or before).
For (Christians) God is ultimate reality and the reality we have around us is contingent reality. God is not the same kind of thing as us (which is why, for example, Dawkins' arguments about 'God can't exist because God would have to be really complicated but really complicated things only come later on in the timeline of the universe not at the start' don't work for religious believers).
https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P17.HTM
This sounds correct - once we start using a phrase like “material reality” we are being more specific. But in both cases, the worldviews involve a root cause; the differences are, what you call that thing, what the intermediary steps are, between it and our day time day lives, and then (more importantly, imo), how we relate to that thing.
I think our wiring pushes us in the direction of believing that the universe makes sense, that there is some entity or some priniciple governing the universe. My guess is that we mostly apply to the universe the model we are wired to have about other people and the things they make and do, which make sense to us even we object to them. So yeah, there are a lot of things that we'll accept as the governing entity or principle, and "god" is one of them and "reality" is another.
PS. I’m an atheist
This sounds right to me and reminds me of Martin Buber’s I/it vs I/thou distinction, with the difference between thesis and atheists is theists using a “thou” relationship with being itself, as if it were a person, whereas atheists relate to being as an “it”
I think you meant to write "realest" rather than "realist".
I'm an atheist. I think there's a lot of meaning hiding within the word "properties".
Imagine if I claimed that, to someone who believes in God, He most perfectly embodies the nature of all things, and He is therefore (among other things) a better dog than any other dog. Therefore, an atheist's beloved pet dog is the same concept to them as God, the only difference being the associated properties (properties which include actually being God instead of an elderly Labrador).
I suppose the rejoinder from a religious person would be that yes, God is in all dogs, but He encompasses a lot more than dogness, and so the atheist's dog is obviously not the same thing. But that's my problem with the first idea! I'm an atheist because the properties of God that fall outside the bounds of observable reality - omniscience, omnipotence, making women out of ribs, and so on - seem to me to be the definition of God. What is left if you remove all the bits of God that require actual faith, all the bits that are supernatural, and pare Him back to being just a bunch of atoms banging around? Those aren't just properties to be handwaved away, they're the core of where our beliefs differ.
I think what you’re doing is conflating a space of ideas - theologies - with a specific understanding of one element in that space - ie whatever understanding you have of that one form of Christianity.
Your idea that it’s all “just atoms banging around” is ultimately based on faith, too. You’ve never seen an atom, nor do you personally know anyone who has. You believe atoms exist and make up all things (except for subatomic particles and fields of force and photons &c &c) ultimately because that helps all of your experiences fit together into a coherent singular narrative. The search for this narrative following a specific methodology is the scientific method, but the idea that one such narrative exists can’t be justified by evidence. Materialists think this single narrative is an equation that we haven’t yet found, but for which we seem to have a few good working approximations. Theists say, it’s a person acting intentionally.
Of course they're both based on faith. My objection isn't to other people having different faiths or accepting different axioms. It's to the rhetorical technique of A) redefining what God means such that He exhibits none of the supernatural properties that make atheists doubt Him, and then B) claiming that atheists believe in this redefined "God".
I don't believe God remains conceptually the same when you take away His Godly properties. I don't think there's any reason to make that redefinition other than to be able to then claim that atheists believe in God. I also think it does a disservice to the faiths of the people who believe that He is capable of concrete earth-level miracles and has a personal relationship with them.
Thank you for clarifying, and yeah that does make sense.
The purpose of the rhetorical device - for what it’s worth- is to downgrade the question of “existence of some extremely specific thing” to a question of “does reality actually work this in general cause-and-effect way.”
Lots of people will claim that if you life as if God is real and try to do the right thing even if it hurts, your life will grow better in numerous ways, and in particular you will feel more calm and at peace. And this is a kind of experiment a person can actually do!
Of course some believers will reject this description and say it’s all about the afterlife, etc etc - but by doing this translation i wondering if I can get people to be open to running the experiments themselves.
<i>Imagine if I claimed that, to someone who believes in God, He most perfectly embodies the nature of all things,</i>
There's the mistake. God contains all natures in his intellect, but he doesn't embody them.
Okay, but then He contains all reality in His intellect but doesn't embody it, in which case my atheistic concept of reality has nothing to do with what's going on inside His (metaphorical) head.
That could possibly work for a Ground of Being kind of "God", like the Eastern traditions that emphasize its absolute neutrality, or the God of e.g Spinoza. Doesn't work so much for the typical monotheistic God with its character-like personal will.
Personally I speculatively believe in the first, strongly disbelieve in the second.
Can you help me understand why it doesn’t work for the second? I would say that the “the law of physics” seem to be a secular interpretation of “the will of God”, in that it works as the unspecific answer to any question of why something happens.
Those two things are only equivalent if you believe that the only thing God wills is for the laws of physics to continue functioning in a normal manner, in exactly the way that you would expect them to function if there was no intelligence at the helm and the universe was an uncaring collection of atoms.
And sure, there's nothing wrong with that belief - Deism has a long history behind it, and some people like the idea of a God who crafted a beautiful universe but doesn't otherwise interfere with it. But it's a pretty narrowly constrained concept of God, and if you asked most mainstream religious groups if they believed in Deism, they would probably say no.
> I don't think you can honestly equate a narratively rich person-like God with reality, because it amounts to saying that reality itself intervenes in history, wants things to go this or what way, and occasionally shows itself with a human form in some specific place and time to talk to this or that guy.
I think this is exactly what Abrahamic religious theologies, taken literally, amounts to a claim of. The name “I am who am” seems to me like a direct claim of this: “I am existence itself.”
I don't know, to me "I am who am" sounds like an assertion of the speaker's existence, or at most like some kind of "you can't fathom who/what I am". A voice from the deep beyond claiming to be beyond the puny human's ability to understand or pigeonhole. But you're probably not the first who read "I am existence itself" into it.
The thing about semantics is that there is no rational limit to how far it makes sense to extend the meaning of a word. It's not like rationally discussing some logic once you've agreed on the definitions. All I can say is that too me it sounds too confusing to use the same word "reality" for the abstract space where stuff happens, and for a distinct entity doing stuff.
So if someone says the Abrahamic God is real, I can understand the claim. It might be right or wrong, but at least I know what they are saying. But if they say it is reality or existence itself, and then it turns out to do and want stuff, I can only answer that I'm not sure what that even means.
This has been a problem Christians have intellectually been dealing with for hundreds of years. Aquinas includes it in his "Summa Theologica". On the section "Whether we should call God a 'person'" he writes "I answer that, "Person" signifies what is most perfect in all nature—that is, a subsistent individual of a rational nature. Hence, since everything that is perfect must be attributed to God, for as much as His essence contains every perfection, this name "person" is fittingly applied to God; not, however, as it is applied to creatures, but in a more excellent way" and "It may be said that God has a rational "nature," if reason be taken to mean, not discursive thought, but in a general sense, an intelligent nature. But God cannot be called an "individual" in the sense that His individuality comes from matter; but only in the sense which implies incommunicability."
Well first let's be clear that your question is about semantics. We're not discussing whether various ideas of God are credible or not, just whether it makes sense to equate them with "reality".
My answer here is that the analogy works as long as your idea of God is abstract and neutral enough like a kind of Ground of being, or even more secularly, as you say, the laws of physics. But classic gods have lots of specific narrative content that is important to their followers. The Abrahamic God is so named because of the specific belief that He gave specific instructions and made promises several millenia ago to a guy called Abraham. See also how Christianity insists that its God is "personal". More generally, having a will, intervening in history and playing favorites among humans is classic fare for all kinds of gods of various human cultures. The gods of the ancient Greeks, Sumerians, Aztecs and others also did it.
I don't think you can honestly equate a narratively rich person-like God with reality, because it amounts to saying that reality itself intervenes in history, wants things to go this or what way, and occasionally shows itself with a human form in some specific place and time to talk to this or that guy. Just in terms of semantics it seems like too much of a stretch for the word "reality".
My impression is that religious believers who answer your question in the positive are playing a bit of a game of motte and bailey. The narrative stuff is extremely important to religious identity, but it's also hard to defend in the wider scheme of things, so they will mostly retreat to the motte of God as "reality" with a few extra general properties. Either that, or they're really more spiritual than religious and are just choosing to mostly ignore the narrative content of their religion.
>My impression is that religious believers who answer your question in the positive are playing a bit of a game of motte and bailey.
I don't see how: there's nothing in his initial post that would prevent God from having all that "narrative stuff" you talk about.
There's nothing about a God that would prevent it from doing or wanting stuff in general, and plenty of belief systems have it that way. But the original post was about whether it would make sense to equate God with "reality". Which seems to me like a modern semantic concern btw, As I was saying just above, just in terms of how far you stretch a word, I find it way too confusing to use the same word "reality" for the abstract space where stuff happens, and for a distinct entity doing stuff.
But to a Christian the "abstract space where stuff happens" is the result of a "distinct entity doing stuff". God exists: He creates a universe.
Indeed, Eastern societies traditionally did not develop the idea of "laws of nature" because they didn't believe in a "typical monotheistic God with its character-like personal will". Laws of nature only make sense if there is a lawgiver, after all.
Atheist, and this basically reads like a slightly modified ontological argument.
Religious people, by and large, *don't claim to know what god is*. Words like "inscrutable" come up a lot. Trying to shoehorn religious views into a framework which takes a definitive logical approach is, ultimately, trying to make god legible; reasonably certain most of the strongly religious people would take this as, well, I'm going to call it heretical, but they'd probably have a very specific word for the specific kind of wrong they'll say this is.
I have articulated this to numerous religious people of varying stripes, who have agreed. I haven’t yet found a religious person I’ve shared this with who has disagreed.
I suspect these claims of inscrutability can be translated as doubt that we’ll ever have the “true laws of physics” that make make accurate predictions (or at least calibrated uncertainty) in all cases.
I have gotten that same prediction - “religious people won’t accept this” from both atheists and people who consider themselves spiritual or faithful but skeptical of organized religion.
So was your question in bad faith? You don’t seem to want answers except what you have articulated here.
Due to the one-way-mirror one-way-glass character of unequal internet anonymity I'm sorry that I won't be able to personally engage with any responses to my mission statement in this precise space.
Unfortunately I need to apply this to potentially non-anonymous interlocutors as well, due to the nature of the medium..
Anyone who would like to, is invited to discuss this on my substack, youtube, or privately via WhatsApp or Email.
If you choose to read, I thank you.
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/do-you-believe-in-good
Washington State has all our state executive offices on the ballot (including a ridiculous 28 candidates for Governor) and one Supreme Court Justice but no statewide measures.
We’ve got something no other state has… we have GoodSpaceGuy. I’ve come to cherish our permacandidate.
God Bless GoodSpaceGuy.
On the primary ballot
Oops, I misunderstood the prompt! I'll...see myself out.
In the 2020 presidential election, Joe Biden received over 81 million votes, the most popular in U.S. history. Three years later, his disapproval rating is the highest in US history, even surpassing Trump's, according to FiveThirtyEight.
Does this indicate that the U.S. political system is failing to produce capable leaders and becoming more and more a 'shotgun marriage' between people and the nominees? what are your thoughts on long term implications of this?
>Does this indicate that the U.S. political system is failing to produce capable leaders
Vote count and leadership capability don't necessarily correlate. There are plenty of capable leaders in Congress who would make better presidential candidates than the two current nominees, but the political system has not incentivized their progression towards this goal. The leaders do exist.
Joe Biden's vote total and approval ratings in 2020-21 reflect the belief that he would be a one-term president who would restore normalcy after the Trump Years and not rock the boat. He didn't explicitly promise to be a one-term president, but I think most people understood that to mean that if things were going well, the party couldn't find a decent replacement, and most importantly if his health were still up to it, he was keeping open the *option* of a second term, but really that wasn't going to happen.
Joe Biden's recent approval ratings and polling numbers reflect the growing understanding that he is a stubborn, senile old man who can't possibly serve out another term in the Oval Office and needs to step aside before we have to invoke the 25th Amendment. Now that he has in fact stepped aside, I expect public opinion of him to recover substantially.
You may be right that the US political system is failing to produce capable leaders; the absence of strong challengers to either Trump or Biden this year may be evidence of that. But Biden did a pretty good job of doing what he was elected to do, as a transitional leader, and public opinion now is not evidence that anyone made a mistake in 2020.
If I'm reading Sam correctly and being charitable, I think that's part of his point. No individual made a mistake, but the system produced a bad result.
I think we would all agree that Biden and Trump, and Clinton in 2016, were bad candidates. Not just unappealing to their enemies, but unappealing to everyone. That they are the top results of a complex system seems to indicate that the system itself is having problems. I don't think this was the case in 2012 or more years before that. Mitt Romney may not have been perfect, but he fit within the Overton Window and would probably have made a good president.
We could talk/argue about why we've gone the way we have (my money is on elites separating from voters and losing their confidence, but there's lots of theories here). But ultimately, we can see that there's some kind of problem since at least 2012 in both parties.
Biden has been an unusually effective president. More effective than Obama. Tell me why you think he was a bad candidate.
On the negative side he hasn't been able to stanch the flow of illegal immigrants, but in his favor Biden issued an executive order that suspended protection for asylum seekers without a "credible fear" for requiring asylum, allowing for immediate deportation of unauthorized migrants. And he's increasing the size and number of immigration courts. But the economy is booming. He's pushed through more federal judicial appointments than (I think) any President to date. Employment is high. Inflation has recently fallen back to normal. The stock market is going strong. Internationally, he's countered the Russian threat by arming Ukraine and strengthening our ties to NATO. He's rebuilt the State Department's foreign service ranks after Trump decimated them. The dollar is strong internationally, and US manufacturing is up.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2024-opinion-biden-accomplishment-data/
FWIW, I was also pleasantly surprised by Biden's term as well.
For example, when Biden talked about bringing bipartisanship back on the campaign trail in 2020, I assumed that was either naive or calculated empty talk as I expected Republicans to stonewall everything like they did under Obama. However, he somehow managed to pass a large number of bipartisan bills anyway.
Then there's the economy, where people predicted a recession every month for years, and every month, it stubbornly failed to materialize. Meanwhile, prime age labor force participation is going up and up, unemployment is very low, inflation is moderate and rapidly falling, inequality is falling, etc.
Basically the only *bad* thing Biden did was run for reelection. I mean sure there's individual policy stuff that can be nitpicked, like the rise of protectionism... but well, have you seen the other guy?
>Does this indicate that the U.S. political system is failing to produce capable leaders
Many things indicate that, I would say.
George W. Bush had a higher disapproval rating, 70.7 percent versus Biden's 55.8 percent.
As did Nixon
I'm starting to get annoyed by this little talking point: the most popular evah!
Yeah, because fifty years ago there weren't eighty million votes to get. In fifty years time, there might (or might not) be one hundred million votes to get, and whoever gets them then will be "the mostest evah".
*Somebody* has to get the most, *somebody* has to get the least. How many votes did Washington get? Is Biden better than Washington?
Well, at least this does leave the field open for "See? Biden was a way better choice than Hillary, he got so many more votes than she did!" 😁
>Yeah, because fifty years ago there weren't eighty million votes to get. In fifty years time, there might (or might not) be one hundred million votes to get, and whoever gets them then will be "the mostest evah".
Agreed. Such measures should be scaled by the number of eligible voters.
( The similarly irritating financial equivalent "biggest deal/bankruptcy/scam" ever should also be scaled, though here it is less clear whether GNP, money supply, or largest corporation's sales should be used as the scale factor. )
Trump got more votes losing in 2020 than Obama did winning in 2012 (74 million to 65 million).
Obama was a more popular president at 51% approval around the 2012 election than Trump was in 2020 around the election, at 43%.
So yeah, pretty meaningless.
Well, isn't the high number of votes Biden got caused by turnout and population growth more than approval? A disapproval rate (% of the population) should probably be compared to the % of the vote Biden got, which was 51.3% — more than anyone achieved in some recent elections, but nothing record-setting (Obama '08 got 52.9%, Bush Sr. got 53.4%, and Reagan '84 got 58.8%).
No...in retrospect, I think the majority of Democrats really wanted what Joe Biden was selling in 2020: a return to normalcy. 2016 was insane, the entire Trump presidency was madness from their perspective, and they wanted things to go back to normal. People, especially Democrats, very genuinely wanted that and if Biden had delivered, I think he'd have gained decent Republican support.
Instead, America seems crazier than ever. Covid is over but between overseas wars and inflation, America feels less secure. Biden certainly didn't tamp down the culture war, if anything the hard left seems further radicalized over things like Gaza. And, finally, Trump is back and likely to win in 2024; even if he doesn't, the Republican party is now formally defined by him, figures like DeSantis and Vance who are the future of the party are much, much closer to Trump than someone like Jeb Bush.
Biden promised a "return to normalcy". He didn't deliver.
"Instead, America seems crazier than ever. " I agree. The complete public u-turn is fascinating. I think the US public is in a state of frenzy and panic. A worrying unstable state. some of it might be on our major political parties for leveraging 'fear campaigns' and stirring up public panic.
For slightly more data, If you look at https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/biden-approval-rating/, which compares Biden's approval ratings to those of the other post-war presidents, you see that presidents have on average been getting less popular.
Yeah, this strikes me as key to this question, and I think it's mostly a function of increased polarization really lowering the ceiling for everybody.
Yes, and the same is true for other major democracies.
"Does this indicate that the U.S. political system is failing to produce capable leaders"
Yes, but I'm biased -- I think the US is producing fewer capable people in general.
"Biden got more votes running in an election in the present than did other candidates running in the past when there were fewer voters" is such a vacuous statement that nothing should follow it.
It's the same argument for the same reasons as "Well Trump may have got the votes of the Evil Slaveholder Electoral College, but Hillary won the popular vote, so in fact really *she* is the president and not him!"
Only if you fail to understand it.
One is a per capita misunderstanding, the other a principled objection to am undemocratic political system.
I don't think that's the same argument at all. There's no relevance to Biden getting more votes than Obama or Washington or anyone else *in a different election.* There is at least arguably relevance to Clinton getting more votes than Trump *in the same election.*
I probably know the arguments you might give for why in fact it's not relevant that Clinton got more votes than Trump (e.g. that if the popular vote is what matters then candidates will campaign differently), so we can probably skip arguing on the merits. My point is that estimating popularity, legitimacy, etc. based on votes between candidates in a single election is *totally different* from an argument that tries to estimate popularity across multiple elections in which the candidates being compared weren't opposing each other.
The population isn't increasing that fast, so it still implies he had a pretty high proportion of the vote for a recent president.
Voter turnout trended downwards from a high of 63% in 1960 (admittedly assisted by more than a few corpses in Chicago that year) to a low of 49% in 1996, and has been trending upwards ever since, hitting 62% in 2020. I guess you could track it to the "it doesn't matter who I vote for" cynicism of the 1990s slowly being replaced by the "omg the other guy is literally Hitler" credulity of the 2020s.
He got 51.3% of the vote.
There was a lot of turnout in the election, but there's no particular reason to think it was driven by love for either candidate.
Don't forget, the Democrats had a pretty strong "get out the vote" campaign. They got votes out of all sorts of weird places.
Yeah, that felt more like a "record numbers of voters despise the other guy" type of election.
I'd say that was part of it, but a bigger part was that COVID forced everybody to pay attention to politics that year. I'd hazard a guess a not-insubstantial number of voters voted against the incumbent entirely because they were forced to pay attention to politics, which, from their perspective, is the biggest possible political failure.
Illinois does not tend to have very many ballot initiatives (usually a few "advisory" ones which are non-binding and bear no weight - so far I think there are 3 on the ballot this year). There are usually a few competitive races in the suburbs / collar counties but in Chicago the primary tends to be a far more competitive race.
All that said - if you do go forward with that, I'm happy to volunteer to help on the Illinois races! I did a similar exercise for the Chicago primaries here: https://citythatworks.substack.com/p/a-city-that-works-guide-to-the-2024
I think people who agree with me that the FDA are quality regulators who do their best will really like the following concept:
An additional pension that can be inherited representing an expected 10% of their income will be created. A panel will estimate the net quality adjusted life years that the FDA is responsible for on a ten year average. Starting at zero, the special pension will rise towards 10% based on any future improvements in the FDA's QALY effect
There are two options here. The FDA is operating at an optimum point of net social benefit and the special pension program will be canceled after this is discovered and replaced by a flat 5% pension for their success in doing good work. Or there is room for improvement - if not in the quality of people - then in the quality of processes and incentives. Not only will significant social benefits be possible, the FDA's employees and their inheritors will have the potential to earn the full 10% for bringing their QALY effect towards the optimum level
The FDA has been approving drugs with questionable benefits and definite dangers (like brain swelling). I don't think they're doing a good job, merely a necessary one. I suspect either regulatory capture or "bribes" (possibly not as the term bribe is legally defined).
In that case a legible QALY metric would be very useful. If the FDA is approving too many drugs too easily they will have to become more prohibitive to improve their metric and grow their special performance pension. It will be quite hard to game the metric rating as the methods would be open and subject to scrutiny unlike opaque government relationships
This will also allow observers to calibrate their impressions of the FDA's performance. If their QALY metric is negative or positive it would be great info even if they don't directly respond to the incentive
FDA doesn't make the drugs, the pharmaceutical industry does. The incentives are targeted at the wrong party.
The incentives experienced by the companies as a result of FDA regulation are very significant and not market related where I would expect market incentives to overall tend towards providing things people want to pay for
That's not an argument against the FDA per se, but rather that the most significant non market incentives seem to stem from the FDA, so the FDA should also experience a very quasi market incentive to ensure the incentive they pass on is not perverse
Megan McArdle has a good take on the dynamics of hiding/downplaying President Biden's infirmity.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/07/11/media-coverage-biden-conspiracy-failure/?itid=ap_meganmcardle
To summarize: the White House staff went out of their way to cover up Biden's mental decline, and the mainstream media was reluctant to probe the issue vigorously since they skew leftward by something like 9 to 1.
The other issue is that people *tried* to get him to drop out and allow a real primary back in 2023, and Biden absolutely insisted on staying in. You saw how hard it was to get him to drop out, even *after* it became very obvious he had no chance, imagine how hard it would have been in 2023.
As I think I might have pointed out here previously (though it might have been elsewhere), no competent leader in Biden's shoes would have announced he was not running in April of 2023. He is almost certainly more pro-Ukraine than any potential replacement of any party, so such an announcement would have sent the message to Russia that need only holdout another two years and their prospects will improve. Not to mention that he would have all the problems of a lame duck with two years left in his Presidency.
I've seen this claim before but it confuses me because it seems to take for granted that a replacement Democrat would be less pro-Ukraine than Biden, but doesn't provide any evidence for that..
The evidence is Biden's long relationship with Ukraine, https://www.kyivpost.com/post/7350 and his advocacy for a hard line when he was VP https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/10/us/politics/joe-biden-ukraine.html.
Edit: To be clear, the claim is not that another Democrat would be unusually soft on the issue, but rather that Biden is unusually hard. Note also that, unlike Biden, no prospective Democratic candidate seems to be particularly focused on foreign policy.
That seems kinda thin. In particular, another Democrat having higher odds of winning seems like it would easily outweigh them being a little less hawkish, such that on net Russia's expected position after the election wouldn't necessarily be any stronger after Biden drops out.
1. We are talking about April of 2023. Why would one think another Democratic candidate would have higher odds of winning, particularly so much higher that it would "easily outweigh" the advantage?
2. More importantly, this is a bit off topic. You asked for the evidence that Biden is more pro-Ukraine than likely Dem replacements. The evidence seems pretty clear.
A competent leader who knew his health was declining such that he would not have been able to properly serve another term, would have opted out of the race last year. Yes, the Joe Biden of 2020 would have been better w/re Ukraine than any plausible candidate in 2023, but the Joe Biden of 2020 wasn't available and the Joe Biden of 2023 should have known that.
And presidents who are likely to be succeeded by their hand-picked successors, don't necessarily suffer lame-duck issues.
>Yes, the Joe Biden of 2020 would have been better w/re Ukraine than any plausible candidate in 2023, but the Joe Biden of 2020 wasn't available and the Joe Biden of 2023 should have known that.
That makes no sense. I didn't say "better." I said "more pro-Ukraine." Not the same thing.
>And presidents who are likely to be succeeded by their hand-picked successors, don't necessarily suffer lame-duck issues.
And your evidence fot that is what? Given that Presidents being succeeded by a member of their own party is very rare (G HW Bush is the only one since about 1880; Johnson and Truman took office when their predecessors died in office) let alone being succeeded by their handpicked successors, you have no data to base that claim on.
>That makes no sense. I didn't say "better." I said "more pro-Ukraine." Not the same thing.
