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!
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!