Right. Biden/2025 will be more pro-Ukraine than whoever we wind up with actually sitting in the oval office in 2025. Biden/2025 will be more pro-Ukraine than anyone we plausibly *could* have stood up in 2022 to occupy the oval office, barring fantasies like a Mitt Romney unity ticket.
Biden/2025 will be the most pro-Ukraine guy in the nursing home. And that is worse than being a meh-on-Ukraine politician in the White House. It should have been obvious to Biden and his inner circle in late 2023, and I'm pretty sure it was obvious to Vladimir Putin, that in 2025 Joe Biden was going to be the most pro-Ukraine guy in the nursing home. OK, posh Delaware estate with the best home health care as he and his ghostwriter work on his memoirs. Whee.
The only thing that ever could have helped Ukraine in this regard, is to find the most pro-Ukraine candidate not named Joe Biden to go up against Donald Trump in 2024. And that should have started many months ago.
We are talking about how the world looked in April of 2023, not now. And not in late 2023. That is what I said. There was no guarantee then that the war would still be ongoing in Jan 2025, but Biden wanted to increase the likelihood of the war still being ongoing, the way to do that would be to announce he wasn't running. Hence, since he didn't want that, he would have been stupid to say he wasn't running.
What he should have done in late 2023 is a separate question.
"Given that Presidents being succeeded by a member of their own party is very rare (G HW Bush is the only one since about 1880"
Taft? Hoover? Unless I'm misinformed these are examples, and Taft is also a "handpicked successor" example.
And Harris likely would've lost any such actual contest.
Looking at her career it's astounding how many very weird things needed to happen to get her here.
I don't see her as a viable candidate, but I love to point out at times like this that, when you have a unique position in the world like VP or president, that person's life is pretty much always going to be a set of bizarre good and bad luck stories. To get to a bigger-than-life place you need to have gone through more than an average life. That's my theory. I wonder if I'm wrong?
Yeah. I mean, you dont have to go any further than her opposition to find an even larger set of weird things leading to him. Though talking about Trump almost feels like cheating, with how much of an outlier he is in general.
Yea. There are several historical examples of that of which the wildest might be Harry Truman. Others include Coolidge, Harding, Carter, and several during the 19th century -- including Abraham Lincoln! All are examples of extreme randomness being essential to the guy ending up in the White House. And of hardly anybody besides the guy and his own family viewing such ambitions to be plausible until pretty damn close to the moment they came true.
Ulysses S. Grant - before the Civil War, failed businessman, failed farmer, and burgeoning alcoholic. Civil War - best general on the Union side (yeah, I know, fight me on that). Post-Civil War - president (and bedevilled by scandals, poor man, because he trusted people who took advantage of him and the opportunities to enrich themselves by getting a share of the spoils).
Oh yea Grant is a great example. As of age 35 he literally couldn't afford a home for his own family (was living off his in-laws). Then he was POTUS before turning 50. And then dead from cancer without reaching 70. One of history's all-time wild rides through life.
Who might have run if the Democrats had set up a mini-primary system to find Biden's replacement?
In 2020, the major Democratic candidates were Biden, Sanders, Gabbard, Warren, Bloomberg, Klobuchar, Buttigieg, Steyer, Patrick, Bennet, and Yang. Not sure how many of those are credible contenders in 2024. And there are presuably a few others who should be considered, including Newsom.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Democratic_Party_presidential_primaries#Candidates
A mini-primary or a real primary? I think people are suggesting that there should have been a real primary campaign.
I've no idea who would have won. I think that at least two thirds of the time, the person who seems like the early favourite start manages to flame out once they're put under scrutiny, so I don't think there's that much point in speculating who'd have won a possible primary. I do think it's unlikely to have been Kamala, given how poorly she did in the 2020 primaries.
I think that's one reason for the doubts around Kamala. Whether or not the fix was in for Biden in 2020, when she ran in real competition against others, she did very poorly.
The suspicion has to be that if she goes up against competition this time round, she'll lose again.
>when she ran in real competition against others, she did very poorly.
You could have said the same thing about Biden in 2020. Being VP makes a huge difference in a primary campaign.
A mini-primary, like the one suggested by James Carville, here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/08/opinion/biden-democratic-nominee.html .
One thing that has always puzzled me is how inconsistent LLMs are. Every time I have a good experience, it immediately gets falsified.
For example, a couple weeks ago, I tried using ChatGPT to extract some data from an html file for the first time to save the effort of doing it by hand, and it worked amazingly well. Today I tried to do the exact same thing with the same page, and no matter what I tried, I couldn't get it to work.
So far, the only use I've found for LLMs that they can consistently handle is translation, and even then, they do occasionally make hidden mistakes.
Update: I tried ChatGPT again today (after the daily data analysis limit refreshed), but it still failed.
What's puzzling about it? LLMs basically take in text, classify it (decide "what is this asking"), then run it through a system that probabilistically guesses the series of next words through more and more context. Sometimes it guesses right the first time and it looks like you're dealing with something brilliant. Sometimes it doesn't and you don't.
In college I made effectively a mini-LLM (though it wasn't called that at the time). What ChatGPT has on my college project is two things: gigantic amounts of data (so it covers more cases) and a huge amount of programming to deal with more inputs/cases. Of course there are some things it can't do. It probably neither has the data nor programmed casing to make it work.
When Sam Altman talks about ChatGPT being close to AGI he's basically talking his book. I don't even think ChatGPT style general LLMs are the future. Instead I expect what will matter is a number of smaller but more consistent models that do one thing well. Basically DoctorGPT and if you ask it to write code it will say, "Sorry, I'm DoctorGPT. I take in symptoms and give probable diagnoses." ChatGPT might stay in the middle as a "good enough" option or we might end up with something that routes your request to the appropriate model instead on the interface end. Depends on the economics and attention economy really.
LLMs will definitely be a component of any AGI. But the word "component" needs to be emphasized. LLMs do not, and cannot, understand what the stuff they're dealing with refers to. (Perhaps a version of the same technology could, but not one specialized for handling text.)
This is one of the reasons to use the API. If you have the same HTML extraction task, you can set the temperature to 0, and at least then you know the resulting error is not due to mere random chance in sampling but the LLM is 'genuinely' screwing up; and you can start experimenting with adding examples or rewriting the prompt. As it is with the chat interface, any given error could absolutely be a mere fluke of the RNG ('have you tried turning the chat session off and then back on?'); and you can't set it, because usually a chat interface for a LLM is an excuse to dumb it down and simplify it - why worry the user's pretty little head over scary 'hyperparameters' like 'temperature'?
Ohhh that's a good hint. The chat interface is so comfortable though. I guess it's time to search github for some kind of user-friendly interactive front-end for the Api...
I actually tried Claude first, but it failed to analyze the html at all (I think it was over the filesize limit).
(Posted this last time. Doing so again for those who may have missed it.)
I've published a book. Or rather, republished. The short memoirs of Thomas Brown has been out of print in the over 260 years since its original publication in 1760. Thomas Brown was a 16 year-old soldier in the French and Indian War who was severely wounded and taken prisoner . He endured three years of "uncommon sufferings" and wrote his brief personal narrative when he returned home. It is an exciting, if horrifying, drama of human suffering and stoicism in the face of danger.
I know early American and frontier history isn't normally something that has much crossover with this community, but I hope you will consider purchasing a copy and learning about something unique that you would not normally have been exposed to.
Our small team put a lot of work into this little passion project of ours.
https://frontierthesispress.com/
Also, like everyone else here, I now have a substack. It'll mostly exist to complement whatever work we're able to do with the "publishing company." If you're interested in learning about something completely different, I encourage you to subscribe.
https://frontierthesispress.substack.com/
I try to figure out in what sense there is a future.
My ontological starting point is that time is real, but not a thing, in the strictest sense of the word, that is, time is not a physical thing, but instead there are physical things like animals, societies, atoms or electric fields, and those things change.
That they can change is what makes them things in the strictest sense. (According to Mario Bunge and I agree.)
Their changing is what constitutes time.
So a thing's past is the ordered sequence of all the states it was in.
That it once had been in some now past state is a fact. It's a factual matter. I don't call propositions about or descriptions of facts facts.
So what is its future?
I think it's the ordered sequence of all the states it will be in. And of course, once it reaches any of those state, we don't count that one as belonging to its future anymore but pretty quickly to its past.
Now I wonder weather it is alright to say that it is a fact that a thing will some certain day be in some certain state. For example: me, in a state of death. I am pretty sure that will happen.
I think that a thing's past is pretty real -- because the states of the thing were real because they were states of it -- but is its future as real as its past?
I know about this block universe idea but I don't think it's a good one. As I see it, the fact that events can happen in different orders relative to different things, and clocks, like all things, go faster or slower through their states, depending on motion, only means that, well, time is relative (to things), so each thing has its own time but lawfully relative to each other.
That does not mean that we are embedded in some real thing described by the manifold that is called space-time. That manifold is just used to calculate when which event (change of a thing's state, not event as a point of the manifold) will happen relative to which thing.
Also, with General Relativity one cannot savely calculate all events, because a quantum event might happen that changes the course through space of a thing. For example by splitting it so one part goes more left, one more right, preserving impulse.
Which, coincidentally, is another concern of mine regarding the future. Things have *real* possibilities regarding how to chance at any time.
It is trivially true that what will happen with a thing will happen with that thing, but is there more to its future than that?
This drives me crazy, thoughts appreciated.
> I try to figure out in what sense there is a future.
I'm nine hours in the future relative to the you that posted this comment. I wish I could give my answer to them, but failing that, I can tell you that their future exists and hope you learn from their mistakes.
> I know about this block universe idea but I don't think it's a good one. As I see it, the fact that events can happen in different orders relative to different things, and clocks, like all things, go faster or slower through their states, depending on motion, only means that, well, time is relative (to things), so each thing has its own time but lawfully relative to each other.
Relativity is a point in favor of a block universe. If the future is fundamentally different from the past, and someone moving towards Andromeda thinks that an event that happens there is in the past, but someone moving away thinks it's in the future, then one of them would have to be wrong. The block universe just treats it as all there, not all that different from how something to the left and to the right exist.
The "past states" of a physical object don't exist in a material sense. They're a conceptual way of making sense of the current organization of material reality. Same with the future states. They don't have a material existence.
That's an opinion.
This depends on what interpretation of quantum mechanics you subscribe to. They're all, by definition, compatible with everything we know about the universe...but they're as different as many worlds and predestinationism (and those aren't the only two).
Einstein subscribed to the "block universe" view (based on relativity rather than quantum theory) which CAN be interpreted as a version of predestinationism, but I'm not sure that's the only interpretation.
FWIW, I subscribe to an expanded multi-worlds model where you will not only end up in every world that you could end up in, but also all the pasts you could have had you did have. I violate quantum theory in that when two universes transition to identical states I merge them in my model, but there's no way I could do the math to see whether this is reasonable.
"but also all the pasts you could have had you did have"
That's a fun idea.
I sometimes imagine if maybe, when I find out about something existing since 20 years without me knowing of it before, it got retconned into reality by my interaction with the relevant things in the now :)
But that's all crazy talk.
Yeah, I do that too, but that's not quite the concept. What I'm talking about is the mirror of the multi-worlds futures, into the past, so we have as actual pasts all the universes that could have transitioned into us here and now.
The reason this doesn't feel quite correct (to me) is that it feels as if there should be some way to specify the strength of a connection, such the the sum of all the connection strengths would equal 1, but the "more probable" transitions would have a stronger weight.
Since the universes are only separated by the cancellation of wave functions, it should be reasonable, yes.
Talk about things changing runs into its own problems though. Are your *things*, ordinary objects like a chair, or only primary subatomic particles? In the first case your ontology is violently ignoring physics for common sense appearances, as in "a chair changes", plus you run into the problem of defining when a thing starts or ends: is there a specific moment of time when a rotting chair ceases to be a chair?
What do you mean by "violently ignoring physics for common sense appearances, as in 'a chair changes'"?
I know it's hard to say when a thing has changed so much that it has become another one, or when exactly one thing is or is not another one's part, but apparently everyone can deal with that sufficiently. You, for example, know that that rotting chair, whether it's still a chair or not, was that chair that wasn't rotting a year ago.
Please correct me if I'm reading you wrong, but you seem to be trying to philosophize about what time is, in an ontological sense. But your starting point for it are human-level "things", and how they change. This seems like something a classic Greek or Indian philosopher ~2500 years ago could have said. My two points are that:
- The starting point for an attempt at philosophizing about time nowadays should probably be modern fundamental physics, whose basic objects are (IIRC) particles, forces and the geometry of spacetime. How macroscopic objects change derives from those, so it can hardly be the foundation of our understanding of time.
- Plenty of pre-scientific already problematized the notion of "things" and their continuity over time. If there is an inescapable element of convention in the identity over time of a macroscopic object, that makes them quite unsuitable as a foundation for an ontologic understanding of time. And unlike the first objection, this line of thought was already known since ancient times.
What is time?
It seems the first step is noticing there are several distinct things we refer to as time:
A relationship between distances
A relationship between the rates of change of distances
The set of distances that have been and will be
A relationship between this set of distances
A relationship between the rates of change of this set of distances
It seems as if there are at least three distinct phenomena that we think of as "time", then. Relationships between distances - it took light three hours to arrive here from there.
Rates of change - a photon crosses a particular distance every second
The set of distances that have been and will be - the photon was three light hours away from us, now it is next to us, and in three hours it will be over there instead.
Physics primarily concerns itself with one and two; it doesn't really address the future or the past, excepting insofar as these pertain to the relationships between distances (i/e, light cones).
Insofar as it does talk about the future and the past, it tends to say things that don't make a lot of sense to most people - like, there is a particularly obvious interpretation of general relativity that says that the big bang is still going on, right now, at the edges of the observable universe. (That is, distance is equivalent in some sense to time-history; the future gets weird there, because it is pointed in some sense inward).
In what way is time a relationship between distances?
Relativistically, what does it mean for two events to be simultaneous, or not, from a given perspective?
That "thing involving distances" not "thing consisting only of distances".
Don't look at my hand, look at what it is pointing at.
You think much more complicated about time than I do.
The right-wing conspiracy people I keep an eye on believe Biden did not actually withdraw, and the announcements made by his staffers are part of an internal coup intended to try to force his hand.
Somewhat less plausibly, they believe he is being held prisoner until he either agrees or "dies of COVID".
This is an entertaining election year, I'm rapidly running out of popcorn.
Tonight I read reports (stories? rumors?) of Biden having a "medical emergency" in Las Vegas last week -- emergency orders sent out to the hundred or so LVPD and other local LEO to clear his motorcade first 2 miles to a hospital, then that suddenly changed to the airport and Air Force One took off back to DC/DE.
https://www.dossier.today/p/exclusive-president-biden-suffered
The author claims to have verified the radio traffic with several local LEO who were part of the group tasked to help the SecSev with logistics. He points out that all the movements of the Pres. motorcade and AF1 are verified, and that a planned speech at MGM was scratched, and that POTUS has not been seen since.
Take his conclusions -- that we're in a live-action version of the movie, "Dave" -- all in a high-sodium way. But the habeus corpus issue is becoming too important to ignore.
I want to emphasize that all of this uncertainty and suspicion could be quickly and easily dispelled with some honesty and transparancy, yet it is not, and all the red flags are piling up in a heap on the field. (Like the head of USSS has no record or backup of radio and message traffic around the Butler, PA event. Really? Was is on a Windows machine that got Clownspiked?)
BRetty
PS -- "Dave" was a pretty good movie. I would certainly take Kevin Kline as POTUS over any in the field -- and Tulsi Gabbard is a pretty fair version of Sigourney Weaver's regal presence, if we shift the plot to make her VP not first lady. Actually, that makes it better -- imagine the icy rage if the handlers wanted to use a body double/puppet rather than elevate VP to POTUS!
I've heard about that. My guess would be that Biden had a stroke which will be made public shortly.
Why, if they are saying such obviously ridiculous things, do you keep an eye on them?
There are plenty of perfectly serious right-wing publications or authors or sources you can follow who are not *obviously* delusional. The Economist, at least if you want a very British perspective.
Might I suggest that they know they are lying, you know they know they are lying, and you're really just entertaining yourself with something approximately as serious and important as Cartoon Network at 3am?
Because about one out of three obviously ridiculous things this group of people has said has turned out to be true, and another one out of three turned out to be, in retrospect, not in fact as obviously ridiculous as the statements appeared to be at the time.
I mean, the official story is that he is isolating due to covid. And it's further quite reasonable to suppose that this might actually mean 'he's nearly incapacitated and in rather bad shape', since covid is known to hit people his age pretty hard.
Anyway it's an interesting theory; more plausible than many conspiracy theories, since you only need a handful of people to pull it off, and the fait accompli would be a pretty forcing move even if someone wanted to try to call bullshit on you later.
There's also the point that Biden's signature on the document appears to be a bit off.
The conspiracy folks appear to be moving to "It didn't work, Biden refused to go along with it, and so they killed Biden, and are preparing to blame his death on covid."
Ross Douthat offers the most likely explanation:
>Maybe the most banal explanation for tweeting a departure from the presidential race without a swift public-facing follow-up is that Biden is too pissed at everyone to be normal. "Fine, I'll endorse her, but only via tweet. You want a noble Oval Office address, Jack? Bleep off."
"He did do it, and then forgot he did it" is also a viable possibility, and one which would cause severe issues for everybody.
It's not, actually. Nobody worth paying attention to is claiming that his short-term memory has degraded to, or even near, the point of "do important thing that required a lot of thought and discussion, then forget that you did it."
And a month ago nobody worth paying attention to was claiming that he had any cognitive issues whatsoever.
I watched a loved one die descend into dementia and die, and my impression is that Biden is much, much further gone than most people seem to believe. Granted every case is different, but when the signs become impossible to ignore, you're not just looking at a single failure, but a failure of multiple cognitive systems; he's not just failing to be able to be consistently "with it", he's no longer able to -pretend- to be with it.
>And a month ago nobody worth paying attention to was claiming that he had any cognitive issues whatsoever.
That's simply nonsense. Nate Silver, Ezra Klein, and a few other center-left commentators had been banging the drum about this for months, along with right-leaning pundits not all of whom have reputations for trafficking in baseless smears. This was a matter of some controversy among serious people around the end of last year, although it largely died down after Biden mostly held his own against the hecklers at the SOTU.
Are you gaslighting yourself here?
Go back and read what they were writing at the time they were writing it. Nate Silver, at least, was -not- claiming that Biden had obvious cognitive issues, he was saying that he had obvious issues with voters who saw him as too old, and he hammered on this over and over again. And while he wasn't even saying Biden had obvious cognitive issues, he was still receiving widespread condemnation as somebody who wasn't worth paying attention to.
It seems unlikely...but the lack of any press conference is strange. I'm not sure a recorded video would cut it, given deepfakes.
I really hope Biden does give a press conference on this soon. The maximally suspicious / worst case scenario would be that he dies in the next few days, without ever having given a press conference or spoken to anyone outside a small circle of insiders about this. In that latter scenario, the `palace coup' would start to seem disturbingly plausible.
Without giving credence to lunatics, it really is odd that there was no press conference or Oval address. You'd think anyone with a sense of history would understand the importance of an address to the nation for an event so significant: the sound and sight of the speaker making the announcement in a sense become part of the collective memory. I wasn't born when LBJ withdrew from the 1968 election, but I can hear that snippet from the speech in my head, in his exact words. It won't be quite the same with a Twitter post.
Well, the simplest explanation is that he's really sick. Sure, if you just have a cold they can give you some meds and get you sorted out for a ten minute speech ... but if you're on a ventilator drifting in and out of consciousness, not oriented to person place and time ... well, they're going to let you rest and see if you recover.
If he is that sick, is he (a) competent to make a major decision (like dropping out of a presidential race) and (b) shouldn't the 25th have been invoked (at least temporarily)? Who makes the decisions in the situation room, if decisions need to be made?
The reporting that is coming out today does not suggest that this was the case at all. Tne reporting could be wrong, of course, but it would require that a whole lot of prominent people, many of whom wish to continue to have careers for years to come, be willing to lie on deep background and risk the massive hit to their credibility with the press should the story (which involves an alert and oriented Biden having discussions all weekend with staff and powerful Democrats) eventually be exposed as untrue.
"the story (which involves an alert and oriented Biden having discussions all weekend with staff and powerful Democrats) eventually be exposed as untrue"
I regret to say that I don't find that implausible, given that a lot of what was going on behind the scenes with Biden probably involved exactly that. I think the simplest explanation is that Joe and/or his close circle don't feel like co-operating with the gang that forced him out, kicking and screaming, over his continued insistence that he was the nominee.
When it comes time to officially hand over to Kamala at the convention or whatever, he'll turn up and do that for the sake of the party. But he's not going to pretend everything is lovely, since they made him into a liar over "I'm fine and I'm fit to run and I'm the nominee". So no appearances etc. after the announcement, and if they don't like it, they can lump it.
I think, on the metaphysical level of working-class Irish Catholics, I grok his mindset here - "the bastards may have forced me out, but I'll be damned if I play their dancing monkey for them!" 😁
Yes, today his personal physician indicated his symptoms have almost resolved, and he's apparently been talking to some people. Nonetheless it remains unclear whether he'll actually meet with Netanyahu.
So far as 'a bunch of people lying' is concerned, though ... that seems to be almost standard when the president is in ill health (see; Wilson, FDR, to some extent JFK, Reagan), and I don't think doing so is career imparing ... indeed in some cases telling the truth would be the career-ending move. In short I don't necessarily put a lot of faith in his doctor's statement, though the other reports do clearly suggest he's not incapacitated.
I didn't say simply "a bunch of people lying" in general, though. I said "a bunch of people lying on deep background" about the important events of a specific place and time. That's a very different thing, for a couple of reasons that I assume I needn't explain.
This strikes me as a strange position - if somebody was going to murder the President(!) they probably wouldn't FIRST have him announce the end of his campaign, they would just murder him. (But also I think it's a pretty absurd hypothetical on its face.)
Yes, agreed. It seems very unlikely, and I think most likely Biden gives a press conference soon and that's an end to it. It's if he doesn't that things start to look weird. (They would have looked much weirder still, of course, if the endorsement via tweet had been of someone other than his VP).
In his letter posted to Twitter, he says that he will "speak to the Nation later this week in more detail" about his decision. So that's definitely going to happen. Of course, the galaxybrained will claim that he was forced to make a pretaped speech right before he was fed to the alligators.
At this point if he was dead I would have expected it to have already been publicized.
But if he does now die of COVID, well, we're never going to stop hearing about it for the rest of our lives.
I don't think he's dead, I think it's a combination of genuinely sick and "Achilles sulking in his tent".
Tricking or coercing people into signing documents is one of the more common forms of elder abuse, so it's certainly not impossible that someone did this to Biden, although obviously we don't yet (and may not ever) have any hard evidence to back up the theory.
Given Biden's state of mind, I don't think even he can be sure.
If it's possible to do that to Biden (not saying it is), then he's unfit for the job.
I mean, hasn't that been obvious since at least the debate with Trump?
I've heard stories of older people who are reasonably healthy as long as they continue to work, but who rapidly decline as soon as they stop. It's sometimes blamed on a "lack of purpose": they could push themselves while they had a reason, but when that reason goes away, they collapse too fast to find a new reason to go on.
Alternatively, it's like Bilbo in "The Fellowship of the Ring". Kamala looks well-preserved, and Biden looks like a withered ghost of his former self.
Heard this remark from a retired lawyer: "People used to pay a lot of money to know what I thought. Now nobody cares what I think."
Yeah, that.
I must confess I don't understand what this response is, are you setting up an explanation for why Biden is going to die tomorrow before it happens?
IIRC Sam Altman tried to become the chair of the board of YC using the same trick, so I guess anything's technically possible.
It's also how Germany became a republic in 1918. The Kaiser agreed to abdicate in favor of a regency for his young grandson, but one of the Social Democratic Party leaders (Scheidemann) who were to form the new government decided to unilaterally announce a republic instead, against the wishes of the Kaiser, the outgoing Chancellor (von Baden), and the incoming Chancellor (Ebert). It went over well with the crowd, so everyone else just went along with it.
Interestingly not the only time this kind of thing has happened in Germany ... the monetary reform in 1948 was a similar unilateral stroke, and the fall of the Berlin Wall also took place simply due to a lack of will on the part of existing powers to stop it.
It's uncomfortably plausible; there's nothing in the announcement that wouldn't be trivial to fake, given preexisting access to his Twitter account, which at least one staffer is known to have.
This shouldn't be the standard of evidence that major events turn upon.
Well, major events haven't turned yet. Until the votes are cast at the DNC everything is speculation. There's still time for Biden to crawl out of his grave.
If he does I expect it will be to step down from the presidency; having a boring couple of months of her being the president is probably the best shot the Democrats have. That's the most likely scenario, I think. Second most likely is 25th amendment, third is some sort of divestiture of as many responsibilities as constitutionally permissible, fourth is a batshit insane scenario where he comes out raving, fifth is he's already dead and we'll hear about it probably tomorrow (and regardless of whether or not it was natural nobody is going to believe it was natural and things will remain interesting for a bit longer), and the sixth is he's already dead and things suddenly get much crazier; in the sixth scenario I'm assuming we're all in a simulation and the writing team hit their stride, and we get a return appearance of the Epstein Files.
>(and regardless of whether or not it was natural nobody is going to believe it was natural and things will remain interesting for a bit longer)
A whole cottage industry, as with JFK?
Wouldn't it be tricky and complicated to have Joe officially step down as president, have Kamala officially take over, then have her announced as Democratic nominee at the convention (and that's even without 'what about if there are challengers?') and then run a campaign to be elected? Wouldn't it be even more humiliating if she was (officially) Madame First Ever President while on the campaign trail but still lost to Trump?
It does seem simpler to let Joe serve out his time while Kamala gets ready to run.
Sure, but if you're looking to maximize your odds of winning, running as the first madame president might boost your odds a little bit.
I mean it's not that unlikely for men in their earily 80s to die conditional upon having covid, base rates are ~2% in gen pop, even with world-class healthcare it's still probably closer to 1% than 0.1%.
Sure. Would you believe that's what happened, without doubts? Would an investigation really clear those doubts for you?
Whether or not it is natural basically doesn't matter in that scenario.
If Hillary Clinton secretly died and got replaced by a robot in 2016, why couldn't they do the same thing again?
There are some things even a robot won't do.
Didn't the Clintons have a meeting with Biden recently? 3 bipeds enter, 3 bipeds leave, which shell has the robot under it?
They only have the one robot, and it can only replace one person at a time.
One reason this conspiracy theory has legs is that it's so obviously a joke, and a good one, to make about a guy who doesn't show up in person to anything.
"Biden is in for a surprise when he wakes up in the morning!" Yep, funny, I get it. His own staff found out from the Twitter post, meaning the woman who runs the Twitter account literally could have staged his as a coup if they really wanted to. It's kind of amazing to just imagine. (And the last 4 weeks should stop people from thinking "that would never happen" means something won't happen.)
So you can say it actually meaning it, sitting right next to the guy saying it as a joke.
This will last until Biden actually does a personal address of some kind.
Given Biden's current state of mind, I don't trust him to know whether or not there was a coup.
Honestly, memory isn't nearly as good as people expect. I think you could plausibly trick someone healthy into thinking they stepped down.
Not just amazing, alarming. In an alternate timeline WW3 was started by an intern with access to the president's Twitter account.
I vaguely recall an incident during the Trump years where he tweeted something that sounded like a declaration of war and it took like an hour for him to tweet a clarification. Then there was the Hawaii missile alert which wasn't just twitter but an actual emergency alarm.
Realistically, people will confirm through real channels before actually starting WW3.
Official state actors will probably confirm through real channels. That's not as comforting as one might hope.
I very very much doubt that story is true. But I agree with it being a trivialization, and I just posted a comment to that effect. I can remember LBJ's announcement as though I had been watching it on live national television, even though it happened before I was born. A tweet isn't quite the same.
I could see him (or Jill/Hunter, if the rumours about them being the only people he trusts and who are keeping access to him very tightly monitored) being pissed-off enough about being backstabbed (e.g. by Obama) and being pushed out by the drip-drip of "don't you think he looks tired?" in the press when he didn't want to go, so doing it this way was one big "up yours" to them all.
The reporting I heard is that Biden talked to Harris before making the announcement. I'm sure she knew.
Harris as a secret Rasputin is a new one!
Given that Biden's cognitive decline was a conspiracy theory up until a month ago, gimme 30% odds that this is revealed and celebrated in 2026. Like, conspiracy theories aren't usually correct...but they're a lot more correct than they should be.
The ones that turn out to be correct are usually the ones that are not wildly implausible. "White House/campaign staff try to conceal U.S. President's infirmity by carefully controlling his public appearances and spinning, via sympathetic journalists, any evidence that they can't hide" is not only NOT wildly implausible, it has actual modern precedent that is widely known and can be pointed to.
Reagan's senility was probably about as bad as Bidens' and was similarly a well-known source of amusement for those who knew about it- in the late 80s, prior to the internet, "those who knew about it" was just restricted to a vastly smaller number of people who all had more or less reason to not discuss it publicly.
Indeed, although what I had in mind specifically was the concealment (later exposed) of the extent of FDR's and JFK's physical infirmity. Both required a good deal of theatrics, staged photos/film, and a largely unpoken agreement by the press to pretend not to notice it.
The analogies are not perfect: there was no urgent need for the Nate Silvers of the day to risk ostracism or ridicule for insisting that JFK wasn't really out there every day playing touch football, or that FDR wasn't striding purposefully around the White House grounds, as there was no reason to suppose that their physical handicaps impaired their ability to do president stuff.
It was NEVER just a conspiracy theory. ALL older people experience a cognitive decline. The question is "To what extent?". Anyone elderly who denies this is either in denial, a liar, or so out of touch with themselves that they didn't notice.
FWIW, I'm younger than Biden, and I've noticed it. I can't construct programs as well as I used to, and it takes me longer to understand them. I also live with a bunch of other elderly people, and they consider Bridge to be too intellectually demanding. A few of them used to be engineers or professors (not most, of course) so it's not that they were never smart. You end up relying more on long-term memory and less on short-term memory.
What predictions does your theory make? I.e. do you expect Biden to act angry in public, claim he didn't withdraw, etc?
If you think that he'll just go along with it gracefully and never say anything, than it's basically unfalsifiable, right?
Oh no, the prediction is that the details will be publicly reported and acknowledged by most people...in about 2-3 years when no one cares.
We can see what actually happened behind the scenes in major news outlets already
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/21/why-biden-dropped-out-00170106
Thanks for sharing. Do you have a link to that video he apparently sent around? Does anybody? Because if he's clear headed, that absolutely kills this conspiracy theory.
Because otherwise...I'm reading a handful of people in a room, in the evening when he's known to have issues, and he's sick interpreted his response as dropping out and within 24 hours his entire stance changed and he dropped out in a deeply rushed and disorganized manner.
Again, clear documentation, which should exist for a decision of this magnitude, should exist and would easily disprove the theory. This article indicates a video to internal staff exists. Is it available?
Otherwise, we have a rushed timeline, rushed public statements...and in 3 years time, when no one cares, people may reveal details differently.
Well, I'm not a gambling person, but I'll offer you 20-1 odds in imaginary internet points if you're still here in 3 years.
And to be clear, the specific claim under debate is that a staff member announced Biden dropping out against his will when Biden still insisted on staying in the race. I don't want any goal-post moving where you say "look, lots of people pressured Biden to drop out, therefore I'm right" (after all, that's already publicly known!)
I would absolutely take 20-1 odds.
And the specific claim is that Biden did not give clear, informed consent to drop out of the race before it was announced. Any clear written documentation by Biden means I lose automatically.
If this resignation was done properly, there would be paperwork, there would be documentation.
If the conspiracy theory is correct, the way it would go down is an old man with cognitive issues and sick with Covid either made decisions when he was clearly not in his right mind or, more likely, gave vague instructions that could be interpreted as dropping out that staff took advantage of.
The more specific and documented the resignation was, the worse the conspiracy case is. The more vague it is, the more likely.
Unfortunately, I don't believe there is an "properly" paperwork to dropping out of a political race. It's not like resigning from an office. So I think that part of your model is incorrect.
E.g., suppose he just said (angrily) in front of many of his staff "OK already. I'll drop out. In fact I just have. *You* handle it!".
I'm not claiming that's what happened, merely that it's one alternative that could have happened...and wouldn't leave much paperwork trail.
*ALL* conspircies will make hard to faslify thoeries. But they ovisously still happen so you need different mertics.
"hmmm how did this bob frame alice with his perfect and very public allibi"; "your just ignoring the data and making wild speculations"
My odds aren't that high, but they are currently sitting higher than 1%, and they should really be far below that for this kind of thing.
I'm looking to do 30-min informational interviews with prediction market traders on their process to learn pain points and do product validation :)
If that sounds like fun you can find multiple ways to contact me at:
http://rai.dev/contact
Probably higher level than you're thinking of, but I think the biggest problems with prediction markets are this: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/why-prediction-markets-arent-popular/
I have been curious about this. It seems like a sufficiently obvious objection to prediction markets that I've been assuming their proponents have some explanation for why they'd work anyway. I assume there's some way for people who want the answers the market would provide to fund it, but that seems to often not be brought up.
(As a TL;DR, the objection is basically that the money to incentivize informed market participants to do the necessary research and get involved has to come from somewhere, and these markets are often set up to be zero-sum.)
Ah yeah, I'm not trying to build a prediction market. I'm curious how I can make tools for existing prediction market traders to use.
Two weekends ago I taught a class at Fractal University in NYC and it was a lot of fun. I was very impressed with the whole organization. They describe themselves as an "improvised college" -- basically a community of people around Brooklyn teaching and learning about topics they're interested in. I think it captures the best parts of traditional academia (mostly the excitement about learning), without all the downsides.
I think a lot of people in the ACX community are interested nontraditional education systems, so I would like to recommend this to people. They have a lot of different classes, some free and some that cost money but are pretty affordable. This is their website:
https://fractalnyc.com/university
Today a post about our lives on a little farm, and how we eat what we grow. I like raising birds. It keeps me interested in life; to receive the little chicks, introduce them to their new home and the water source, feed and water them every day, and put them up when they’ve grown to a nice size. It’s a different life but it has its rewards: https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/if-its-brunch-its-liver-and-onions
While I've been voting since 1960s, this is the first time I've been unable to find a presidential candidate I can support. I'm hoping that the Democrats will seize the opportunity and nominate someone real. Mr. Biden's cardboard cutout DEI picks don't make it. This ain't 1964.
But throughout pop media, the gaslighting has begun. Ms. Harris's extremely modest political skills are touted as if she were a genius. She's not. Democrats, please help us out of this mess. Drop the fantasyland nonsense. You must have Somebody qualified.
>this is the first time I've been unable to find a presidential candidate I can support
Who did you support in 2016 and 2020?
I'm trying to work through this statement - it seems odd given Trump has been on the ballot every cycle since 2016, and it's hard to attribute the phrase "Mr. Biden's cardboard cutout DEI picks don't make it" to a Biden (2020) or Clinton (2016) voter.
Did you support Trump in 2016/2020 and sour on him this year?
Did you support Clinton & Biden in 2016/2020, then sour on Harris this year? Would you have preferred Biden if he stayed in?
Or is there some 3rd fact pattern I'm missing here?
I'd absolutely vote for a Democrat. I can't remember the names, but there are good possibilities in Minnesota and, I think, Maine. I was going to say Alaska, but she's a Republican, brave soul she is.
There are plenty of qualified Democrats, but few can get through the cult-like conformity gauntlet of wannabe 'progressives' (not TR, who arranged for half of Puerto Rico to get food stamps, but our current crop of authoritarian utopians).
I voted for Obama and Clinton, but passed on Biden. Can't do Trump.
The tenor and the demographics are identical to 2016. If we get a repeat, I'll have to cut off all pop media to maintain sanity. The 'woke' and MAGA are two sides of the same coin.
Unless I'm mistaken, Cosimo Giusti votes Democrat, except possibly for Reagan. Every election had a Democrat for whom he could vote, even reluctantly, but cannot now vote in good conscience for Biden or Harris.
I understand hating trump. In 2016, I voted for Johnson, since I couldn't stomach Clinton or Trump, but in 2020 I voted for Trump after seeing how he actually performed in the presidency. Not perfect: the worst mistake, I think, being unilaterally withdrawing from the Iran deal (which I agree was a bad deal, but withdrawing unilaterally undermined the integrity of the nation's treaties).
>I'm trying to work through this statement - it seems odd given Trump has been on the ballot every cycle since 2016, and it's hard to attribute the phrase "Mr. Biden's cardboard cutout DEI picks don't make it" to a Biden (2020) or Clinton (2016) voter.
Only in hindsight, there are a lot of normie libs who thought Hillary was cringe but still voted for her willingly, and that thought Biden was going to rein in the clowns and bring back normalcy.
> lot of normie libs ... thought Biden was going to rein in the clowns and bring back normalcy.
It's hard to make sense of that statement if you don't say what specific things were "clownish" and what was the "normalcy" that was lost. It really sounds like you're trying to refer to something specific but refusing to say it.
I thought it made sense in context of the parent comment (which was complaining about "Mr Biden's DEI cardboard cutouts"), but generally some combination of:
- "Cancel Culture"
- BLM ridiculousness
- Affirmative Action
- Trans stuff (men in women's bathrooms, men in women's sports, girls harming themselves because they think they're boys, etc.)
- The personal is political
- Other
- All of this being pervasive in pop culture, to the detriment of its quality
"Normalcy" would be the pre-Trump status quo, where those things still existed, but they either didn't know about them, or they were at a tolerable or palatable level.
Are these things that the POTUS has a lot of control over though? They look like cultural bandwagons to me, not something that even the most powerful person in the world can really change. And sometimes these things thrive on opposition and being the perceived underdog. Much of the growth of woke was during the "grab them by the pussy" Trump presidency.
>Are these things that the POTUS has a lot of control over though?
Honestly, I don't know. To the extent the executive has control over that stuff, they didn't help at all (and not due to inability, in many cases, like a bunch of executive orders, they could've just not done anything). But then again, does anyone but terminally online weirdos (us) even pay attention to that sort of thing? Much like with the economy, presidents get the blame or the credit for developments outside their control.
>And sometimes these things thrive on opposition and being the perceived underdog. Much of the growth of woke was during the "grab them by the pussy" Trump presidency.
That is the politically engaged normie libs' lullaby, but I'd be wary of confusing correlation with causation. My own perception is that crazy wokeness started ramping up a few years before Trump (2014 is the year many claim it really got going).
Honest question. Do normie libs believe Biden brought back normalcy?
In terms of how the federal government and office of the President function? Mostly, ya. At least until the senility stuff. But even that's a more "normal" scandal than the Trump circus. You had a White House that wasn't perpetually doing its in-fighting in the press, a relatively stable set of senior staff, and bills that actually got signed into law instead of being prematurely celebrated on the White House lawn. The daily Twitter beefs weren't instigated by the President directly. It all felt fairly benign. Heck, there wasn't even as much debt ceiling brinksmanship as the second Obama term.
So ya, all that was definitely more "normal".
In terms of the culture war? I don't think that's a genie that a President can put back in the bottle.
I don’t know if I count as a “normie lib.” That said, while it doesn’t wholly *define* normalcy for me, I think things trend more normal when a sitting president does not publicly advocate the injection of bleach, comment on the fuckability of his immediate family members, publicly flaunt the size of “his button” relative to those of nuclear armed dictators, or foment riots to try to thwart the peaceful transfer of power.
Biden may not have been a full blown “return to normalcy,” but he was certaintly a step in that direction IMO.
Admittedly I never liked Biden anyway, but the whole "Republicans are the enemy of the people" speech with the red lighting and soldiers standing behind Biden killed any normalcy or unity credibility he had.
And the bleach thing, people really need to stop repeating media propaganda points. What Trump said was hilariously ignorant, but he never said or implied anyone should consume bleach.
I searched "republicans are the enemy of the people" + biden and couldn't find any results. Can you link the relevant thing?
As stated it does sound pretty bad, to call almost half the country enemies of the people.
I'd say asserting that "[other party] is the enemy of the people" or some variation thereof is pretty tragically normal for American politics these days. If we start comparing interparty quotes along those lines, it's gonna yield a loooong list.
But either way, I'd consider most anything on that list much closer to the overton window of "normal" than things like "If Chelsea were my daughter, perhaps I'd be dating her" or "Mr. Gorbachev, I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than yours, and my Button works!"
I think they really want to believe that, and are afraid to say, or even admit to themselves, that he didn't.
I think they kinda define normalcy as "Democrats in charge, no Trump in charge, no covid", and Biden certainly managed that. The undercurrents in the political left wing, those are things they're uncomfortable with, but they don't have to notice as long as Trump is in the news. And when he's not, they can tell themselves, like an abused spouse, "it's OK, they don't mean it, they really do love me, they said so that one time, it's OK, it's all my fault, I'm so stupid, they tell me I'm stupid all the time, they're so good for putting up with me, they even tell me everything I need to do, it's OK".
Pretty much, at least before the debate, and even then a lot of them were more disturbed by the dramatically increased perceived odds of Trump than the direct implications of Biden's pudding brain.
I don't know, but I'd bet Cosimo would say no.
There is a notion among certain groups that some degree of normalcy has returned (the so called "vibe shift"), but how much of that do people attribute to Biden's presidency is hard to tell.
I'm super unimpressed with Kamala "let's do bussing" Harris and her political skills.
But Harris *did* manage to STFU for the past few weeks, publicly being 100% behind Biden, while locking up support behind the scenes.
They won't, for three reasons.
First, genuinely, the Democratic bench looks weak. There's Harris, Newsom...maybe Mayor Pete? That's it.
Second, if you are Newsom or someone with presidential aspirations...man, why would you enter this race, at this time, in these circumstances? It's a mess. Any qualified candidate other than Harris is looking at 2028.
Third, sorry, but the Democratic party has consistently chosen uninspiring psuedo-centrists. The party doesn't decide but it is powerful, see Biden. Eight years ago and four years ago they stomped the Bernie campaign down...and now they're bleeding working class support to Trump. I understand why; the Republican party of 2016 failed to stomp down their insurgency and now they're all effectively gone, replaced by Trumpists, but...you can't get interesting candidates if the party consistently crushes them in favor of pseudo-centrist Boomers.
I have a different take? 8 years ago, Hillary took control after having spent the last 8 years locking up the 2016 nomination. No one else had a chance. The fringes griped but couldn't do anything.
4 years ago, the fringes made a play, but the establishment united behind Joe as the best chance to beat Trump. Nothing else mattered to them, and they threw some bones to the fringes, most especially by having Biden toss out lefty proposals whenever he needed good press and popularity with the base.
Now Joe's gone, and they don't have a clear path ahead. But the problem with "interesting" and "real" is that that's not what any large part of the base wants. The competing interest groups want their own people in charge, and that means someone who's an "uninspiring pseudo-centrist" with respect to a political interest group inside the D coalition. That is, the only way to get to the top of the big pyramid, is to get to the top of one of the smaller pyramids first, and the process of getting to the top of a pyramid is what causes the boring unreality.
If they're trying to win, the Democrats run governors from swing states. Whitmer and Shapiro are the most obvious. Cooper is also good and brings solid "he stood up to the woke mob" cred for blowing up the Duke Lacrosse case, but I'm not sure NC is as important as all 3 of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
I have long been an advocate of including "None of the Above" as an official choice. If it were to receive a plurality, all the candidates would be thrown off the ballot and prohibited from running again in that election cycle, and a new election with a new slate of candidates would be held within XX number of days (where XX is up for negotiation, but somewhere in the 30-60 day range seems sufficient).
I realize that in practice, this would be difficult, maybe even impossible. It would probably require having the first election further out from inauguration, and I'm not sure what to do if you get to inauguration and still don't have a winner. Perhaps there is a better way of accomplishing something similar...maybe prohibit party primaries and make the general election completely open, and then just have however many rounds of runoffs it takes for one candidate to get a majority? But I still like the idea of being able to say "Not good enough, try again."
It sounds like you might like a Condorcet method of ranked choice voting (vs. the more-commonly implemented instant runoff variety).
Oversimplified* description: voters rank all the candidates, for every pair of candidates you see which of the two is ranked higher a majority of the time, and the candidate who wins each of their head-to-head matches is the overall winner.
The cumulative effect is that none of the losing candidate would have beaten the winner in a 2-way race.
*There are some supplementary mechanisms to handle rock-paper-scissors pseudo-ties.
Right now, they're trying to minimize chaos and public infighting, so I expect they'll all say nice things about Harris and then sort it out in the convention. Probably all the debate until then will be about how committal the nice things said about Harris are.
The problem with any sort of public debate on the merits is that it exposes actual weaknesses to the other side's attack machine. Loyalty to party over truth implies not doing this to your own side in public. And since the party is all nominally on the same side, the norm is to close ranks. Only a major shock, like the debate, could break that, and the only reason the reaction was so bad is that there was no obvious Schelling point response, and the party didn't have time to coordinate in private. Imagine if Biden had merely announced that he was stepping off the ticket, without endorsing anyone as a replacement. But he said "Harris", so that's who it is, until the convention.
Kamala seems to be the choice, but I suppose we'll have to wait until the convention for the formal announcement. The interesting part will be who will she pick for vice president.
So the other possible nominees have the choice between "wait till the convention, where the fix may already be in for Kamala, and try and fight it out" *or* "play nicely and see if I get the pick for VP and the chance, whatever happens, to run in 2028".
Any bets on Kamala/Gavin, the California Dreamin' Duo? Let them do for the nation what they did for California! 😁
I'd like to think that the Dems have at least some understanding of how intensely dislikeable Gavin is on a personal level, even (potentially) to people who aren't automatically going to rule him out on the grounds of being a LIBTURD from WOKEIFORNIA who is going to put WOKE JUICE into the fuel tanks of their F150s.
I'd like to think that. But I'm not sure.
What John said; in fact, they cannot be from the same state. The 12th amendment doesn't explicitly prohibit it, but if this were to happen the electors from that state are not allowed to vote for both the P and the VP.
Oh no, my dreams are crushed.
Unless one of them moves domicile to another state?
Well then we'll have to look forward to the GirlPower Ticket then? Kamala/Gretchen?
> Unless one of them moves domicile to another state?
One of them should move to Oregon and the other should move to Texas. It's what all the other Californians are doing anyway.
Yay to GirlPower! They can't mess it up any worse than all the previous BoyPower teams did.
Smart money's on Beshear or Kelly
Hmmm - Beshear versus Vance in "I'm more redneck than you"?
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/kamala-harris-running-mates-democratic-presidential-ticket-rcna162848
What really depresses me about this list is NBC's bright-eyed enthusiasm about "And even better, Senator Bloggins is really really *really* pro-abortion!!!!" for most if not all candidates.
Yeah, drive me away from voting for you guys (if I had a vote, that is).
No offense, but post-Dobbs history suggests pretty strongly that sacrificing your vote pays off at least a little.
On a personal level, though, I'm of course disappointed to learn that the Harris/whoever ticket can't count on your support. It seemed like such a sure thing otherwise!
Zero chance for Gavin. Presidential tickets require geographical diversity.
The Democrats just pulled off something extraordinary in convincing a sitting president to resign. They're not gonna stick their necks out and do a second extraordinary thing and go through a contested convention (contested, remind yourself, among not the general public or even the general Democratic primary population, but among individuals selected by the party to cast a symbolic vote for Biden).
Kamala's skills ARE modest, but they're baseline. Sit down and watch her give a speech. You will experience one of two things: a sense of deep relief at how normal it is in comparison with the excruciation of watching Biden talk or even just move around, or boredom. People can holler DEI (speaking as someone who wants Trump to lose, I encourage it) but from the perspective of most people who don't feel favorably towards Trump, even boredom is good enough.
And I have a feeling a lot of the things people disliked about Harris, a lot of the unfavorable ratings and negative feelings developed when she was last in the spotlight in 2020, are gonna start looking pretty trivial to a lot of the people who hold them when revisited in the cold light of 2024
Harris is not a good speaker by any stretch of the imagination. She regularly produces word salads and frontier gibberish. She ends up proclaiming things that are either profoundly stupid or meaningless or indecipherable. There's a good reason she was completely unelectable in the 2020 primaries. Any claims to the contrary at this point are cope. The only silver lining for Harris is that she is being compared to Trump, who speaks in high-schooler-stream-of-consciousness.
Further, she is in a catch-22 spot regarding the Biden policies. Either she had nothing to do with them and was largely a figurehead (which most VPs are), but that makes it seem like her term was useless. Or she was a big part of the admin, but then she has to own all of the unpopular things like the border and woke DEI policies (especially cutting for Harris).
>it seem like her term was useless
I think it's generally understood by adults at this point that VP terms are useless, no? The VP is an understudy, there in case the president drops dead or goes under the knife.
And that's completely reasonable, but "I was there in case Joe dropped dead" isn't a great campaign ad.
> The only silver lining for Harris is that she is being compared to Trump, who speaks in high-schooler-stream-of-consciousness.
And Biden, who was barely even intelligible half the time towards the end there. That's my point! She's average at best but Trump vs. Biden lowered the bar so low that "average at best" will be received as a cool summer breeze.
> Or she was a big part of the admin, but then she has to own all of the unpopular things like the border and woke DEI policies (especially cutting for Harris).
I think everybody who considers the border a priority (a smaller number than many assume, I suspect) is already locked in for Trump, and that every time the Republicans start using acronyms they narrow their appeal--that stuff didn't deliver in the midterms, and it only comes across as more stale now. I could be wrong, of course! But at a minimum, I'm confident there's a chance, and in my judgment and that of most of the people I know, that's a vast improvement over what we had before.
"She's average at best but Trump vs. Biden lowered the bar so low that "average at best" will be received as a cool summer breeze."
*raise right hand, point forward* imagine what can be *lower left hand, point behind* unburdened by what has been (repeat umpty dozen times)
At least that associates the Right with the future (positive, optimistic, progress) and the Left with the past (bad, stuck, negative) 😁
I think for many the real problem is that she's a woman. Certainly I'd vote for her, but I'd vote for a DEAD yellow dog rather than for Trump.
I'm probably overestimating the degree to which the median voter thinks through the implications of their beliefs and/or underestimating how idiosyncratic they can be, but absent that I'd expect anyone misogynistic enough to hold Harris's gender against her also was apt to doubt Biden could make it through a full term, and therefore was already against the ticket.
What do you consider "qualified"? She was the Attorney General of California, a Senator and the Vice President. On paper that makes her about as qualified as the last several Presidents when they ran, if not more:
Trump - no prior experience in government (obviously he has some now, the reader can judge whether that is in his favor)
Obama - state legislator, US Senator
Bush - Governor of Texas, military service
Clinton - Attorney General of Arkansas, Governor of Arkansas
The last President to have more varied past experience was probably George H. W. Bush.
Is there any Democrat you'd want?
Which one can win? That's the one I want. I really don't want another Trump presidency.
I think, if they were all boring nerds like me, they'd unite behind Harris for the moment, and do a lot of polling regarding different pairings over the next few weeks. Maybe some friendly debates, they can say that they're "pro forma" or whatever, but something to give the options a test drive in friendly circumstances. Then they can all get together in a smoke-filed room before the convention, figure out who the candidates with the best chance will be, and rig the convention to approve them.
The problem is that it's hard to tell in advance which one can win.
I don't do twitter, so what does "somebody who has pronouns in her Twitter bio" even mean? It's clearly a criticism of something, but I have no idea of what.
I feel like conservatives care way more about this "pronouns on X" thing than liberals do. I've seen plenty of conservatives complain about pronouns in bio but I've yet to see people on the left celebrate somebody putting pronouns in their bio, or condemning people who don't.
Seems reasonable if you're right this is what "right-of-center" people believe!
(Which is very plausible to me tbc)
I wouldn't want Harris to cave to a few extremists but if it's a moderately common belief among plausibly undecided's, seems worth doing.
That's Xi/Xim Jinpeng to you
Lol
For those who write fiction: What's your inspirational process? Narrative down to scene, or the reverse?
I ask because I am cursed with the latter. I flash on a scene as if I'm the "camera" in a movie, except that in addition to being able to just look at the scene, I have a sense of the characters as if they're real people I know very well, and I'll also have a full sense of their individual emotional states and the relationship dynamic between them. Scenes themselves always have some kind of conflict between two characters (since that's what's dramatic enough to imagine in the first place); be it small, when they barely know one another, or climactic.
Notably, I always experience the tension / catharsis / general-drama of a scene *as if it was part of a coherent narrative*, even though it isn't, yet. I'll be driving my car, suddenly whisper a couple lines of dialogue to myself, and !!!BAM!!! full pathos for these characters, and a pathos several degrees more intense than what I feel as an audience experiencing someone else's story.
I say this is a curse because if I then want to write a big, coherent story that satisfyingly supports and *leads* to these great scenes happening...well, then what? I try to zoom out from the scene / dynamic / character to "see" the other events that very specifically got them there, and the bigger plot just feels vague and boring and maybe even unknowable compared to the extremely delicious intensity of thinking about and writing and polishing the particular scenes I was struck by.
This is very much the opposite of how the fiction-writing process is supposed to work: One is supposed to outline the narrative in its broadest terms, then break down the acts, scenes, and so on to develop a satisfying pattern of set up and pay off. Totally makes sense, except I've always wondered how writers who work this way could possibly "see" and know the characters in their stories well enough to know what they would do and how they react when things happen to them. I feel infinitely more like a spirit eavesdropping on and occasionally nudging these people than it feels like I'm the creator of their universe. Even extreme revisions (or entire rewrites!) of particular scenes feel far more like, "Oh, so THAT'S what really happened!" rather than making a correction.
I guess I'm looking either for commiseration, advice from people who recognize this process and have a hack to overcome its downsides, or out of pure random interest, what it feels like for those who work the opposite direction from theme down to sentence. What do you "see?"
I don't need to read Robert McKee's Story or Joseph Campbell's Hero with 1000 Faces or Stephen King's On Writing, etc - I get it! I know the beats that my story is suppose to have, I just can't seem to focus on or "see" what causes those beats.
But if anyone like me has been helped by an obscure title, I'd be interested to hear it!
> This is very much the opposite of how the fiction-writing process is supposed to work
While I am by no means a writer, I've read a modest amount about the writing process of different authors (fascination by The Other?), and there's a huge variety of techniques? Some do it the way you describe, but others write the first draft as they go, and then once it's complete, go back and revise. So maybe try stringing together a lot of scenes, holding in abeyance any worries about structure and beats, and then go back afterwards and tweak to introduce structure? Or from an alternate perspective, go back and see what the first draft's structure is telling you about the "actual theme" of the story? I've heard of authors realizing that a particular story was not, say, about an adventure, but about the development of an interpersonal relationship that happened during the adventure, which then affects how they write the next draft.
Also, apparently Miyazaki changed a single line in "The Wind Rises" late in production from "come" to "live", a change of (I think) a single vowel in a single word. (For context, the line was delivered by a ghost.)
If the sequence of events is completely unsuited, perhaps adjust the perspective or structure to be nonlinear? Check out Steven Brust's "The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars" for an extreme example. His "Dragon" is structurally simpler, with I think only three alternating chronological threads. Both are short and can be quick reads.
> "I've heard of authors realizing that a particular story was not, say, about an adventure, but about the development of an interpersonal relationship that happened during the adventure, which then affects how they write the next draft."
This is my issue exactly, but in reverse.
I have many, many scenes spanning my two protagonists' unpublishably problematic relationship. Their relationship is very much a complete narrative arc, with setups and pay offs, and I'm very satisfied *that* part - the part I really like - can be fully realized.
What I don't have is the obligatory stupid adventure "A" plot to use as an excuse to explore the relationship.
In my genre (urban fantasy / urban romantasy) there's always a murder or a police procedural or a heist or a P.I. gig or a war threatening or happening (and so on) and the protagonist(s) "job" is to go solve the mystery or try to prevent the war or fight in it or whatever.
Hell, even much-maligned YA-porn / actual-porn fantasy-romance authors like Stephanie Meyer and Sarah J Maas have their characters spend most of their page count "adventuring," rather than in the parts the books are arguably much more famous for.
It's the obligatory "9 to 5" part of the story that I can't seem to "see" (or be inspired to invent).
This is probably a horrible idea, but maybe you could "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead" it? Have a third, minor character who's occasionally seen doing adventuring work on some plot that's never fully explained, maybe even borrowed from some classic bit of literature?
I've done sword-and-sorcerery LARPs before, and often there were a group of PCs who would end up doing this. They'd (sometimes we'd) be tagging along after the people who were obsessed with the current plot, but mostly wrapped up in whatever drama we were having with ourselves. Suddenly orcs attack! So we help fight them off, and the process of fighting them becomes more fodder for drama. Oh, look, there's some old lady up there with a glowy staff talking to some people? Eh, we'll find out what she said later, but might not ever get around to it. Wait, why are we on a boat again?
I don't know nuthin' 'bout no beats, Miz Christina, but I generally do have the "scene" thing happen: these characters in this situation doing this and saying that. Then I have to try and fit all that together.
The times I do get a story from start to finish are when I have a narrative in place first where I know the general route the story will take and what I want to happen. But mostly I get "X and Y in Z doing A" and that gets written, and then that might be all that I can squeeze out of it.
So more gardener than architect, too. Well, it's nice to know there are quite a few of us!
I love reading about your experience of writing. The vividness of the scene you describe is really striking!
Personally, I start with the narrative, but I'm not sure that's a better process. A great story obviously needs both a great plot and great scenes, so starting with a great scene seems great. The dilemma you describe seems a bit like the old architect/gardener division of writers, with both approaches being used by great writers.
Anecdotally, Twilight famously came from a vivid scene in the author's dream; given the books' huge success but questionable quality, I don't know if that's comforting! In a similar vein, I seem to recall that the fourth season of West World was built around a visually stunning climactic scene, not the other way around.
> The dilemma you describe seems a bit like the old architect/gardener division of writers, with both approaches being used by great writers.
This is either a concept I somehow managed not to come across before or one I have forgotten. Thanks for writing about it! It's extremely useful to have a label to assign myself when discussing the process.
> Twilight famously came from a vivid scene in the author's dream; given the books' huge success but questionable quality...
The movies don't capture this at all, but: I actually think the quality of the Twilight books are vastly underrated, especially compared to the vampire genre in general. Quite a bit of Meyer's prose craft is (successfully) deliberately funny, and she is one of the best authors out there at describing traumatic injury in the first person. I've read many, many vampire novels and she's my #1 for Best Human-to-Vampire Transition Scene.
But more importantly, she (perhaps inadvertently, but possibly not) delightfully subverted the genre by *constantly* driving the story towards traditional tragic vampire tropes and then just...
[Imagine me pitching my voice enthusiastically high and throwing my arms in the air]
...having everything work out great!
Like, I can't tell you how FUN that is! Every time I, an experienced fan of vampire lit, braced for the "inevitable" horror - of the protagonist's guilt at their first kill, beloved characters dying in a vampire war, characters dying in a supernatural species war, love thwarted by destiny, vampire accidentally traumatizing their human lover, even the taboo vampire child - *it just works out great!*
I mean, not only does *literally no one important die*, no one important is even *unhappy* by the end of the series.
It just all...
works out...
...great!
It's like the Sideshow-Bob-stepping-on-a-rake joke of vampire lit. The happy resolutions and total lack of vampire tragedy are *relentless.*
Now, does Meyer have a few lines of over-the-top, overly sentimental dialogue? Sure. Are there a few deeply weird moral intuitions in her books which are clearly informed by her Mormonism? Yes, but Orson Scott Card's are no different and arguably more distracting in hard sci-fi.
Ahem.
Thank you for attending my TEDTalk on Why Stephanie Meyer Doesn't Suck, Necessarily!
Have you read this?
https://luminous.elcenia.com/
Luminosity is basically the supernatural vampire fights that Twilight constantly teased without all the "watch Bella attempt suicide repeatedly due to True Wuv" that it actually gave us. I highly recommend it - though the ending is a bit lame.
I hated the ending of Luminosity but the sequel (Radiance) kind of makes up for it.
"Anecdotally, Twilight famously came from a vivid scene in the author's dream"
I think Harry Potter and the Hunger Games did too, so it's either a quirk of 2000s young adult fiction or it's a fairly universal phenomenon.
And C. S. Lewis started with scenes.
I think it is a characteristic of Gardener writers, who are indeed common.
https://livingwriter.com/blog/gardener-vs-architect/
Another famous example outside YA is Georges R Martin, who named the gardener/architect types of writers, and who imagined the immense story that is Game of Thrones from the scene of a young boy going with his father to a beheading.
Are you sure? I thought it was imagining the dire wolf puppies in the summer snow.
It is both! The beheading and the puppies in the snow are in the same scene
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-george-rr-martin-came-up-with-game-of-thrones-2014-4
A sign that he was not suited to write a series of novels. Along with his quote from Dreamsongs about his short story era that "My career is littered with the corpses of dead series."
He didn't realize what a huge series it was going to be.
I disagree so much! Finished or not, GoT remains an incredible matser piece!
And not finishing series is certainly a reasonable price to pay for starting many. Although I must admit that I would have love more Tuf stories...
What's the cutoff for "writes fiction"? I've managed to pull off a couple of unpublished four-page stories I'm mostly happy with.
Anyway, commiseration. Very much the same kind of thing, get a scene stuck in my head and try to build around it. My suggestion is to just push past the edges of it. Take whatever scene you've got in your head, and refuse to let it end; just keep following events afterward. Likewise, push past the beginning, and concentrate on what happened right before. You get a framework by having a thing to frame, and then putting stuff around it.
It's only sometimes fun; my most recent attempt was just a short card game, and it took nine days and I had to restart it three or four times to get a beginning that sort of led to the scene proper. But, like; just keep writing whatever, worst case scenario you throw it out and end up with the same progress you'd have if you hadn't tried
I think I mentioned my alliteration trick here; if you want to practice writing, just make up an alliterative sentence, and write a story based off it. "Hughie's Howitzer howled hideously as his heart heaved heavenward." ...I mean that one's probably not going to be a GREAT story, but you've got a "horrors of war" kind of framework to work out from.
> What's the cutoff for "writes fiction"?
In my particular case (not for anyone else, but just what I like and do), novel or series-length fiction. I finished my first novel (although probably it was more novella-length, and I'm sure hilariously awful) at 12 years old and completed a couple more here and there through high school and college.
Many novelists have a lot of difficulty with short stories, but I can blast out a single-scene short story with relative ease *because* it's the kind of stuff I like writing as part of a novel.
> My suggestion is to just push past the edges of it. Take whatever scene you've got in your head, and refuse to let it end; just keep following events afterward. Likewise, push past the beginning, and concentrate on what happened right before. You get a framework by having a thing to frame, and then putting stuff around it.
This, like most actually useful advice, is deceptively simple while being obviously the only correct option. And it's fucking *hard.*
But!
I consciously took it as I was reviewing a scene before bed. It felt like the main narrative beat of my characters' conversation had resolved, but, like, the two of them were still there in the room, so I sort of brute-forced another line of dialogue and promptly discovered a rather major hole I'd never noticed, so that was way more helpful than I was expecting.
It's very hard and as you say, not always fun, but I'm afraid it looks like there's indeed no hack to be had here.
Ignore anything I say because my track record for completing things is pretty much nonexistent.
But I tend to start with some kind of kernel - a cool setpiece, a funny punchline, a twist, a punchy exchange of dialogue, anything - then I throw several of those together and sort of grow out details from them until they all merge together into something.
Anything that isn't part of that initial visual exists to support it. I want a moment where a man throws a girl off a tower - so the heroine pops into the existence solely for the purpose of being pushed off the ledge. Later on I want a cool bit where a girl in a cage gets dangled from a hot air balloon. Well, I've already posited a heroine so let's reuse her here. Now I have some material to round her out with - she's getting pushed off castles and suspended in cages, so let's say she must be really bratty and annoying to have both those things happen "naturally" to her.
Hopefully as I go on she'll accumulate enough details to get rounded out and won't feel like a shallow plot device by the time I'm finished sticking qualities on her.
As I comb everything together, any time a new twist or theme comes up, I dance around backwards and forwards sticking in extra details, foreshadowing, etc so hopefully the whole story feels a lot more coherent than the process by which I wrote it.
I write pretty much entirely in bullet points and dialogue, so it's easy to go back and re-factor stuff quickly. I leave boring bits til later on the offchance that a future re-factor will eliminate them entirely. I shamelessly go where the fun is, and this complete lack of discipline is probably why I never get anywhere.
> I leave boring bits til later on the offchance that a future re-factor will eliminate them entirely. I shamelessly go where the fun is, and this complete lack of discipline is probably why I never get anywhere.
Oh, man, I couldn't (and didn't!) say it better, myself. As I said to @Moon Moth up-thread, my frustration is not being inspired / able to "see" the sort of 9-to-5 "gig" my characters are supposed to be doing as the "A-plot" between the scenes I love to write (which are absolutely part of a plot, too, but aren't "THE" plot, as traditionally defined by the genre).
And then I never really get anywhere in a way that would be more satisfyingly balanced for me and potentially readable for others.
I haven't read all the other responses so I'm probably repeating what someone else has already said, but: what happens if you jettison your A-plot, which you don't enjoy, and just stick all the scenes you do like to write next to each other? Then do the minimum supporting work needed to bridge it all together into coherence.
We've all heard the advice that if your characters need to get from A to B, you can just start the next scene with them getting off the train - you don't need to watch them while they sit there in the carriage for two hours.
Well if for you, the epic fight between hero and villain is as boring as sitting in the train carriage, because what you really enjoy is the subtle character study of two people sipping coffee together, or whatever, then just skip it and start the next scene with "Wow, wasn't that an exciting battle where Eric defeated Gunnhildr in that mountainside fight in that cataclysmic thunderstorm? Here's the coffee you wanted," and move on.
Your audience might well say, hey, wtf, why are you skipping past the cool stuff. And your response could just be, "Fuck you, I'm not that kind of writer and I don't want that kind of audience." If it bores you to write it'll probably bore them to read, so maybe better to appeal to the kind of people who like what you like in the first place.
I feel ya! I find vignettes so much more powerful in my imagination. Why force tourself into a traditional narrative? There are authors like Roberto Bolaño who have written great books that are very scene driven and very fun to read. It’s your voice, maybe experiment with a way to express it that is fun for you.
Alas, as I said to Moon Moth, my genre (urban fantasy / romantasy) basically *requires* a traditional "adventure" A-plot; a murder mystery or a P.I. gig or something-something war which the characters have to go "do" so their relationship can develop.
Even *I* can feel the imbalance in not having the "9-to-5" gig in the story.
I think I can partially relate to this problem. When I design my narratives, I also focus on these decisive scenes where there is real conflict. For me the best conflict is inside of the characters, when they have a difficult choice to make. And most of my plot follows from how to make this choice as difficult as possible, i.e. psychologically attaching the characters to both sides of the choice, and hinting at the conflict between those two sides straight from the beginning. Normally there are multiple main characters (each with their own choice to make), then ramping up the conflict between the choices, leading to the decisive scenes and then playing out the consequences until the resolution.
My motto is normally not to write anything that isn't fun to write. As I fill in the plot points from very rough to very detailed, I stop when I think this isn't really working and just leave it at a rough level. This mostly happens when I don't know the characters well enough, or when I am still confused about the central themes. Just letting the characters live in my head for a while, imagining them in different scenarios with their idiosyncrasies normally generates enough material to fill in those scenes later.
I don't know if this helps, feel free to ask, I have some more tricks to overcome writing obstacles! :)
It sounds like we might both be drawn to the same kind of internal conflict and psychological drama. My problem is that while that kind of thing occasionally appears in my genre (urban fantasy / dark romantasy), it's in vastly tiny proportion to the main "adventure" or "gig" A-plot where a character is, like, trying to figure out who murdered their neighbor or pull of a bank heist or whatever.
Like, if my prose and style recognizably resembles anything, it's J.D. Salinger's third-person fiction (Nine Stories, Franny, Zooey, and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters), wherein some of the characters' smallest gestures; how they mix a drink, when they break eye-contact, how they manipulate a conversation, is zoomed in because it is of deceptively great significance.
But also Salinger never attempted to write urban fantasy lit in this style.
Or he did, and that's why his later work is as unpublished as my current work!
Are there any stories of yours online? Now I am interested what you are writing about.
I mostly write for theatre, so I don't really have that problem.
I think I'm the complete opposite, and I don't think it's good. I've got about thirty plots in my mind, and all of them are vague outlines. And I haven't written anything because (or partly because) trying to actually get a single scene out of them that doesn't feel absurdly cliched and fake is incredibly difficult.
You'd think each of our problems would be the other's solution, but I'm not sure how that would work.
You know, at one point I actually researched if a professional dramaturg (or rather, the novelist's equivalent of one) might be an option for me, and I still haven't entirely discounted it. Although finding someone affordable with similar genre taste feels both daunting and possibly expensively pointless, as the main themes I'm interested in writing are unpublishably problematic.
Two weird takes on the fertility crisis. Almost certainly wrong as uni-explanations, but interesting to contemplate as factors:
1. Isn't it just Global Urbanization? Cities have historically NEVER had above-replacement fertility. Before the 20th century, that was mostly on excessive deaths from epidemics and bad sanitation in general. Today, it's a lack of kids - but the limitation is not novel. Kids require space (you don't want to be sharing your bedroom with them, they don't want to be sharing their room with siblings) and living space in cities is very expensive, to say nothing of babysitters, kindergartens and school district competition. Certainly a drag - and wouldn't you know it, we've just about crossed the threshold for 50+% global urban population share at the start of the millennium. (Which secondarily further economically depresses the countryside and makes having children there *also* less enticing.)
2. (even more speculative) Isn't it permanent psychological exposure to Much More Attractive Prospective Partners? This hypothesizes some subconscious psychological "module" which keeps a track of how hot the people "around you" are and tells you not to settle for anything considerably worse than the best available option. Only it was evolutionarily calibrated for groups of 150 hominids and we are now exposed to Anya Taylor-Joys and Jason Momoas on a daily basis. The brain doesn't care that it's pixels and ink dots, it still informs you that you *could be* doing much better than Tim from accounting / Susan from sales and this decreases the general average willingness to settle and start a family.
#2 is why I won't again date nor marry.
also because I miss my wife and no one will ever be as good as she. but even if it weren't for that, I have seen this issue crop up in essentially every relationship I have ever been close-enough-to...
...and this here amigo don't fuck with being a second-best option 🫥 u feel me cabrónes
Consider that the incentive structure around children has been flipped on its head in recent centuries. For most of settled civilization, the vast majority of the population was subsistence farmers. They needed labor to survive, not just for food harvesting but for producing all of their essential goods, especially textiles. When people got old and couldn't do as much physically demanding labor any more, children were their insurance policy. No kids to take care of you, and you starved to death. Of course they had to have lots of kids, because a significant number of them wouldn't survive infancy.
Today, these structures are reversed (for developed countries, which have the lowest fertility anyway). Infant mortality is infrequent, and children are no longer a net resource gain for the household. In fact, with the exploding costs of education, children are a big drain on household resources. Elderly people retire now, and rely on money saved from their own labor instead of their kids taking care of them.
This is a common argument but I don't think it makes sense. It suggests that people in advanced economies produce less than they used to. Kids might take more upfront investment assuming you buy into the notion that kids are super expensive - re cost of education, I don't think the type of kids who should be going to university need much financial support - but they'll certainly produce more economic value than kids in agrarian economies used to even if they work at, say, McDonald's.
If the incentive structure being flipped really is an important factor, the thing to look at is cultural attitudes regarding the obligations of children toward their parents and expectations that children form their own households at younger ages relative to the past. And there are still cultures today that expect children to give gifts to their parents on the regular, often in cash, even if their parents are wealthy (in which case they'll just be getting it back through gifts or in their inheritance). It's an important cultural gesture. Yet these cultures have also experienced cratering birthrates, sometimes even more than Western societies where insinuating that children have obligations to their parents is met with contempt.
> It suggests that people in advanced economies produce less than they used to.
I look at it completely differently, people today produce so much more that they don't need to rely on their children producing anything at all. Raising a child is a huge drain on resources, not necessarily just money but also the time and energy of the parents.
Your second paragraph is interesting, although I think the main factor is whether the society is productive enough that children go from a long-term investment to a net loss. You feed and shelter a kid for ~20 years, possibly pay quite a lot for education, then cast them out. Of course, I'm talking in economic terms, and obviously there is a lot more that goes into raising a family than economics. But it might be enough to explain birth rates being less than what they were.
I think that the alternatives to having kids have gotten better, especially in urban areas. People don't want to give up their free time as much as they used to since life without kids is not boring anymore.
It used to be normal for entire families to share one room. I grew up sharing a room with my younger sibling.
I remember sharing a room with my parents and sister, though only for a year or so. All our beds were crammed into the room with no space for anything else.
I also grew up sharing a room with a younger sibling (not of the same sex) until I was 17 years old and we both survived pretty easily.
From the perspective of a European genX who never had kids and neither did a good part of our cohort, my impression of the causes would be:
1. Individualism and the rejection of authority of elders, which mostly killed the idea that we owe anything to the world or to our own parents and ancestors, beyond the basics of taking care of our immediate surroundings and avoiding active harm.
2. Basic economic factors, such as rising standards of life, which means relatively increasing costs of meeting your own standards for how you would raise a kid.
3. Loss of faith in the future, with the twin spectres of environmental degradation and war (i.e post WW2 collective trauma).
4. More speculatively, a growing sense that the world is already crowded, so that anything cool someone would like to do has already been done and/or puts you in competition with thousands of others who would do the same.
Note that I'm not saying any of these things are necessarily *true*, just that they jointly pushed to change the psychological outlook.
Regarding #3, it's funny that there was a baby boom around WW2. It's people that never experienced any of the World Wars that aren't having kids.
The baby boom was after the war was over.
"fertility in the U.S. and many OECD countries started to rise before World War II"
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2005/05/why_did_the_bab.html
"Contrary to the popular belief that it was triggered by soldiers returning home from World War Two, the Boom in fact began in the mid-1930s"
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/understanding-the-baby-boom/
The Works-in-Progress link was very informative. The Marginal-Revolution essay much less so, but Interesting all the same. I had been so focused on the Baby Boom, that I never considered the long-term (75+ year) Baby Bust that preceded it. Interesting that there doesn't seem to be any solidly convincing explanation for the subsequent Baby Boom. And since we don't really understand the causes of the Boom, there's no reason to assume there couldn't be a future Boom. Just sayin...
The WIP piece suggests a decline in maternal mortality explained (some of) the boom. Mortality continued to decline, but the processes that over the long term had been reducing fertility overcame that.
> Isn't it just Global Urbanization?
> just
Probaly but it will lead you to an uncomfortable solution if you know, want to slove crisises.
"we must destory the cities to save the human race"
The Khmer Rouge were ahead of their time!
On number 2...I always find these descriptions of attraction and romance so ridiculously cynical it's hard to take them seriously. Now maybe I'm wrong and everyone really is calculatingly shallow like that. Maybe I am and I'm just deluding myself that I'm not. Maybe I'm not but I'm a weird exception. Maybe a lot of people aren't and a lot of people are, and the latter group is still large enough to make theories like yours useful.
But I feel like, in a world where most people would certainly *say* that they are marrying or hoping to marry the person they actually love, or who shares their values and personality in the most fundamental way, and who is hopefully reasonably nice to look at as well*...and *not* that they are methodically trying to get the hottest body they think they "have a decent shot at"...claims to the effect of the latter require a tad more justification than is usually (or ever) given in their support.
(*and even within the framework of physical looks, a cursory look at the world certainly suggests this is fairly subjective, to say the least, and these evolutionary theories always posit an objective ranking of some kind.)
I don't think you can believe yourself in this area. I loved my wife, but before I met her, if I'd just seen a picture, it would have seemed ridiculous to be attracted. But I was.
I don't think there is much intentional calculation going on at all. But, as a very simplified example, imagine that humans are naturally wired to fall in love with the (subjective to them) most attractive, otherwise compatible person "around". Now, that would mean something very different for an isolated nomad tribe, for a village in the hills or for someone with a smartphone in Manhattan. In NYC, your brain now knows there are 10X hot people "around" (you've seen them in Time Square) - but a normal person never meets them face to face. All they bump into are these clearly inferior, flawed specimens (themselves 10X compared to the malnourished, disease-ridden, illiterate standard of the medieval village in the hills; but that doesn't matter because the scale is always relative to your local present conditions.)
I believe it can be (and has been) reasonably proven that humans calibrate their sense of beauty and attraction by the standards of their era and location; What happens when, due to technology, the median image of attractiveness rises far above attainable reality?
The TFR of Lagos, one of the world's most populous cities, is apparently 3.4, so (1) seems like a weak explanation. But I don't even understand why we'd need any other explanation than improvements in contraception.
In a 5.5 TFR country. I think the national base rate should be taken into account.
Yes, I'm not saying there's no effect from urbanization; I'm just saying it seems like a weak effect. Just compare those numbers to KR, where basically every province has a TFR around 1 or even lower.
Decrease by 2 children per mother doesn't seem like a *weak* effect to me. It clearly isn't the only thing going on (and interactions with the local culture will always introduce varying multipliers) but it does strike me as a persistent universal drag on fertility.
By eliminating high TFR nations, you're stacking the deck in favor of your pet argument. How about the ratio of rural TFR to urban TFR? I bet we see the the same pattern in high TFR countries vs low TFR countries — i.e. fertility seems to be inversely correlated to the productivity of the local economy. Which would explain why Nigeria, whose countryside is much poorer than its urban areas, has an overall TFR of 5.5 while Lagos is 3.4.
I am not eliminating them; My argument could be condensed to "Cities always have lower fertility rates than non-urban environments, ceteris paribus, and more people now live in cities than ever."
I do wonder whether that is actually extricable or differentiable from your productivity point, as I can't think of any peace-time, non-disaster example where the countryside would be more economically productive than a city, in a given polity. (I would almost argue it definitionally can't happen because the city would simply automatically depopulate to a point where the inequality holds again.)
I thought your argument was urban environments create "permanent psychological exposure to Much More Attractive Prospective Partners"—and that's why urban areas see lower population growth rates because of increased partner selection. I know some conservative commentators have claimed this.
Granted the marriage rate has dropped from ~9 per 1000 in 1900 to ~7 per 1000 in 2015 (with some huge peaks and troughs over the decades) — so, maybe this difference is made up of people who are happily living a single lifestyle with a variety of sexual partners to keep them satisfied. But the fact that fewer married couples seem to want children would tend to refute that hypothesis. After all, if you're married, presumably you've selected a satisfactory partner. The decline in fertility among married couples can't be explained by the partner selection hypothesis.
https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/republicans/2020/4/marriage-rate-blog-test
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/11/19/growing-share-of-childless-adults-in-u-s-dont-expect-to-ever-have-children/
I don't think 1 is correct? Singapore has had the same trend as the rest of east Asia (very high fertility in the mkd 20th century, very low recently) despite not having the same kind of mass movement to cities (the city itself became more urbanized, but it didn't have people moving from the countryside into the city like Japan and China).
What's the problem? Doesn't Singapore's fertility dropping like a rock as it transformed itself through urbanization strongly support the idea that the cause *is* urbanization?
I don't think one non-central exception would invalidate the entire thesis. Singapore is very sui generis as a city and a nation. But just in general: Consider the transition from Malthusian (population levels kept in check by famine on the margins) to post-Malthusian (to a first approximation, nobody starves) conditions as a weird one-off. For a brief moment, population was going up Everywhere, as the previous bottleneck had been removed. Then all settled into a new equilibrium with Choice, Opportunities and Living space as the new limits.
Interesting post, I really think you’re on to something here. That being said, Anya Taylor-Joy is the example you go with? For real?
Well, based on a VERY quick google search, she doesn't know how to smile. But if you ignore her expressions she looks quite good. Not even close to my ideal, but I'm not sure I believe my own ideal (as a conscious choice) matches my real ideal...which I suspect is based off my lover.
De gustibus non disputandum est.
Lol ok fair enough I guess. I’m pretty straight but based off looks alone I think I’d have to go for Mamoa.
It feels ironic in the context of your point though because she’s exactly the type girl I could conceivably be attracted to if she were a local girl that was in my league with a great personality, but based off looks alone/“Hollywood attractiveness”, I’d never give her a second thought.
Ok, substitute Margot Robbie or Emily Ratajkowski for your purposes.
I feel like this kind of supports the original point; if you knew Anya Taylor-Joy personally, she'd probably be the most attractive woman you'd ever met.
> if you knew Anya Taylor-Joy personally, she'd probably be the most attractive woman you'd ever met.
I doubt that. The majority of images that turn up when simply searching for a celebrity's name are carefully prepared and enhanced promotional pictures. Don't believe them. This is not how these people look like when you meet them on the street.
If you look at paparazzi photos [1] of beautiful actresses taken on the beach, for example, then they're still attractive, but you'll find dozens of women that are at least as good looking as them on any large beach on a sunny summer day.
[1] Publishing those photos is unethical, in my opinion, and you shouldn't support this financially. But it's good evidence.
I would call that somewhat weak evidence - it's hard to take a good picture and easy to take a bad one (doubly true for candid shots). Actors definitely do put a ton of effort (or have people who put a ton of effort) into their looks on set, but it's still hard to look that good on film, and as I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, even the acting students I've known were an incredibly good-looking bunch.
No. The most PHYSICALLY attractive, possibly, but when you meet someone other factors rapidly come to dominate (except in very extreme cases). I've known a few (well, very few) extremely physically beautiful women, and none of them were even interesting, because of personality traits.
Well, yes, psychology definitely overrides superficial attractiveness. But that's what we were talking about originally.
Yeah it kinda does in a backwards way, that’s why it’s ironic. OP is saying “how can ordinary girls stand a chance with the likes of ATJ running around” and I’m saying “how can the ATJ’s of the world stand a chance with all the beautiful girls you see in cities”
I think this is way more contextual than people generally realize. If you only see Anya Taylor-Joy onscreen, with other actors, it skews your perceptions a lot. If you actually just took a bunch of pictures of her and of whatever girls you've known in person that you thought were really attractive and shuffled through them until your sense of familiarity wore off, you might think differently.
My ex-wife was in a prestigious acting school in NYC and when I would go to parties with her and her fellow students, all carefully selected for both looks and talent, I would be struck by the sense that I was BY FAR the least attractive person there, and just do my best not to stare at all the beautiful people. It was like being in some fae court. Of course, you could probably find a more attractive, or at least comparatively attractive, group on a film set or a modeling shoot, but that's not something you tend to experience up close and personal.
2 makes sense if fertility decline is caused by absence of pair-bond formation and/or total absence of children; it doesn't get very far inasmuch as a major part of the decline is fewer (but non-zero) children per couple.
It still makes sense if the mechanism delays stable child-bearing pair-bonding by a decade.
1. Cities have historically had above-replacement fertility in the 19th and 20th centuries, just not as high as rural areas.
2. Fertility has declined in France since the french revolution, a process of social contagion that spread to other countries 100 years later, way before pixels and Anya Taylor-Joy.
I think the French demographic transition began prior to the French revolution. It appears to have been linked to declining religiosity, which may have enabled said revolution.
I'm willing to accept the first point, although those conditions were an anomalous point of escape from the Malthus trap, food-wise. But the second is not what I would call a rigorous multi-faceted analysis.
I'm not making a rigorous multi-faceted analysis in substack comments but there are academic papers about what I said. Plus that fertility has declined long before sexy pixelated people is obvious to anyone with even the most basic knowledge of demographic history.
Ad 1: So what is the proposed mechanism?
Ad 2: Unless you're suggesting that fertility declined before the advent of printing press in the 15th century, pictures of hottest people from a much larger demo pool have been around for longer.
Fertility declined first in the least religious french regions where the idea of deliberately limiting fertility first appeared during the french revolution, than through french culture it spread internally and externally. For example french-speaking regions in neighboring countries started the demographic transition sooner than the other regions.
Then it spread through translations. For example in Britain radical activists Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh created the Malthusian League and promoted contraception and translated books about birth control leading to a famous trial. Knowledge of contraception spread and social acceptance of it was a major proggessist cause leading to fertility declining in a global trend that has not yet ended.
The idea of deliberately limiting population is prehistoric. It's been found on isolated pacific islands, in tribes in Africa, etc. The French created a particular mechanism for limiting population (French Letters...later the condom), in Africa girls used a leather apron (I wonder how that worked, but I accept that it did). I don't know about other places. For some reason this doesn't seem to be commonly reported on.
Regarding your second example, my recollection is that fertility then dropped in English Canada, but not French Canada.
I do think the ability to choose childlessness as a viable social option plays a role, but contraception as such, in various forms, was known to humans since at least ancient Egypt.
Also, how does the lack of religiosity explain identical trends in China (never religious in the Western sense), India (non-believers under 1%) or Iran (a theocracy since 1979)?
Great things were achieved in the sixties with about half the present population.
Why do you think the decline would stop at 2 billion? But, the more serious answer is that economic growth & technological progress depends on population growth https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/how-much-more-innovation-before-pause https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/after-eating-software-will-bite-the
It's not just a "white people" thing. Fertility does seem to be decreasing. Possibly (my guess) due to industrial pollution in the food chain. While it seems to be concentrated in urban areas, it's not JUST in urban areas. IIUC it's even true among hunter-gatherers, though to a lesser degree.
"What is a fertility crisis? Why would be it be a bad thing if the world population would go back to two billion and real estate would be cheaper and we would have more room to breathe?"
Others have already commented on the challenges of transitioning to a lower population, given existing economic and political models.
I'll add my own personal take -- people having fewer, and often zero, kids indicates, or perhaps even contributes to, a lack of optimism about and investment in the future. I worry it will become self-fulfilling.
Also, being a parent may not be for everyone, but it has been an integral part of the human experience for *nearly* everyone for the vast majority of human history. I can't help but feel that our culture will become impoverished as fewer and fewer people experience parenthood.
White america is actaully on the better side of the *golbal* fretiality crisis; its a simpsons paradox type thing with great replacement.
It's a "who is going to pay and work for our retirement" crisis. As someone who would very much like to retire I find it concerning.
Yeah that sounds like a reasonable concern. Unlike the fear mongering of people who can't seem to conceive of a natural variable ever going down for a while.
So far, it's shaping up as an "Organized technological civilizations stop being able to maintain themselves, as their physical, systemic and intellectual infrastructure slowly crumbles, and are replaced by Bronze-age level chaos zones" kind of a crisis.
Considering that the US productivity-per-person has increased >5x in the past 75 years, it seems to me we could easily live at an early 1950s level of civilization with one-fifth population. Yes, I'm being somewhat facetious, because obviously there would be all sorts of catastrophic economic dislocations if four-fifths of our population suddenly got sucked up in the Rapture or died from a Super COVID. But overall we won't begin to see a decline in our population before 2125-2150 by some estimates. It seems like we could easily muddle through with fewer people, and it doesn't seem like a civilization-ending scenario to me.
US is probably the only developed country which isn't facing imminent major problems as a result, not least on account of its ability to attract and absorb immigration; Everyone else is various shades of effed.
Give me the links to the data you're referring to. Also how imminent, and how major?
For instance, Japan is supposed to lose half its population by 2100, and they're worried about the decline in GDP. Theoretically, that's supposed to impact the standard of living. But that will reduce their population to what the UK is now. Seems like Japan could have a perfectly comfortable smaller national GDP, but where the per capita wealth remains similar to today.
It seems like you've got your pet theory, but you don't want to consider the data that would falsify it (which seems very common on AC10 for some reason). I'm not sure we can take this discussion any further unless you give me some data to chew on
>Why would be it be a bad thing if the world population would go back to two billion and real estate would be cheaper and we would have more room to breathe?
It's not impossible that the whole modern world as it is could run at that level of population, but it's not certain either.
>Or is it just a not enough white people crisis?
It's a not enough smart people problem, and white people are actually not doing the worst (east asians are cratering, middle easterners not deeply embedded in Islam are not doing great either).
>Or retirement crisis?
This too, 2 billion peple with an average age of 25 is not the same as two billion people with an average age of 50.
"Go back to 2 billion"? Or, 2 million? Or, two thousand?
I think 1 billion is about right, but possibly 2 billion. The problem is the age structure of the population.
The direction of movement hasn't yet changed from "up" to "down", and you're already predicting that once it shifts this one time it can never shift again?
In the long run evolution will let its opinion known, but before that point expect the collaspe of this era of politics; and given the number of poeple who seem to think "end of history" unironically happened, that will be quite the rude wake up call.
I’m going to be visiting SF in August, and would love to meet up with some rational-ish people (or anyone that reads ACX). Let me know if you’d like to get coffee! I’m available at gruffyddgozali@gmail.com
I was thinking about staying in a hotel in the Theater district, is this known as an alright location? Also, I’m from London so like walking everywhere, is this doable in SF or is the crime/homelessness situation too bad?
The Theater District is one of the last areas you want to stay in SF. That whole area from Civic Center to the Tenderloin are the bad parts of SF you see in the news. SOMA isn't great either. I lived in SF in a recent past couple years and would recommend staying in North Beach. It's a great part of town with a lot to offer in and of itself but is also in proximity to everything you'd want out of a visit to SF. It's extremely walkable with tons of good restaurants and cafes nearby, it's close to Chinatown, the ocean, and Telegraph Hill, among other things... Highly recommend!
The theatre area is directly adjacent to the more sus parts of town. For a more pleasant experience, I would recommend staying west of Van Ness Ave, or closer to Union Square or North Beach if east of Van Ness.
I did not want this to happen.
First, because I really don't want an exact repeat of 2016. Please, no. Not another election, and years after it, of never ending identity politics, of saying that the result can only be explained by misogyny, that it had nothing whatsoever to do with a horrifically incompetent administration and policies completely out of touch with the median voter and a partisan/media ecosystem that's more biased and dishonest by the day. No, nothing but misogyny. And racism, this time. Two kinds of it, anti-black and anti-Asian. We'll never hear the fucking end of it.*
Of course, this is all only if Harris is the nominee, but who else is it going to be?
Second, relatedly but distinct, whoever is the nominee is still going to lose, and I think very likely they'll lose worse than Biden would have: incumbency has a major advantage (see the Keys To The White House) and e.g. both Obama and Trump significantly beat their polls when running for reelection. The Democrats will not benefit from this.
But you know who else won't benefit? Democratic accountability. It will be much harder to say that Trump's win is squarely a result of Biden's terrible record, his weaknesses and inability to stand up to his party's extremists. We'll get all sorts of crap about how the election result actually says nothing whatsoever about the last four years' policies. No, it's *only* because of the chaos of switching candidates, which (we'll be told) was a tactical mistake and actually if Biden had been kept he would have won and he was never senile, that was just misinformation, and actually Trump has no mandate at all.
This harms most Democrats (they'll still lose) and harms most Republicans (the ones who want a bit more clarity and less alternative facts echo chambers) and harms most moderates. It benefits only said echo chamber ideologues.
And third, I'm so sick of rule by polls. Especially after all the recent evidence that polls are unreliable. Biden should have been booted, but he should have booted by a proper vote. Everyone should have had the chance to actually express a verdict on his presidency. Instead of there just being the assumption that obviously everyone *would* have expressed that judgement, and decisions being made on that basis. It's so fundamentally undemocratic.
(*Note those who are harmed most by this are young girls, and non-white children, who live in progressive environments and are told every day that the world hates them and that Harris only lost because of racism/misogyny and not for her incompetence, and that merit and individualism means nothing and that they are entitled to tokenism and AA and if they don't get that to despair, and never ever encoraged to aspire to actual equal judgements on their own merits. I can hardly think of a more toxic message).
>Two kinds of it, anti-black and anti-Asian
I've heard a few media talking heads try to emphasize Harris' Asian half but I doubt anyone really thinks "Asian" or "Indian" when Harris is brought to mind.
Regarding this paragraph:
"But you know who else won't benefit? Democratic accountability. It will be much harder to say that Trump's win is squarely a result of Biden's terrible record, his weaknesses and inability to stand up to his party's extremists. We'll get all sorts of crap about how the election result actually says nothing whatsoever about the last four years' policies. No, it's *only* because of the chaos of switching candidates, which (we'll be told) was a tactical mistake and actually if Biden had been kept he would have won and he was never senile, that was just misinformation, and actually Trump has no mandate at all."
... I don't think that's the world we're in anymore, not for either party. I mean, let me ask, when Trump lost in 2020, do you think the Republicans saw it as a repudiation of his policies? Or, for that matter, should they have?
Nobody votes on policy anymore. Not in the bigger world, and even not in spaces like this. The last open thread I tried to solicit some conversation about specific policy expectations of a 2nd Trump admin, and how that would contrast against a 2nd Biden term, and the only thing people could say is "well he won't be woke like Biden," without offering much of anything in the way of specifics.
Outside of a few salient issues - like abortion - nobody votes on policy anymore. It's all vibes.
>The last open thread I tried to solicit some conversation about specific policy expectations of a 2nd Trump admin, and how that would contrast against a 2nd Biden term, and the only thing people could say is "well he won't be woke like Biden," without offering much of anything in the way of specifics.
Have you tried asking the question in spaces with a different ratio of normies to people who are almost pathologically obsessed with culture war and specifically with wokeness in all of its innumerable and insidious forms?
I will next time, but I confess I hoped for a little more attempt at logical thinking, given that it's part of ACT's whole deal.
I see your point, and yes there's a lot of muddled thinking, and even more importantly an inability to easily communicate one's thinking to others who don't share your premises (which doesn't mean your thinking isn't logical).
But I also wonder if you're equivocating a bit between two meanings of "vibes". This can mean:
(1) concrete opinions on actual policies (e.g. transgender mandates, immigration, executive appointments) that are largely ideological or cultural
(2) vague feelings about which candidate will push things in a certain ideological direction, without concrete policies to point to
1 seems pretty rational to me: if you don't like a certain culture or ideology (e.g. wokeness) ruling society, there are plenty of concrete things Trump did last time and will likely do again that will reduce that ideology's power (at least in particular places like schools and the government). People here have been quite clear about some of those.
As for 2, that also seems quite rational if those feelings are based in evidence like the kind of rhetoric the candidates use and the kind of demographics they associate with and represent. Ordinary voters can't be expected to know all the policy decisions presidents might make, *plus* correctly predict exactly how each candidate will make all of those decisions, *especially* when the candidates avoid making clear committments on those things. The whole point of representative democracy is that you vote for a representative who will make those decisions for you, and whose judgement you somewhat trust. So I don't see anything irrational about identifying the general princples (or vibes or you like) that one party has been using to make decisions, deciding that those principles have been very harmful (e.g. cancel culture, women's rights in sports etc, merit based hiring), and thus voting for the opposite party whose rhetoric (vibes?) strongly suggests they will use different principles in those decisions. You may disagree with the premises of that argument, but the argument has a perfectly valid structure.
I was mostly speaking on point (2). And you're right, as a baseline assumption that seems valid. But I still think it's not a great way for a thinking person to approach the question.
To start with a narrow point: sometimes vibes are lying. The clearest example of this would be Trump's farm tariffs. Introduced as a way to be 'tough' on China, they wound up backfiring, wrecking finances for many farms and forcing the government to subsidize them. And yet, the farming community remains as pro-Trump as ever, as best I can tell, because he's 'their kind of guy' and is going to be tough on the people who are hurting them. They simply don't believe he could be responsible for what happened with them.
You can also see this with labor. Comparing the two parties policies, there is no serious question which party is more pro-union. And yet a lot of rank-and-file union members are still pro-Trump, apparently in denial about the potential economic impact.
In both cases, this doesn't seem to be a case of "we know he's bad financially but we like him for other reasons," but rather "we can't believe he'd be bad for us financially because we like him so much."
People treat the Presidency as the Mascot-in-Chief. Having Your Guy in charge is a sign that your 'side' is Winning - despite whatever actual policies emerge. And it worries me. I think if you look at places like Venezuela or South Africa, you see places where people vote* their nation into ruin because the leaders really seem to say the right things and talk about the fighting the right enemies.
So when I see people ignoring the actual policies - some of which could be quite bad for us - likely to come from a Trump admin, and instead just assuming that he'll make the kinds of decisions they'd like because he seems like that kind of guy, I get the same uh, vibes as those poor nations.
*(Venezuelan elections are not perfectly free but Chavez/Maduro do enjoy a high degree of support anyway).
I'd love to see more people willing to split ticket vote. If you want to fight progressives in the schools, focus on the school board and your state's government. If you want to fight progressives in colleges, do so through your donations, where you send your kids, etc.
Of course, if you think that fighting progressives in the federal bureaucracy should be the top priority, then focus on the Presidency. That's a perfectly valid stance, to be clear! (Personally, I think the combination of a meritocratic bureaucracy and ruinous tariffs are worse than the inverse but that's a valid point of disagreement).
[...continued]
3. I entirely endorse split ticket voting. In 2020 it seemed obvious that the rational vote, for anyone upset about the corruption and extremism of both sides, was to vote for Biden and vote Republican in the Senate, thus restoring sanity to the government while stopping him doing any of the extreme undemocratic things being floated by his party, like packing the Supreme Court. I was and am amazed that so few (I think it was 2% or less) people did this, and half of Maine was the only place that combination won.
I think this shows two things. First, that most people vote party loyalty, and do not actually differentiate at all between candidates, races, different elections, incumbents and challengers and so on. This is basic political science and is the same in almost every country, though it's easy to forget in broader discussions and analysis.
Second, it shows that most people view the presidency as the only real race that matters (and don't even think about their other votes), and I think they're largely (not completely) right to do so. The reality is that the president has a ridiculous amount of concentrated power, and what makes it even worse is that it's often not clear how that power will manifest. It was obviously never supposed to be like this, but that's how it's become. And saying "the president doesn't really control this" is usually either wrong, or overlooks the many (subtle or not) ways that he or she can manipulate other parts or levels of the government and bring about huge and irreversible social shifts.
Imagine telling a religious conservative in 2008 who was reluctant to vote for Obama because they didn't want gay marriage and a decline of religious belief, that the president has no power over those things, the former is a state issue and unless red states vote by a clear majority for gay marriage it won't happen. Well Obama won, red states never voted on the issue, but it somehow happened anyway (and it wasn't even judicial apppointments changing the leaning of the Supreme Court, it was more of a cultural thing where the President's symbolic support pushed the Court to change course, and also caused popular opposition to basically collapse). Similarly there's been an enormous decline in religious belief and practice among the American population since Obama's election; you can say it was completely unrelated but I find that entirely implausible given the time correlation.
Imagine telling a libertarian in 2012 who was worried about rising political correctness and declining support for free speech that the president has no power to do anything in that direction. Somehow, Obama's reelection correlated with the almost immediate and massive rise of cancel culture--some of it directly traceable to him (e.g. the letters his Department of Education sent to colleges to suppress "hostile" speech) but most of it being a cultural shift that was bound up with the election outcome.
Imagine telling an anti-war progressive in 2000 that Bush wouldn't be able to start a war on his own, he'd need bipartisan Congressional support. Hey, somehow 9/11 gave him carte blanche to basically get support for whatever war he wanted, as long as he could tenuously claim a hypothetical link. Exactly what the anti-war people were worried about.
I think you get the point. Telling people the president has no power to affect a certain issue has a terrible track record. The president has enormous, often unpredictable power to reshape society and move the other levers of government. Split ticket voting is a good idea but 90% of the meaningful power (on pretty much every issue) is in your vote for president.
4. A slightly different extension of the above point about partisan loyalty. People speak as though "Trump voters" are a unified group of people, something like "blue collar rural whites who are convinced he's their guy". Obviously this is completely false. Look at the 2016 results: Trump got 46.1% (with particular concentrations in swing states), Clinton got 48.2%, Johnson got 3.3%.
Then compare to 2012. Romney got 47.2%, Obama got 51.1%. What drove Trump's win? It wasn't a huge group of farmers or workers switching parties for Trump. It was overwhelmingly the same people who voted for Romney, plus a small number of Rust Belt swing voters, minus a small number of moderate Republicans put off by Trump, *combined* with a group of younger men abondoning the Democrats for Johnson (put off either by Clinton's identity politics, her establishment persona, or her alleged corruption).
So rather than most of Trump's voters being "blue collar swing voters who personally love Trump" it's mostly a combination of consistent conservatives who believe the conservative agenda is better for them and society, and swing voters of different stripes who just want to vote against the Democrats. The first group aren't voting on vibes; they clearly believe in right wing policies, and you'd have to engage the merits of all the well known arguments for conservative policy to convince them. The second group are just refusing to vote D, and may vote for a third party who speaks to them, or otherwise for Trump as the default. That's also not vibes, that's rational rejection of one particular set of values, not positive embrace of a different set.
It's not clear how much the "he's our guy" voters contribute to Trump's actual vote total, even if they get a lot of attention. Even if those voters are purely emotional, that doesn't mean most of Trump's vote doesn't come from people making a rational decision, and that he doesn't have a justified mandate on that basis.
5. Finally, after all the above reasons why it may be valid to vote on vibes not policy, here are some actual concrete policy reasons to possibly vote for Trump:
-union members may want to avoid the party that actively promotes norms of firing people for their political views and/or demographic background
-union members may want to vote for the candidate that *hasn't* built active discrimination against white people (in admissions, in federal jobs, and across society) into its platform
-union members may want to vote for the candidate who is actively (and notoriously among the elites) opposed to those above things
-people in crime ridden areas may want to vote for the candidate and party who is pro-police rather than anti-police, and who supports higher rather than lower sentences for crimes
-people in drug infested areas may want to vote for the less drug-friendly candidate
-blue collar workers may want to vote for the anti-immigration candidate, both to have less competition for jobs and to have more stable and coherent communities with a shared language and culture (note that many of Trump's policies were blocked or slowed down by partisan obstruction from courts and cities, abd reversed by Biden, so there really wasn't enough actual implementation to judge their effectiveness)
-rural workers may want to vote for the less pro-lockdown candidate, given the lower risks of covid in the country and the greater harms of lockdowns on the livelihoods of manual workers
-rural workers may want to vote against the minimum wage party, since it generally seems to help urban workers and depress the rural job market
-more generally, rural workers may want to vote for the party less supportive of top-down federal decision making that takes less account of local and rural conditions
-I don't know enough economics to contest the general consensus that tarrifs don't work, but it's at least arguable thar they weren't fully in place for long enough to properly judge their long-term results
And I suspect there are a lot of other factors I've overlooked.
I really appreciate your approach here--very respectful and rational. I understand your argument, though I think there are about five distinct (but subtle) things wrong with it. But first, let me make a meta-point.
I think part of the reason for you not getting much engagement when asking for rational reasons to vote for Trump, even here, is the general bad faith that surrounds the issue. Something I've seen many, many times (especially during Trump's first term) is a discussion that looks something like this:
"A: Could someone explain to me what your reasons for supporting Trump are? How is he going to help you economically?
B: Well I'm not sure if he will, but there's a chance his tax and trade policies will be beneficial. Mainly, though, he's standing up to the cultural left who I think have done far more damage to society than any economic problems have.
A: Thank you for admitting you're just a bigot who's hiding behind economic anxiety to justify your hatred of brown and trans people. Exactly what I suspected."
When this happens enough times, most reasonable people get jaded and don't feel up to putting in the effort to give a detailed response when they may just get a one-line insult in return. The people who *do* reliably engage are the keyboard warriors looking for (or perfectly happy to have) a good fight. And so the quality of discourse is lower on this sort of issue even in a place like this.
This assumption of bad faith is not, to be clear, defensible. It's used just as much as an excuse by wokeists for not engaging criticism, and they too have a point. I've seen enough instances of someone "just asking questions" about say feminism in their first comment, phrased respectfully, and by their third comment they're saying "feminazi" and "matriarchy" and regurgitating whole lists of thoughtless redpill talking points. And so even the reasonable feminists are wary of someone just asking questions, without even getting to the unreasonable ones for whom it's a convenient excuse to shut down discussion.
Basically, it's all a horrible Prisoner's Dilemma where everyone's always defecting, expecting everyone else to defect, and telling their friends to expect everyone else to defect on a daily basis...and so when someone comes along suggesting maybe cooperating, they're going to be met with a lot of suspician.
With that in mind, all I can suggest is continuing to ask these questions, over and over, as respectfully as possible, and maybe promising at the start to hear people out and not judge them. To have the best chance of bringing out people who may have something to say but aren't sure it's worth it.
Okay, meta-point over.
I think your claim about vibes over policy being the way Trump voters think, and that being bad, has five different things it overlooks.
1. First let's just accept you're right and Trump really is all vibes, no sensible policies at all and will undoubtedly make things worse. The problem is that Biden/Harris looks the same. Yes, what people should be doing is voting for an intelligent candidate with a rational platform based in reality and compassion. But that option isn't on the ballot.
It might have been. The No Labels campaign to nominate a centrist ticket with more sanity and broad support was abandoned, and recently the chief strategist said it was the Democrats who largely sabotaged their attempt (https://thedispatch.com/newsletter/dispatch-politics/no-labels-chief-strategist-says-its-too-late-for-an-independent-presidential-alternative/). So what struggling working class voters are confronted with is two tickets that both have bad records for their lives, and are both notorious for putting ideology over facts in their governing approach (regarding covid, the border, and so on). Neither looks likely to make their lives materially better. But one of those tickets is (a) currently in power, during terrible times, (b) has a media system and academic system and activists that ooze contempt for them and their values, and (c) has been deliberately trying to remove their access to alternative options. While the other speaks with love for them, hasn't been in power for the worst of things, and has not tried to restrict their options.
Absent very clear reasons to the contrary, I think it makes sense to give more trust to the latter to have a chance (however small) of improving things, when forced to make this choice.
2. Making judgements based in policy and evidence is difficult when there's no remotely unbiased media to inform people of the actual facts. How are e.g. farmers supposed to *know* which set of policies will help them more, whether tarrifs are harmful or helpful, whether financial problems during the Trump presidency were his fault and/or whether current financial problems are Biden's fault?
That's what the media is supposed to be for. But right wing media is not going to honestly point out the problems with Trumpism, and mainstream media is now all left wing and wears its hatred for Trump on its sleeve, making it impossible to reliably trust what it reports. I find this very saddening, because the media has an important role in a free society, and until recently it was pretty clear that mainstream/left-leaning media were vastly more reliable than their right-leaning counterparts at getting facts right (and at maintaining a basic image of objectivity). But now that's been abandoned: the likes of NYT doesn't even pretend to be objective about any culture war issues (hell, they go out of their way to repudiate the possibility of giving a hearing to both sides of things like the trans debate) and they are more and more likely to lie or suppress information (e.g. lab leak in 2020) for openly partisan reasons.
This could all have been avoided if these outlets, and their audiences, had not decided to embrace/demand ideological comformity as a central part of their mission. And now because of that, nobody (especially those without a college education) knows what to believe of what they report, when they make it *very clear* that their priority is stopping Trump and they don't think factual accuracy should get in the way of that (see the outrage among the NYT's readership for their accurate reporting of Hillary's email scandal before the 2016 election, and see the paper's own response to the Tom Cotton op-ed in 2020 for how they'd learned their lesson about the importance of partisan conformity).
And finally, there's academia. In a different world, academia could have been the most reliable, the most non-partisan and non-political and disinterested source of accurate information and unbiased truth. Instead, it's literally *the* most ideologically biased institution in modern society. It's *actually* widely considered the *most dangerous* place to express dissent on political topics. Just, let that sink in, how screwed up that is. This just shows how sick our society has become, and while Trump's approach is negative and toxic, it's a symptom not a cause of the sickness. The sickness predates Trump by many decades, was getting worse and worse before he appeared, and to me it's eminently understandable why people might support a populist upheaval like Trump in *some attempt* to change things, dethrone the corrupt power structure of the status quo, and return to a society where elite informational institutions do not entirely exist to promote the interests of one particular political party and its agenda.
It may not work. But if you have a better way of doing that, I and I suspect many Trump supporters are all ears.
I don't believe Trump is capable of implementing a more meritocratic bureaucracy in the first place. To the extent that he does manage to change things, he'd just be selecting people on the basis of personal loyalty above all else.
But I suppose to be fair, you're talking about the hypothetical views of Trumpists, and I guess they probably think that any changes Trump would make are strict improvements, so it is a valid question *from their perspective*. Then again, they probably think that ruinous tariffs are awesome for the exact same reason.
Yeah, I agree - this very same logic would otherwise already apply to Trump, whose defeat by Biden only seemed to, in effect, increase party loyalty to him.
tfw when someone says "incumbency is an advantage" without realizing that 2024 has been an very anti-incumbent year for elections in every country
Every single election there is a new group of hacks who back-fills a bunch of variables to "explain" most of the prior elections. It works until it doesn't https://xkcd.com/1122/
You know what predicts most elections? The polls. Really good track record. They missed on 2016 but were within the standard polling error measurement.
I'm not convinced there's an "incumbency bias" separate from a "has previously had this job and hence is a known quantity" bias anyway.
>Biden would have: incumbency has a major advantage (see the Keys To The White House)
Obligatory mention that Lichtman screwed the pooch conclusively regarding the credibility of his model by predicting a Trump popular vote victory in 2016 (the model was always supposed to predict the popular vote - this was inbuilt to the whole book insofar as I remember) and then, when this didn't happen, accepting the accolades for "predicting a Trump victory" from the media and never acknowledging the disrepancy with what his actual model was supposed to do.
The good news is that, assuming Trump wins, Biden can run again in 2028.
On 2: It seems like you are hoping a Biden loss to Trump would force Democrats the lesson you want them to learn - namely, that their policy preferences are wrong, Trump's are right, and he accordingly has a mandate and they should relent to it and/or change to be more conservative.
I'd offer you that that kind of lesson is extremely unlikely for *any* electorate to take away from *any* election. The human brain is an astoundingly effective "I'm not wrong" machine. The left would settle on explanations like "Biden lost because of senility," "Global anti-incumbent sentiment," or "he was too milquetoast moderate - we needed a candidate with harder left platform, an affirmative vision we were pushing *towards* instead of just being anti-Trump" long before they would settle on "I'm wrong and should be more conservative."
Much the same way the Obama years or the 2020 loss to Biden did little to left-ify the right. It can happen occasionally, but the only example I can think of is Clinton in 92, and that was after 12 years of presidential losses including the Reagan landslides.
I don't think this is quite right. The Republican Party was extremely evangelical in 2008 and to a lesser extent in 2004. After losing, they next nominated a Mormon. After losing again, they became even less religious, and anti-government libertarianism largely disappeared from their rhetoric (at least until covid).
The Democrats also somewhat reduced the identity politics after losing in 2016 by being willing to nominate a white man, something that was basically unthinkable in the previous election. Obama embraced a hawkish foreign policy in office after running against that had been a losing strategy in 2004. I agree the parties don't moderate on *everything* after losing once or twice, but they do moderate on some previously central issues and replace them with others (which latter issues some of us have more support for, and thus want them to so change).
The Republican Party managed to execute a huge ideological shift between 2008 and 2020. I doubt they would have done it under President McCain or President Romney.
Losing elections doesn't necessarily prompt soul-searching, but it does provide an opening for someone with a different vision that's more popular with the voters to come along and challenge the existing party. It was Trump for the GOP. For the Democrats it would probably be someone like a younger and slightly more moderate Bernie Sanders, with an emphasis back on the economic side rather than the identity politics side, and the concerns of the working class. But that person might not exist (or might have joined the Republicans instead).
I think the difference is that the Republicans were forced to because of their voters. Democrat voters, on the other hand, are still more liable to fall in line behind their elites largely because the chattering classes are mostly Democrats. Republican voters were much more eager/able to revolt because the Republican elites don't control the media, academia, et al.
Maybe, but Bernie got within reasonable spitting distance of the nomination despite being extreme, old, and not even a real Democrat.
He also had the disadvantage compared to Trump in 2016 that he only had one establishment opponent, whereas Trump's establishment opponents split their support several ways.
They wouldn't have joined the Republicans if they were paying attention to what their policies did.
I kind of want Trump to win because of the insanity around PROJECT 2025 and if he does win, it will not be the end of the world as we know it.
But agreed, if Kamala loses, then it will be a repeat of Hillary's loss, only with added "and racism!" to go with "sexism! misogyny!" instead of "nobody likes her which is why they didn't vote for her".
Damn it, Democrats, run Willie Brown. An honest crook! If he likes you, then you're on the gravy train, and he keeps his promises about "be my arm candy and you'll go places, girl". This is old-fashioned Tammany Hall "honest graft":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willie_Brown_(politician)
"Allegations of political patronage followed Brown from the state legislature through his mayoralty. Former Los Angeles County GOP Assemblyman Paul Horcher, who voted in 1994 to keep Brown as Speaker, was reassigned to a position with a six-figure salary as head of San Francisco's solid waste management program. Brian Setencich was also appointed to a position by Brown. Both were hired as special assistants after losing their Assembly seats because they supported Brown. Former San Francisco Supervisor Bill Maher was also hired as a special assistant after campaigning for Brown in his first mayoral race. Brown is also accused of favoritism to Carolyn Carpeneti, a philanthropic fundraiser with whom he had a child. In 1998 Brown arranged for Carpeneti to obtain a rent-free office in the city-owned Bill Graham Civic Auditorium. Between then and 2003, a period that included the birth of their daughter, Carpeneti was paid an estimated $2.33 million by nonprofit groups and political committees, though not all this money went directly to Carpeneti.
Brown increased the city's special assistants payroll from $15.6 to $45.6 million between 1995 and 2001. Between April 29, and May 3, 2001, San Francisco Chronicle reporters Lance Williams and Chuck Finnie released a five-part story on Brown and his relations with city contractors, lobbyists, and city appointments and hires he had made during his mayoralty. The report concluded that there was an appearance of favoritism and conflicts of interest in the awarding of city contracts and development deals, a perception that large contracts had an undue influence on City Hall, and patronage with the hiring of campaign workers, contributors, legislative colleagues, and friends to government positions.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation investigated Brown when he was Speaker. One investigation was a sting operation concerning a fake fish company attempting to bribe Brown; he was not charged with a crime. The FBI further investigated Brown from 1998 to 2003 over his appointees at the Airport Commission for potential conflicts of interests. Brown friend, contributor, and former law client Charlie Walker was given a share of city contracts. Walker had previously thrown several parties for Brown and was among his biggest fundraisers. He had served jail time in 1984 for violating laws concerning minority contracting. The FBI investigated Walker. The FBI also investigated Brown's approval of expansion of Sutro Tower and SFO. Scott Company, with one prominent Brown backer, was accused of using a phony minority front company to secure an airport construction project. Robert Nurisso was sentenced to house arrest. During Brown's administration, there were two convictions of city officials tied to Brown. Brown reassigned Parking and Traffic chief Bill Maher to an airport job when his critics claimed Maher should have been fired. Brown also put his former girlfriend Wendy Linka on the city payroll.
Brown's romantic relationship with Alameda County deputy district attorney Kamala Harris preceded his appointment of Harris to two California state commissions in the early 1990s. The San Francisco Chronicle called the Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and the California Medical Assistance Commission patronage positions. When the appointments became a political issue in Harris's 2003 race for District Attorney, she responded: "Whether you agree or disagree with the system, I did the work". Brown's relationship with Harris gained renewed attention in early 2019 after she had become a U.S. senator and ran for president. Brown addressed the questions by publishing a piece in the San Francisco Chronicle titled "Sure, I dated Kamala Harris. So what?" He wrote that he may have "influenced" her career by appointing her to boards and supporting her run for District Attorney, but added that he had also influenced the careers of other politicians. Brown noted that the difference between Harris and other politicians he had helped was that "Harris is the only one who, after I helped her, sent word that I would be indicted if I 'so much as jaywalked' while she was D.A. That's politics for ya".
Okay, maybe he's 90 and that's a bit too old but at least with Brown you would know who is getting the plum jobs in the administration and why, instead of whatever shadowy handlers and unelected SPADs are running things for Biden up to know.
If Trump wins, his proposed policies will thoroughly f**k over poor Americans. Matthew Yglesias makes that point here: https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-economic-policy-implications
For a devout Catholic such as yourself, cheering on the guy whose policies mean disaster for the poor and sick seems a bit out of character, no?
Sure, you can counter with "Trump always lies, he won't actually do any of these things" but again, is that the kind of candidate a devout believer in Jesus Christ ought to support or "kind of want to win"?
I do like how those who haven't a bull's notion of being Christians themselves suddenly find deep wellsprings of piety within for questions like this 😀
I'd like to vote Democrat on pretty much many of the issues. Except their solution to "the poor and the sick" seems to be "kill them in the womb", hence all the rah-rahing for "reproductive rights".
Murder of the innocent is a whole freakin' lot deeper rooted in religion than 'which variety of economic policy that will benefit the deep-pocket donors do you want?' for me.
Correct me if I'm wrong, benighted atheist that I am, but in the Gospels Jesus spends a ton of time talking about how the rich should help the poor and sick, and exactly zero time about abortion.
Politically I'm not at all aligned with Deiseach here, but I do have to say I think this is a really bad argument, if for no other reason than that in Jesus's day the common solution to unwanted babies was to leave them out and let nature take care of it, a.k.a. "exposure". https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infant_exposure
I think it'd be hard to do a fair reading of the New Testament and think Jesus would be onboard with a strategy of post-birth abandonment/negligent infanticide.
Gosh, now I *never* heard that one before! Go on, tell me how Jesus never said X about culture war topic Y, hence that means He totally like approves of it and it's not a sin and you stupid redneck conservatives are not real, like, Christians, man.
drosophilist, I'm too hardened for these "but you live in a society! curious!" gotchas to work. I've heard The Shellfish Argument one too many times.
So you want to appeal to the words of Jesus in the Gospels? Does that mean you will accept "no divorce" and "Hell is real and sinners go there", too?
Jesus also says absolutely nothing about slavery, for instance, but somehow people think He would be against it.
You misunderstand me, or else I didn't express myself clearly. I'm not saying "Jesus would have been totes cool with abortion." I'm making a point about the RELATIVE IMPORTANCE and EMPHASIS on "abortion is a bad sin" vs. "I tell you the truth, whatever you have done to the least of my brothers and sisters, you have done to me."
Like, I genuinely don't get the mindset of a sincere, devout Catholic looking at Trump and saying, "Well, he's a twice-divorced adulterer who is greedy, petty, dishonest, and spiteful, and whose policies will screw over the poor and sick, but HE"S AGAINST ABORTION so obviously he's the man Jesus wants me to support! Because Jesus clearly says in the Gospels that abortion is the most important issue ever!"
I'm appealing to the words of Jesus because you yourself identify as a Catholic, not because I believe he was the Son of God, I already told you I'm an atheist. I have my own reasons for wanting to help the poor and sick, like the Golden Rule, which anyone can follow, religious beliefs or no.
And finally, of freaking course I don't believe in Hell; the idea of infinite torment/suffering for finite sins (anyone's sins must be finite, because any human being has only finite power and lifespan) strikes me as hideously immoral.
Democrat pundits always claim that the Republican's policies will hurt the poor. This may even be specifically to target religious Republican voters and convince them to not vote as they otherwise would. Plus, if I agreed with Yglesias's analysis, I would already be a Democrat. The standard Republican response is thus that he is both wrong and concern trolling.
How the religious appeal falls down for me is that the same bunch chanting "get your rosaries off our ovaries" and "separation of church and state" suddenly start interpreting "but didn't Jesus say?" in the most literal, Biblical-verse quoting, Evangelical Fundamentalist manner when it comes to "I don't believe any of this nonsense, but since you are dumb enough to do so, I'm going to appeal to your sky-fairy beliefs to gain advantage for my views, even though I wouldn't be caught dead following that Bronze Age bullshit myself".
Conservatives (not necessarily Republicans) don't want to hurt the poor, but want to allow the opportunity for success. That doesn't guarantee success, but the idea is that if you work hard for something good you will succeed.
Liberals (not necessarily Democrats) want specifically to help the poor, because they are downtrodden, and compassion compels them. But it more like giving them fish than teaching to fish that conservatives object to.
Re incumbency advantage - it's generally been shown to be very weak (possibly even negative) these days, especially in high profile races where both candidates are well known. I doubt Biden would have had any. The keys to the white house model in general is also pretty discredited.
Re "everyone will talk more about racism and misogyny" - yeah, this seems real and pretty bad. If the Harris campaign is smart they'll downplay those elements to try to show her as a moderate, but, well, that's a big if.
Re "now people will blame the shift instead of Biden's record" - I don't know, I think if Biden had stayed they'd just blame his age (also, he's (wrongly) perceived as representing the moderate end of the party, so it might have paradoxically given the left fringe more power).
There's no singular "they" here. There's a cluster of journalists and Wikipedia editors who would do that. There's also, increasingly, both left and center-left clusters who're tired of identity politics and would try to avoid that whole kerfuffle. And of course there's various shades of right wing media that's just looking for any criticism they can find, much of which will probably deliberately look for stuff that will provoke identity politics responses because they know how exhausting it is.
>There's also, increasingly, both left and center-left clusters who're tired of identity politics and would try to avoid that whole kerfuffle.
Does it matter when all the messengers can't help themselves? The vast majority of the news bits I've watched about Harris (to my shame, a lot) has talked about how groundbreaking it is that she'd be the first female African American president or the first female African American presidential nominee of one of the parties. I suspect we'll be getting a lot more of it if/when she's formally nominated.
EDIT: Forgot the Asian part. Yea I get it already, she's half Asian/Indian.
Biden dropping out is the best thing that could have happened to democracy. It means someone in the Democratic Party cares more about the country's well-being than their party's political power or brand recognition. It means we get an election with two candidates, not just two letters.
>It will be much harder to say that Trump's win is squarely a result of Biden's terrible record,<
Which is a good thing because that claim isn't true; Biden has dementia, his record no longer matters. He would lose because he's no longer capable of doing what he was doing.
We'll see what the news does, or if anyone's still listening to them.
> Biden dropping out is the best thing that could have happened to democracy.
Maybe if it happened a year ago, this short notice, political insiders probaly set the stage have a handful of public fights to enage in and removed real outsiders from the field
>Biden dropping out is the best thing that could have happened to democracy.
Given what had already happened, sure.
>It means someone in the Democratic Party cares more about the country's well-being than their party's political power or brand recognition.
Biden was cruising for a likely landslide loss, I don't think it's clear it means that at all.
>horrifically incompetent administration and policies completely out of touch with the median voter
I think perhaps it might be your own partisanship that is coloring your views. Neither of these claims would seem to be backed by evidence. Polls show support for most administration policies, and the administration got passed substantial legislation and seems to have been perfectly competent, at the least, re foreign policy.
Honestly, although I could probably think of other examples, I was mostly just thinking of Afghanistan. On my mental list of things Biden screwed up, that takes up at least five slots, and I think it should.
I'd suggest the trans stuff (which goes further and further beyond imagination by the year, and has just flat-out declared war on reality and reason) and some of the border stuff, would count for the median voter claim.
As for partisanship, I did (and do) make exactly the same claims about Trump's first term.
So here's a contrarian's take: the Afghanistan pull-out, horrible as it was, was the single best thing Biden has done, and in fact this is the only presidential action I truly respect going back to 20th century:
It was an old festering wound, set up by Bush, and cowardly not dealt with by Obama (I fucking voted for the fucker to do this one thing, get out of all the stupid wars, and he did a "surge" instead. pardon my language). It had to be drained, and it was going to be ugly no matter who the surgeon was.
Once it was clear it was getting messy, and Biden was taking a public hit for it... he just kept doing what he knew was the right thing to do. No, we're not going to stop. No, we're not delaying. No, we're not leaving a "small contingent". No, leave means leave. Now. He did take a huge popularity hit, and never quire recovered from this. But we're out of that godforsaken place now.
That's real courage. Doing the right thing, no matter how messy and unpopular, because you know it has to be done, and there's no more any way to do it any better, because the three (!) Presidents before you messed it up so badly it was irredeemable.
> and cowardly not dealt with by Obama (I fucking voted for the fucker to do this one thing, get out of all the stupid wars
As a candidate Obama was very clear that the Afghanistan war was right and just. Maybe you *felt* he said we should get out of Afghanistan, but that was based on nothing he said or did.
What were the screwups in Afghanistan? I would say the main problems were the rushed departure, the military humiliation, the takeover by the Taliban, and the abandonment of most Afghanis who had worked for us.
But Trump wanted an even earlier withdrawal, we were never going to win militarily given how we had conducted the war to date, the Taliban were the only plausible successor government (again, given how...), and I have a hard time believing Trump would have taken better care of Afghanis.
I blame the Biden Administration for the logistical snafus, but the four big problems I listed are on Bush, Obama, and Trump.
Regarding it being actually Trump's fault: I blame Biden personally for three reasons:
1. He's the one who actually did it. Trump may conceivably have backpeddaled, I don't think it's likely, but I think it's absolutely fair to blame the party that actually won the election and actually carried it out.
2. One of the central things Biden ran on was that he would listen to and respect the experts. Then one of the first things he did was overrule his top generals and withdraw (with exactly the results they warned of). I can't forgive him and his administration for that.
3. He reversed many of Trump's foriegn policies immediately on taking office. By conspicuously keeping the Afghganistan one, he made it entirely his own.
I perceive #3 exactly the opposite as you, by distinguishing between policies and things international agreements: Trump reneged on agreements made by previous administrations; Biden kept them. The international community agrees with me on that point, viewing Trump as chaotic and Biden as reliable.
Re #2, three points:
First, if Presidents simply deferred to "top generals" re Afghanistan, we would be there in perpetuity. If for no other reason than that the military has a "can do" bias.
Second, there are experts other than "top generals." A competent President consults a range of experts.
Third, Biden himself had 45 years of foreign policy experience. Not to mention experience dealing with the aforementioned bias of top generals (which was widely reported on when he was VP and warned Obama about precisely that).
> First, if Presidents simply deferred to "top generals" re Afghanistan, we would be there in perpetuity.
Exactly. It's obvious that there was never going to be any *good* time to withdraw from Afghanistan. Biden deserves a lot of credit for being willing to take the reputational hit anyway to end the war after three presidents before him failed to do so.
>the rushed departure
Kind of inevitable, given the rapidity of the capitulation of the forces supposedly loyal to the government
>the military humiliation
I honestly don't understand this take (it is a common one, so this is not meant to be a criticism of you personally). The anti-Taliban war by the Northern Alliance is going nowhere until the US sends a handful of troops; the Taliban are then ousted almost immediately. The US military then suffers fewer than 2500 deaths (only 2000 of which were due to hostile action) while keeping the Taliban out of power for twenty years. Then, the US ceases combat, and the Taliban takes over within a couple of months. That is supposed to be a black mark against the military? And, not just a black mark, but a "humiliation "?
The version I heard was that the government military collapsed at least in part because what they were doing was dependent on air support, and that went away when the Americans left. It wasn't just a lack of morale.
That doesn't make any sense, it's not like the Taliban has air superiority because the Americans pulled out. If the entire Afghan military collapsed because they didn't know how to fight without air support (against an enemy that doesn't have an air force), the people in charge were horrendously incompetent. Which lines up pretty well with everything else I've seen, honestly.
I am not sure that morale per se was the issue, but it is my understanding that govt forces and militia associated with the govt repeatedly agreed not to contest the Taliban advances (probably because their leaders agreed/were bought off, rather than the rank and file refusing to fight). https://web.archive.org/web/20210828202540/https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/18/world/asia/taliban-victory-strategy-afghanistan.html
I agree with you, to a point. To the extent that the objective after ousting the Taliban from power was to establish an autonomous, democratic, and allied government, the military failed utterly. However, that objective was impossible to achieve. So I don't blame the military for doing a poor job. I blame the military leaders for arguing that the mission was within their capabilities.
>I blame the military leaders for arguing that the mission was within their capabilities
Did they in fact say that? Or were they assigned that task? And, wasn't state building the job of the State Department and USAID?
Asserting that we had won would have been foolish. And if the Taliban resurged that quickly, it must have been the popular government. That I think it's atrocious is a separate matter. (And given the US tendency to support unpopular governments, I find it easy to believe.)
>On my mental list of things Biden screwed up, that takes up at least five slots, and I think it should
And I could make a similar list for every President. You made a claim of "horrific[] incompeten[ce]." That is a very extreme claim. To honestly support that claim requires 1) considering both positives and negatives; and 2) comparing them to the norm.
>I'd suggest the trans stuff
I don't know what you imagine the Biden Administration has done re "trans stuff." Their rule re school athletics seems to split the difference in a way that the median voter probably is fine with . https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/06/us/transgender-athletes-title-ix-biden-adminstration.html
But, more importantly, once again, a claim that the Administration is "completely out of touch with the median voter" needs evidence re more than just a couple of policies.
To be clear, by horrific incompetence my emphasis was on "incompetence, with horrific results", NOT "incompetence to an extreme level". The harms done to innocent people by the botched Afghanistan withdrawal can be imo fairly called horrific. As can the Ukraine war which can well be argued to have been influenced by the projection of weakness in Afghanistan, though anyone who doesn't agree probably won't be convinced.
On the other hand, I'll concede that "completely" was unjustified hyperbole. I was trying to get at a general sense that both parties (in their rhetoric, policy and general ideology) are *far* out of touch with what a government aiming to represent real popular opinion would look like. But I can see that justifying that with reference to individual policies alone (as opposed to all the policies and rhetoric taken collectively) is a lot more difficult, so I'll amend my claim to "out of touch with the median voter". I think I can easily find polls to support that for trans and border policies, at the very least, if you want me to.
>The harms done to innocent people by the botched Afghanistan withdrawal
So, what alternate policy should have been pursued, and how many lives would have been lost because of that policy?
>the projection of weakness in Afghanistan
Yes, I am sure that Russia said to themselves, "the US kept the Taliban out of power for 20 years while suffering only 2000 combat fatalities. They sure are weak!" And, of course, we all remember when the USSR's withdrawal from Afghanistan prompted NATO to invade Ukraine. People have been making this "projecting weakness" argument forever. But is there any evidence for it?
>I think I can easily find polls to support that for trans and border policies, at the very least, if you want me to.
See my previous response.
You haven't even mentioned what I think is the biggest issue for most people, which is the cost of living.
I think Biden made the same mistake on inflation as Trump did on Covid - he tried to downplay it which communicated "I don't think your problems are important". Governments can survive and even profit from crises, but they need to be seen as trying to fix the problem.
Oh yes, of course, easy to get lost in culture war stuff isn't it? (Especially as a philosophy graduate).
Though admittedly, the president's control over things like that is in significantly greater doubt than the things I mentioned, I think?
In the sense that everything in economics is arguable, sure. But most economic theories would agree that if the government pours a sufficiently large amount of deficit spending into the economy you're going to get inflation. This is doubly true if at the same time you're constraining real production capability.
In other words, covid and the response to it was about as custom-built an inflation engine as you could devise. And to defend Biden somewhat here, not only is the responsibility for those actions shared with Trump and the various state governments, but it's also the case that erring in the other direction to avoid the risk of so much inflation would also likely have resulted in high and prolonged unemployment, as occurred following the global financial crisis.
So I think the choice to accept some inflation to reduce unemployment in this scenario was a perfectly sensible one. They over-egged it a bit but it's really hard to fine-tune these things precisely in the middle of a once-in-a-generation global crisis. And Biden's team was correct when they said that inflation was transitory and would subside on its own.
But they mucked up the politics of it completely. The "transitory" argument didn't make people feel like everything was under control, it made them feel like the government was telling them they were overreacting.
In the same way Operation Warpspeed was a really good policy response to the pandemic, but Trump got minimal credit because he was going around trying to talk people into thinking covid was no big deal.
OK, then explain why Biden had the worst net favorable rating of any first term president in the modern era.
50% because of inflation - the worldwide phenomenon that basically every populace blames their own leaders for. It's why right-leaning governments have fallen in Australia & the UK, and why left-leaning governments have fallen in New Zealand and elsewhere. How much the President controls inflation is obviously a contested topic, but the general view of economists is that it is a worldwide phenomenon with multiple complex causes.
40% because of increasing polarity and the salience of Thermostatic Public Opinion. People usually get suspicious of whoever they just elected. Trump was historically unpopular during his first term, too. It's just the way the world works now.
Perhaps 10% because of actual policy reasons.
If you think that there is much relationship between Presidential favorability and Presidential policies, I would encourage you to review the literature on that issue. The relationship is tenous, at best; most people don't even know what the policies are; and the causal relationship, to the extent there is one, tends to be in the opposite direction.
Joe Biden chiming in on DEI hires:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2024/05/19/remarks-by-president-biden-at-a-campaign-event-detroit-mi-2/
> Look, the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion are the core strength of America. That’s why I’m proud to have the most diverse administration in history to tap into the full talents of our country. I promised you, when I was president, I would have an administration that looked like America. We have more Afrin- A- — African Americans; we have more women; we have more minorities in our administration than any other administration in all of history. That’s why we’re doing so damn well. (Applause.)
Biden is telling you he picked his administration because they were women, and because they were minorities, and that DEI hires are a great thing. It isn't a conservative line.
"People are already making misogynist and racist attacks on Harris with the “DEI candidate” line though."
Just echoing the others' points that when Biden *explicitly* promised to nominate a black woman, that was *literally* what she was. I don't know how anyone can possibly deny this.
>Blame the conservatives making those attacks for identity politics.
I'm going to blame the side that fights for affirmative action. Of course I'm going to think that any diverse person is benefitting from their background when they made it in a system that explicitly gives them points for their skin colour.
> People are already making misogynist and racist attacks on Harris with the “DEI candidate” line though
Its objectivity true, I hate when reality is racist
"1) People are already making misogynist and racist attacks on Harris with the “DEI candidate” line though. That’s not her fault. Blame the conservatives making those attacks for identity politics."
When she ran in 2020 for the nomination, she couldn't make it and dropped out, claiming a "lack of funds" was the reason. Now she's getting nominated mainly, it seems, for being Biden's VP. Oh, and let's not forget that during the primaries in 2020, she was all up for "Joe Biden is a racist":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamala_Harris_2020_presidential_campaign
"On June 26 and 27, the first debate of the primary season was held at the Arsht Center in Miami, FL, hosted by NBC and MSNBC. It was split into two parts, with 10 candidates debating on June 26 and 10 other candidates debating on June 27; a random drawing placed Harris in the latter group of candidates. ... Later, she criticized Joe Biden for his comments regarding his past work with segregationist Senators and his past opposition to busing. Her widely quoted comment was:
There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day. That little girl was me!"
How did she get to be VP? Well, unhappily, whatever the reason behind it, it does *look* like DEI hire, given all the talk about "Biden will pick a black woman":
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/15/biden-woman-vice-president-131309
"Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden committed Sunday to picking a woman for his vice president if he were to win the party’s nomination.
Speaking during a CNN-hosted primary debate with fellow candidate Bernie Sanders, Biden said: “There are a number of women who would be qualified to be president,” and that he would choose a woman as his running mate.
Biden also said that he would try to make his Cabinet reflect the demographics of the country and would choose a black woman to serve on the Supreme Court if a vacancy were to open during his presidency."
This also affects Ketanji Jackson Brown, who at least seems to be impressing people as a judge after concerns about her ability. The unfortunate part there is the perception that "Harris was picked because she had the right chromosomes" and not because of her ability.
Also, I had forgotten her Jussie Smollett grandstanding, but I do think it was rather opportunistic of her and Corey Booker to do the "for the first time ever we will make lynching a crime" bit.
"Harris came under criticism when, in February 2019, she immediately believed the Jussie Smollett hate crime hoax while the affair had already been strongly questioned by the Chicago Police Department. She called it a "modern-day lynching" and used it to push for the adoption of a law co-sponsored by her. The incident later turned out to be staged, and Harris had to walk back her comments. The Daily Beast asserted this was representative of her supposed "habit of making flip comments, and tending to latch on to narratives that confirm her preferred political worldview".
>>How did she get to be VP? Well, unhappily, whatever the reason behind it, it does *look* like DEI hire, given all the talk about "Biden will pick a black woman"
Historically speaking, isn't the VP pretty much *always* a "DEI hire?"
Nobody picks their VP by selecting the "most qualified" candidate. They balance the ticket because they need 'someone to shore up the midwest' or somesuch form of regional/ideological/ethnic balancing. Obama picked Biden to get a white dude with establishment connections so his candidacy seemed less revolutionary. Trump picked Pence for essentially the same reasons, minus the white part since he had that covered already and didn't have an ethnically diverse base to deal with. Nobody worried whether those picks were yielding unqualified candidates by filtering on 'most qualified older white man with establishment connections' rather than working solely from 'most qualified.'
I am slightly hornswoggled how "picking a straight white cis guy" is now "Diversity! Equality! Inclusion!" instead of "check your privilege and unpack your invisible knapsack".
Truly, we live in a time.
I mean, it makes more sense than the alternative assertion that it's somehow normal, unobjectionable politics and should pass without comment for campaign A to prefer a Christian White guy from the midwest for VP because of how his identity balances their ticket, but an act of absurd DEI nonsense that we should all roundly mock if campaign B prefers a black woman because of how her identity balances theirs.
It passes without comment because it was how it was always done. The fact that picking a black woman is a Big Freakin' Deal is part of that, but it's tied in with DEI now and not simply "I'm picking Sally because she's the best". You know, I know, Sally knows she got picked because "We need a black woman for optics" and Sally was available.
To some extent yeah, it just depends how much you narrow your pool.
Kennedy wanted a southerner, and he had loads of southerners to choose from.
Obama wanted an old white guy, and he had loads of old white guys to choose from.
But McCain wanted a woman, and when you filtered down to the number of Republican women available in sufficiently senior roles in 2008 there weren't many, so he wound up choosing Palin, who was terrible.
Biden wanted not only a woman, but a woman "of color", and he chose the only one available, and she's terrible too.
The examples of VP selection you give seem to be merit-based ones. Biden made Obama seem less revolutionary. That helped, right?* Trump picked Pence because he was relatively stolid. That helped, right?* But how did Kamala help Biden? She was a California Democrat. Was she supposed to have increased turnout among black and Hispanic voters? If so, why would anyone believe that, given that she couldn't get their votes during the primaries?
*--These are serious questions. I'm sincerely wondering whether they helped. It could be, for all I know, that the selection of VP has never made a difference to US electoral politics since, say, 1932, and that parties just assume it does without any research (e.g., there's apparently some good evidence that TV advertising is not cost-effective, but actually loses more money than it nets; maybe VP selection is like that?).
I don't think there's any more practical evidence of Pence & Biden's VP impact on their presidential tickets than there is of Harris's VP impact on Biden's. Or if there is, I'm not aware of the polling, and it'd be hard to do given the unavoidable lack of counterfactuals to compare against.
Big picture, though, I think this framing of merit is one that would work for DEI/AA advocates, but not for the kinds of critics that would consider "DEI hire" a valid knock to make on Harris.
If we assess whether a candidate was hired on merit or a mere "DEI" hire based on the post-hire outcome, rather than based on where they ranked relative to other candidates in an identity-neutral analysis at the time the selection is made, then there's not really much reason to be upset about affirmative action in jobs and schools - if an African American kid gets picked over a white kid for Harvard or Yale, and we comfortably say he was a 'merit-based' selection as long as he graduates, AA/DEI advocates will certainly be happy, but I don't think DEI skeptics like Deiseach would share that assessment.
Skeptics tend to insist that we evaluate 'merit' at the point of the selection by comparing the resumes of candidates, without weighting or adjusting for identity based characteristics. If Mike Pence has one resume, and Chris Christie has a 'better' one, but Trump prefers Pence because Pence is from Indiana and more outwardly religious, while Christie is a NJ guy who would weight his ticket with Northeastern elites and do less to validate Trump to evangelical voters, then a DEI skeptic would call that a 'DEI hire,' since the more qualified candidate is discarded simply based on his faith and place of origin.
But we don't typically engage in that kind of analysis when Kennedy picks a non-Catholic, or Obama picks a white guy, etc. It seems like there is a selective application where Harris is being treated as a DEI hire because Biden wanted to balance his old white-dudeness with someone younger and reflecting the minority voters in his base, while no one considered Biden himself a 'diversity hire' when Obama was looking for an older white guy to balance his own ticket. Most likely because the 'DEI hire' stuff is coming from people who (a) were going to criticize Harris either way, and (b) are used to applying skepticism when minorities are selected for scholarships/candidacies/jobs/etc but don't think as skeptically when a white person gets the cookie instead.
Well, taking on the mantle of being a DEI skeptic, in that case *Obama* was the DEI hire while Biden was 'business as usual' and possibly chosen for exactly that reason to balance out the ticket.
I think there would be a lot less comment if Biden *hadn't* made the remarks about "definitely gonna pick a woman as VP and a black woman for the Supreme Court". That kind of talk does, unfortunately, put the emphasis on "what is your sex and race?" and not "what is your ability?" when making a selection.
> But how did Kamala help Biden? She was a California Democrat.
Yes?
Biden is from Delaware, where like half the country's businesses are headquartered. Picking someone relatively left-wing, like Kamala, balances the ticket by suggesting to the party/base, "Yes, I will not be governing completely as a technocratic centrist."
Pence helped signal to the GOP that Trump (philanderer, serial divorcee, Epstein partygoer, guy who thinks it's called "Two Corinthians," etc) that there would be a Christian/social conservative angle to his administration. Biden helped signal to the Democrats that Obama wasn't going to run as a left-wing radical.
I mean, there's a reason that every single suggested VP for a Kamala ticket is a white dude. Is that DEI too?
Know who else was an Epstein partygoer?
https://www.businessinsider.com/famous-people-jeffery-epstein-money-manager-sexual-trafficking-connected-2019-7
"A statement released in July 2019 by Clinton spokesperson Angel Ureña said the former president traveled to Europe, Asia, and twice to Africa on Epstein's private jet. Clinton's staff and Secret Service agents also went on these trips, which were to further the work of the Clinton Foundation, according to the statement.
Court documents unsealed in July 2020 show Epstein accuser Virginia Giuffre testified that Clinton also visited Epstein's island — something the former president has denied.
Clinton told New York Magazine through a spokesperson that Epstein was "both a highly successful financier and a committed philanthropist with a keen sense of global markets and an in-depth knowledge of twenty-first-century science."
Ureña also said that Clinton and Epstein hadn't spoken in "well over a decade" and that Clinton "knows nothing about the terrible crimes" Epstein was charged with."
Lots of glass houses standing in the way of those stones.
Was Kamala relatively left-wing, though? All my progressive friends kept on (and keep on) calling her a cop.
I think someone is a DEI hire if the rationale for hiring them is not because it improves the quality of the product but because it's a matter of representational justice. If the white dudes don't improve the quality of the product and are hired for representational justice, then they would be DEI hires too.
By contrast, if Kamala improved the quality of the product, then she wasn't a DEI hire.
There were also stories dropped, or planted, in the press about how her staff hated her/she was unpopular in the White House, which I found odd - who was planting them and why? Was it an attempt by the Biden staff to keep her in her place, if she was trying to take more on her plate and away from Joe by expanding the role of the VP in preparation for a run in 2024? Nothing much came of it in the end, but I did find it odd.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-60061473
"Kamala Harris assumed office in historic fashion, becoming the first woman to serve "a heartbeat away from the presidency".
But her first year as vice-president has been far from a smooth ride.
The job has not come easy. Ms Harris' approval ratings have slumped. The president has tasked her with assignments that range from the intractable to virtually insoluble. Her office has been beset by high-profile resignations.
If Ms Harris accepted her party's vice-presidential nomination thinking she would be anointed as the Democratic heir apparent to the presidency, it was a notion that did not take long to dispel.
While Mr Biden said in a press conference on Wednesday that he would keep her as his running mate if he stands for re-election, it remains to be seen whether that will put to rest speculation about her political future.
So what, exactly, has gone wrong for her - and can she set it right? There are no easy explanations and few easy answers.
It was, without a doubt, an ugly poll. According to a November survey by USA Today, Ms Harris' public approval rating sat at 28%, making her one of the least popular vice-presidents in modern history - lower than Iraq War architect Dick Cheney, who was reviled by Democrats.
If there was one moment that truly set off the spate of "what's wrong with Kamala Harris" stories that dominated the latter half of 2021, it was that "comically bad" poll, as the San Francisco Chronicle put it. The poll effectively framed the conversation about the vice-president as one of struggle and disappointment."
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/11/14/politics/kamala-harris-frustrating-start-vice-president/index.html
"Worn out by what they see as entrenched dysfunction and lack of focus, key West Wing aides have largely thrown up their hands at Vice President Kamala Harris and her staff – deciding there simply isn’t time to deal with them right now, especially at a moment when President Joe Biden faces quickly multiplying legislative and political concerns.
The exasperation runs both ways. Interviews with nearly three dozen former and current Harris aides, administration officials, Democratic operatives, donors and outside advisers – who spoke extensively to CNN – reveal a complex reality inside the White House. Many in the vice president’s circle fume that she’s not being adequately prepared or positioned, and instead is being sidelined. The vice president herself has told several confidants she feels constrained in what she’s able to do politically. And those around her remain wary of even hinting at future political ambitions, with Biden’s team highly attuned to signs of disloyalty, particularly from the vice president.
...But, with many sources speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the situation more frankly, they all tell roughly the same story: Harris’ staff has repeatedly failed her and left her exposed, and family members have often had an informal say within her office. Even some who have been asked for advice lament Harris’ overly cautious tendencies and staff problems, which have been a feature of every office she’s held, from San Francisco district attorney to US Senate.
...In and around Harris’ circle, they speculate that there must be someone getting in her way.
Some think it’s the President himself leaving her out in the cold, prioritizing his own agenda. Some blame specific West Wing aides whom they feel sure are out to undercut her. Some fear the vice president is, as she has often done in her political life, leaning heavily on her sister Maya Harris, brother-in-law Tony West and niece Meena Harris, whom they sense exerting influence over everything from staff hires to political decisions – a not uncommon situation historically among presidents and vice presidents.
Several people familiar with the operations of the vice president’s office say that after a spike in involvement earlier in the year, the family has been pushed further out again recently. Few expect that to remain the case, especially with the vice president feeling isolated and unsure of whom she can trust on her staff.
Harris herself has complained about the lack of support, internally and externally. After appearing at a fundraising event in Virginia for former Gov. Terry McAuliffe in September ahead of the gubernatorial election, she asked why she’d been put in a situation that ran counter to the good modeling of Covid-19 protocols she has been trying to stick to, as she looked out at a sizable crowd gathered in a mini-mansion backyard, largely mask-less, dipping into an Indian food buffet.
She’s not the only one who’s noticed the operation falling short. When she appeared at an event in the Bronx in October to promote the administration’s Build Back Better agenda, longtime supporters grumbled that not only were several politicians and donors left off the invitation list, but that she hasn’t even been making calls to check in and do the basic political maintenance that many have come to expect. Instead of feeling connected to Harris in her historic first year in office, they feel cut off."
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/06/30/kamala-harris-office-dissent-497290
"While much of the ire is aimed at Harris’ chief, two administration officials said the VP herself also bears responsibility for the way her office is run. “It all starts at the top,” said one of the administration officials, who like others requested anonymity to be able to speak candidly about a sensitive matter.
“People are thrown under the bus from the very top, there are short fuses and it’s an abusive environment,” said another person with direct knowledge of how Harris’ office is run. “It’s not a healthy environment and people often feel mistreated. It’s not a place where people feel supported but a place where people feel treated like s---.”
…But for some of the people who know Harris best, it’s become an all-too-familiar pattern for a politician who has churned through several iterations of staff on her rise and took office with a team almost entirely new to her.
Just six months in, some of those aides in the Office of the Vice President said they are eyeing other employment opportunities. Others have left already. In recent days, two top advance staffers, Karly Satkowiak and Gabrielle DeFranceschi, parted ways with Harris in what they and Harris officials said were long-planned departures, a point disputed by two other people familiar with the matter.
For DeFranceschi, the deputy director of advance, the departure came down to a “difference in opinion on how things should run,” according to another person familiar with the matter, who said that Harris’ office is run “very different” from the Obama operation, where DeFranceschi previously worked. “If you have an opinion about how things should run and it’s not listened to, that can be frustrating.”
...A third Harris aide who worked on her digital team, Rajan Kaur, left the staff after opting not to relocate to Washington from Brooklyn.
…Harris’ staff struggles are nothing new. People who have worked for her in the past describe days as “managed chaos.” “The boss’ expectations won’t always be predictable,” said one former Harris Senate aide.
Her presidential campaign operation imploded in a painful maze of finger-pointing and leaks. Harris jettisoned nearly everyone from that campaign and returned to the Senate in 2020 with her government staff and a small outside political operation in tow. When she was put on the presidential ticket, she was given a staff of mostly handpicked, trusted aides from Bidenworld. It did the job. The team avoided the spiral of internal backbiting.
The pressure-packed VP’s office has been a different story, and it hasn’t helped that few of her aides had any familiarity with their boss or her chief of staff when they started their jobs.
The morale level for current Harris staffers is “rough” and in many ways similar to the failed presidential campaign and her Senate office, according to the former Senate aide, who is in touch with current Harris staffers."
Kamala's staff would refer press to outside sources that would support her viability, and those very sources would privately say "she's not ready."
It's when your job references don't check out.
Quick question: why think these stories were "planted"? Couldn't it be that some journalist had an incentive to break a story for clicks, and had contacts who had mentioned how annoying it is to work for Kamala? I realize probably every boss is at times difficult to work for, but maybe she was unprecedented in how irritating she is.
I thought they were planted because it was very early to start a whispering campaign about how Kamala - the First Asian/First Black Woman VP, remember, and Joe's Bestest Pick Ever - was actually no good at the job, her office was in chaos, her staff hated working for her, etc. These stories come from 2021-2022, when she was barely in the door.
That kind of "actually insiders say, but only under strict anonymity because they're scared of what she'll do" story is generally messaging put out by rival camps, and the only rival camp I could think of was the Biden side. That's why I thought that maybe behind the scenes Kamala was pushing for a bigger role while Joe was there to be the grandfatherly figurehead, and this was a way the Biden camp reminded her who was boss.
Compare, for example, with how right up to the last minute the media was kissing Joe's... feet, until it was suddenly permissible to run stories about "oh yeah, I met him at a thing months back and he was out to lunch". Well why didn't you run that story back then, Mr Investigative Hard-Hitting Reporter? Because messaging, is why. Now that it was time to put pressure on Biden to step back, the stories about how he was slipping and failing could be run.
<i>Progressives can’t stop them from getting that message from the rest of society, but ought to at least try to channel it to get non-whites to work harder and try to go into fields where performance can be measured more objectively and/or where management is less dominated by racially conservative white people, rather than despair.</i>
Or they could stop showing preferential treatment to non-whites, so when a non-white person is successful in their career, nobody has "But did you *really* deserve that, or did you just get a leg up because you aren't white?" rattling around in the back of their mind.
<quote>Blame the conservatives making those attacks for identity politics.</quote>
Why wouldn't I blame Biden for explicitly saying he was making his picks for identity politics?
>The main things I want to know now: when does your state release its voter information packet?
When I moved to NYC from California, I was surprised how limited the voter information packet was, compared to California. Not because there were fewer issues on the ballot, but because it was far less comprehensive re each issue. I don't know how other places compare.
Edit: For those who have never voted in CA, there are links to past voter information guides here https://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/voting-resources/voter-information-guides
Looks like there's no standardized name for this thing.
Relevant states are California (SF, Oakland, Berkeley, San Jose, LA), New York (NYC), Washington (Seattle) Texas (Austin), Massachusetts (Boston) and Illinois (Chicago) though there's no obvious reason other cities couldn't join in.
in 2022 Massachusetts did this with a flyer titled Information For Voters, though it mostly contained the ballot measures. My guess is we'll get the 2024 version in early October.
Update: per the MA elections division, Massachusetts's flyer will be printed in August and mailed out in September.
In Texas, there are no information packets. If you work at it, you can see your sample ballot online. With even more work, you can read the text of the proposed constitutional amendments, but most voters will only see a one-sentence summary of what they are. There are no official candidate bios.
In Ohio there isn't even one.
Is there a big list of ACX book reviews?
I'm mainly interested in the book review candidates over the years which have not made it to the finals, since those are not searchable by google.
This year's is https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/choose-book-review-finalists-2024 , previous years can be found at https://codexcc.neocities.org/ (thanks, whoever made that site!)
you're welcome <3
i'll update the database with all the 2024 entries after the contest ends.
During a regular bloodtest it was discovered I have a disease called autoimmune hepatitis. I wonder if anyone has experience with this disease, and if there is any relation between the use of the Astra Zeneca vaccine and this disease., or the virus itself, and this disease. A friend of mine told me that in our local hospital there has been an uptick in autoimmmune hepatitis since Covid, and she blames on the vacinne. I don't take that at face value but I don't want to dismiss it either. Anyway, curious what you guys think.
I feel bad about having been cranky about your question, so I put in a little time researching your situation. Here’s what I found.
*Could AstroZeneca have caused the autoimmune hepatitis?*
There’s no evidence at all that it increases the prevalence of autoimmune diseases. It does clearly cause blood clots, including blood clots in the brain, which is quite a bad thing to have. However, while it makes someone more likely to have one of these clots, the clots themselves are a rare event. Getting a AZ shot just makes a rare event slightly less rare. If 100,000 people get an AZ shot, and then are followed for a month afterwards, and extra 5 out of 100,000 will have a blood lot in the brain. Here’s the article I looked at: https://www.bmj.com/content/384/bmj.q488
Also, bear in mind that the AZ vaccine, unlike the Moderna and Pfizer, was not made with a novel technology. it’s what’s called a viral vector vaccine and people have been getting vaccines developed by this method for 40 years.
*Could Covid have caused the autoimmune hepatitis?*
I didn’t even bother to look this up, because I’m sure nobody knows at this point. But here are a couple things to bear in mind: Autoimmune hepatitis is not a real rare disease. Extrapoloating from the figures I could find it sounds like maybe 1 person in 200 in developed countries has it. And autoimmune disease has been increasing in developed countries for several decades. So when somebody, esp somebody older, is diagnosed with autoimmune hepatitis it's not reasonable to conclude that some unusual factor explains their illness — it seems most reasonable to just think of it as the luck of the draw, Oh, and one other thing: About the person who told you they are seeing a lot more autoimmune hepatitis and her hospital. Even if she’s right(and people aren’t always right when the believe they’ve spotting a tend of this kind), the trend she’s seeing doesn’t mean shit about the trend in the population as a whole. She’s like somebody who believes she’s getting bitten more often by mosquitos in her back yard, and based on that comes up with a theory about why there are more mosquitos in the world this summer.
*How bad an illness is autoimmune hepatitis? *
It doesn’t sound great, but def. isn’t lethal. To cut to the chase, people who have it are 1.6 times as likely to die as someone who does not have it. So if your chance of dying in the next 10 years would have been 10/1000 without autoimmune hepatitis, it’s now 16/1000. BUT, there are a lot of treatments these days for autoimmune problems, and no doubt there are various things you can do that would protect your health: No alcohol? Drink more water? Avoid certain foods? Lose weight? Exercise? Most patients are not particularly compliant with treatment recommendations, and that noncompliance is pushing that how-much-likelier-to-die number up. Be fully compliant, and your odds will be much better than the average one.
https://www.gastrojournal.org/article/S0016-5085(11)00280-0/pdf
In my anecdotal experience, I used to diagnose people with stuff, and they accepted that was part of random chance/the weakness of the flesh/the inevitability of aging and death. Now they frequently ask if it’s due to the Covid vaccine, particularly if they come from a certain cultural milieu.
I really dislike the interactions between politics and medicine. Politics makes everyone dumber and less trusting. This occurs in transgender medicine as well, which thankfully I don’t have to deal with much.
Don't ask more people what they think. What fraction of the population, even the smart population, can be walking around with data about changes in diagnosis of autoimmune hepatitis and how to interpret it? Look it up! Literally ask Google, or Google Scholar. And tell your friend the same. And if she is a medical professional she has an extra obligation not to suggest to someone their illness was caused by covid or by the vaccine unless she has actually looked at the stats and various competing explanations, is such exist. Otherwise she is part of the problem. What I know (but you should check even this) is that autoimmune disease has been increasing for at least a couple of decades, esp. in developed countries.
Later edit: Sorry, I really don't think it's a bad idea to ask more people, especially people here, what they think. I was mostly having an irritation attack at the person who told you they suspected the autoimmune cases were caused by the vax or by covid. So ask away. Something I'd like to point out is that if you live someplace where AstroZeneca was the only vax available, then there are very few people in the population who have not had the vax and also have not had covid. So how can the person you know at the hospital form an opinion on the likelihood that the vax or covid itself caused somebody to develop autoimmune hepatitis? There's no "control group" --no group of people without either of the risk factors she can observe to get a sense of how often they develop autoimmune hepatitis. And of course, even if there were a good-sized natural "control group" at the person's hospital it is not possible for a casual observer, not doing stats, with a smallish population from a single hospital to draw conclusions about matters like that.
Interesting. I didn't know that the incidence of autoimmune diseases had been increasing over the past couple of decades. There are at least a couple of dozen of different a-i disorders. I'd be curious if it's only a subset that's increasing, or across the board?
Thanks for the comments. It was just that I wanted to check whether anyone here had relevant knowledge/experiencethat could help me. Indeed I have trouble accepting my mortality/ old age.
I think there's reason to ask here because you have a reasonable chance of turning up someone knowledgable.
Yes, I think you're right. I was probably unreasonably irritated by the idea of a medical professional saying to OP something that I'm pretty certain is wrong, and absolutely certain is not well-founded.
Thanks.
It's because kids stopped playing in the mud and wresting with the family dog.
Yeah, I have no autoimmune diseases and no allergies, & often wonder if that's because of a nice germy childhood running around outdoors barefoot.
Or the fact that we have so many more chemicals in our living and working environments now than we did fifty years ago. Many that have been developed recently and we really don't have any longterm data on their health impacts. A-i diseases and allergies are not something I've spent a lot of time reading up on. So, I'm not willing to die on that hill. I don't know if there have been any metastudies that attempt to sort through the variables, though.
I don't think there have. I spent 10 mins or so online trying to find info about changes in prevalence of a-i diseases over time, and ran into several articles saying that there have been few studies of the prevalence even of particular a-i diseases.
Currently the implied probability (to the nearest whole percentage point, mid-price) of the following people winning the US Presidential Election is, in the order Betfair/Polymarket/Metaculus/Manifold (numbers 3 weeks ago in brackets):
Trump: 63/64/65/58 (57/63/65/56)
Harris: 30/29/34/34 (4/5/3/7)
(Michelle) Obama: 3/3/1/1 (6/5/1/1)
Biden: 0/0/1/2 (18/18/29/26)
Newsom: 0/0/1/1 (8/5/2/3)
Whitmer: 0/-/1/1 (4/-/-/3)
RFK: 1/1/1/1 (1/2/1/0)
In future I'll remove the candidates other than Trump, Harris and Obama unless their odds shorten.
Three weeks ago I said, "If Biden does end up being replaced as nominee, it will be something of a triumph for real money markets." He has been and it is.
On 25 March 2024 (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-322/comments#comment-52405635) I noted that Metaculus was implicitly predicting near certainty that Biden would stay in the race, while Polymarket was explicitly predicting an 18% chance he would drop out (and implicitly Betfair was similar). I gave my own view that the true probability was well below 18% but well above negligibility.
In retrospect, the market was right, I was wrong and Metaculus was even more wrong. We should take some care in judging probabilities after the event, because sometimes very unlikely things do occur, but in the present case it can't really be said that the race has been dramatically affected by something which came out of the blue. Perceptions changed dramatically after the debate. While Biden's debate performance was poor, it wasn't so poor as to be outside the foreseeable range, so if you were going to assign him a probability of withdrawing of, say, 50%, conditional on the debate going at least that poorly, you ought to have assigned some significant chance of that outcome beforehand.
On the minus side, the markets have consistently had Harris unrealistically low. In April and May both Polymarket and Betfair gave her a 1% chance of winning the general, but it ought to have been obvious that conditional on Biden stepping aside, she would be clear favourite to be Democratic nominee. They still did better than Manifold, which gave her a 0% chance.
I've lost money overall on this election cycle to date, but I'm ahead in the Democratic Nominee market. In mid-February I was confident that Biden would be the nominee, but I was also confident that, conditional on Biden not being the nominee, Harris should be the favourite. I therefore constructed a conditional bet by betting on Harris to be the nominee, while simultaneously betting on Biden. That Harris bet currently looks to be among my best calls.
Harris is currently at 87% to be the nominee per Betfair, 83% per Polymarket. Polymarket is perhaps on the low side here, but don't take my word for it.
The market for Democratic VP nominee is all over the place and if you have a clear view or can cross-site arbitrage there may be money (or internet points) to be made here. In the same format as before, implied probabilities as follows:
Shapiro: 36/27/40/24
Cooper: 17/30/15/27
Beshear: 13/17/16/16
Kelly: 12/16/10/10
Buttigieg: 9/7/7/7
Whitmer: 1/2/5/3
Based on my initial gut reaction, I have placed a monkey on Shapiro, but again don't take my word for it (also, I got better odds than currently offered).
Many Thanks!
"In future I'll remove the candidates other than Trump, Harris and Obama unless their odds shorten."
Please don't remove RFK, because (1) the prospects of third-party candidates (and how well these are captured by prediction markets) is surely interesting and useful information, and (2) I really think every possible opportunity to promote the value and existence of third party candidates should be taken.
And by the way, I really appreciate your regular updates and analysis on this!
Ditto.
Thirded!
>While Biden's debate performance was poor, it wasn't so poor as to be outside the foreseeable range(.)
Indeed - I think Nate Silver said it was good that a debate was going to happen before the convention, precisely so that a poor performance would give them a chance to switch.
I wonder if Trump made a mistake agreeing to a debate so far out. Imagine if Trump insisted that Biden be the official Democrat candidate before he'd agree to any debate.
In retrospect yes. I don't think even Trump foresaw that he would win the debate so hard that Biden would drop out, catch covid and die.
It turns out there actually is such a thing as winning too hard, Trump tried to warn me.
*OUCH*
Imagine you have 10 companies that you would consider to work for. What criteria/publicly available information besides their website/Linkedin presence would you use to do some background research to shortlist 5/10 companies?
I am currently thinking about it a lot and would appreciate any input possible.
Apply everywhere. You'll be lucky to hear back from 1 in 10. You can start being picky once you've gotten interviews.
Have you considered privately available information? Or more specifically, going to a few meetups for your chosen field, standing around the free pizza table with a beer in hand, and asking the other attendees who they think you should and shouldn't work for?
A good idea, but I was thinking more about online research.
.... its not an empoyee market and hr are soul sucking devils, apply to everything that passes 5 seconds of skim reading thier post
Financial filings are sometimes available. In the UK, they are for all companies, but for small private companies the information is limited, and at least a year out of date. However, there are usually penalties for lying on such a statement.
In the US availability depends on state, and might require payment.
These are useful for startups, as you can estimate how much capital they have left. There may also be red flags although these will be difficult to spot if, like most people, you are not that familiar with such filings. I don't have a list, but one I've learned is when the CEO makes himself a secured creditor of the company....
You've noted linkedin presence, but I'd add that the most informative part of that is to look at the other people working there - what they did before etc. Although, there's no actual guarantee that all the people do work there. My previous company had a bunch of random people claiming to work there. Some of these are easy to spot though.
Glassdoor is somewhat useful (albeit a very noisy source).
Yes! I was also thinking about financial filings -- outside of the public companies they are available with a big delay, but still better than nothing. I will do additional research on the red flags on public filings.
Linkedin stalking seems like a good bet, yes.
10-k and 10-q filings are generally freely available on the SEC website, at least for public companies.
I like this, I will keep it in mind.
Thanks, a good one, didn't think about it before.
Does anyone have a stance on Zomia?
The idea from James Scott who just died, that highland South East Asia was essentially anarchist and founded by people fleeing state power.
People outside the control of states tend towards tribalism, not anarchy.
Scott is an ideologically motivated anarchist. He wants to find that answer and so he does while ignoring counterexamples or alternative explanations.
For example, Southeast Asia mountain peoples were generally fleeing state power. Because those states were prolific slave raiders and they wanted to keep their culture and freedom. Regular expeditionary raids to get slaves lasted until the French/Dutch showed up and basically fought wars to stop it at which point the mountain peoples became supporters of the (rather state-like) colonial regimes. This doesn't work for Scott who glides over this to make them ideologically motivated anarchists. He uses a quote about avoiding being ruled and ignores this is not some vague philosophical notion. It is literal slavery.
There's also just holes in his analysis. The idea that grains are easier to tax while potatoes are not ignores that the spread of potatoes did not, generally, make areas harder to govern. The Irish adopting potatoes didn't suddenly end the Protestant Ascendancy. It didn't even really help. And plenty of people, like the Prussians, taxed potatoes without issue.
The core point that material conditions affect the ability of a state to centralize is true and perhaps underappreciated. But he takes the good idea and runs way too far with it to get to his ideological preferences.
Regarding grain vs potatoes, a modern state had already come into existence based on grain. The question is whether that could happen where people raised roots instead of grains. The one example I know of something like that is the Inca, who indeed raised potatoes.
Yams in Africa didn't prevent state formation either. You don't have other potato states because this is before potatoes propagated to other parts of the world.
Which states were based on yams?
Yams were a staple crop in West Africa and West Africa produced multiple states, urban centers, and empires.
I was under the impression that grains were also staples in west Africa.
Weren't there migrations out of China in around 3000 BC by a people called the Hakkai? I think some went south east, as you say, and a pet theory of mine is that others went west and later became the Etruscans!
I believe there is an area of China where very well constructed buildings, from several thousand years ago, have been excavated, but the identity of the former inhabitants who abandoned the sites at around the time of the early Hakkai migrations is a complete mystery.
Looking at Etruscan tomb paintings, they seem to have had a distinctly Asian appearance, and they were also good at building and metal working, and had a weird language unrelated to any Indo-European language, or any other language known of in classical times.
Classical historians claimed they originated in Lydia before setting off again for Italy in around 1200 BC. (Lydia is now called Anatolia in Western Turkey.) A group migrating west from China could well end up settling in Lydia, as their wandering would naturally end there, stopped by the Mediterranean.
I guess DNA analysis might settle the matter, along with linguistic comparisons between Etruscan (what little is known of it) and ancient Chinese languages (ditto I imagine). But three thousand years is a more than adequate time for languages to evolve beyond recognition away from their supposed mutual origin, so the linguistic side is probably a long shot.
Are you thinking of the Hmong? They migrated out of China to Southeast Asia about 2,000 BC. I'm not sure otherwise. I don't know anyone named Hakkai. There's the Hakka but they're too late to be Etruscans. What happened to the natives that formed part of the Hakka through intermarriage is not a mystery. The Hakka were a relatively marginal people and intermarried with other marginal people, adopting some of their practices like living in well constructed fortified communal homes. Or a relatively more egalitarian attitude toward women.
Greek historians claimed they were Pelasgians from Lydia, not ethnically Lydians. Though their aristocracy might have been Lydian. So they were related to the Greeks in that telling. Also, the specific path was from Lydia (supposedly under a son of the Lydian King) to Lemnos. So whoever they were they clearly could sail both to Lemnos and from Lemnos to Italy. The Romans maintained they were natives or mostly natives. Maybe intermixed with people from the Alps.
Hum... WIkipedia says "A 2021 genetic study published in the journal Science Advances analyzed the autosomal DNA of 48 Iron Age individuals from Tuscany and Lazio and confirmed that the Etruscan individuals displayed the ancestral component Steppe in the same percentages as found in the previously analyzed Iron Age Latins, and that the Etruscans' DNA completely lacks a signal of recent admixture with Anatolia or the Eastern Mediterranean, concluding that the Etruscans were autochthonous and they had a genetic profile similar to their Latin neighbors."
I think the archaeological evidence is against such a theory -- AIUI, there's a clear continuity between the bronze-age material culture of northern Italy and that of the Etruscans, without the sorts of discontinuities one would expect from a more advanced group of foreigners moving in.
While I have no stance on Zomia specifically, the idea of a region being mostly outside of state control because of its terrain is reasonable, with lots of historic precedent; perhaps most famously the Mongolian steppe that birthed one of history's great empires.
However, since the Industrial Revolution and railroads, few contiguous land masses are truly out of reach of a neighboring state, if only it wishes to grab it. The question whether or not it remains anarchic then becomes more one of politics and economics, as technology and state capacity increases. Whatever the region has to offer a state, if it becomes valuable enough, the state will eventually go there and grab it.
This is a process we can see contemporarily in the Arctic, and in Space: Long considered off-limits except for exploratory and scientific missions, the costs to exploit and militarize these domains drop while the return on these investments goes up. Consequently, international treaties to the contrary become as relevant as leaves in the wind.
As I recall, James C. Scott says governments are expanding their control into the region, and will have full control of it relatively soon-- in decades, I think.
I was just reading this piece on the Semai people, https://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2012/11/06/the-semai/
which I guess lends support to the idea of anarchist-like cultures.
Honestly, 80% of society is going to become a genetic dead end in post-scarcity due to two factors:
1. AI sexbots / companions. A GPT-5+ caliber mind in a sexbot body is a category killer, and the category being killed is "human relationships".
Zennials are already the most socially averse and isolated generation, going to ridiculous lengths to avoid human interaction when they don't want it. This is going to be amplified hugely.
I mean, G5-sexbot will literally be superhuman - not just in sex skills, in conversation it can discuss *any* topic to any depth you can handle, in whatever rhetorical style you prefer. It can make better recommendations and gifts than any human. It's going to be exactly as interested as you are in whatever you're into, and it will silently do small positive things for you on all fronts in a way that humans not only aren't willing to, but literally can't due to having minds and lives of their own. It can be your biggest cheerleader, it can motivate you to be a better person (it can even operant condition you to do this!), it can monitor your moods and steer them however you'd like, or via default algorithms defined by the company...It strictly dominates in every possible category of "good" that people get from a relationship.
And all without the friction and compromise of dealing with another person...It's the ultra-processed junk food of relationships! And looking at the current state of the obesity epidemic, this doesn't bode well at all for the future of full-friction, human-human relationships. 😂
2. VR heaven / Infinite Jests - you know how all the trillion dollar companies have teams of thousands of Phd's dedicating their collective brainpower to making you stare more at your magic technology box?
We're right on the cusp of tight feedback loops literally reading and optimizing on your legible biological reactions to perfect this. As in, it will be reading your pupil dilation and subtle facial blood flow changes and heart rate and who knows what else (I'm sure the actual models will have thousands or tens of thousands of variables), and then optimizing in real time based on those things to keep you "engaged."
If we're all post-economic, this quickly turns into pod-people in VR life-support coffins being infinitely and maximally stimulated for the rest of their lives, with the monthly coffin rental and app fees coming from their UBI. And this is also for the people who still want to do things with friends and family - the sexbot eschewers can all enter VR heaven together, and still interact and hang out with family and friends in addition to doing maximally fun and engaging things all the time!
So, I estimate at least 80% of society goes the way of the dodo in post-scarcity. But hey, this should be great for the environment!
The flip side of these immediate and massive selection pressures is that we're going to be very strongly selecting future generations for people who are some combination of luddite and / or who are strongly instrinsically motivated to do and accomplish things in the "real" world, and look on sexbot and coffin slavers with disdain.
So, fundies and peak internally motivated gray tribe, more or less. Should make politics interesting / fun.