To bump it back a very small level, I'd say it's the result of a culture that celebrates meanness. In theory, it's only celebrated when directed at appropriate targets, but there are so many targets, and aim is so bad, and there's more than one faction.
But that just calls for the question, where did that culture come from? I think some is from politics, some is from odd corners of the old Internet that spread their culture memetically, and some is from nigh-universal 24-7 Internet access, unmediated by a higher authority that aspires to something better. Like "Lord of the Flies".
Maybe it's our social-ape nature coming out, as we unknowingly and unintentionally shift our social organizations from forms that restrain our base impulses, to forms that enable them.
Maybe it's always been like this, and previous generations merely did a better job of editing the historical record, to pretend otherwise to the future.
Maybe this is the driving force behind "decadence": we feel no external threat, so we seek enemies internally. Which destroys social institutions, and lasts until the next external threat that can't be dealt with by muddling through, at which point we pull together and succeed, or we fail (by not pulling together or simply not succeeding).
One of Aella's latest polls asked respondents if they've spend 5 minutes of more talking to a billionaire.
Some people are expressing surprise at how many people answer yes, but ...
a) Many of Aella's respondents work for technology companies
b) Technology companies tend to have relatively flat mangement structures, with CEO's/VPs who are strong believers in going and talking to people to find out what is going on
... so it's really not *that* unusual to find yourself needing to have a 5-10 min or so conversation with someone much more senior than yourself to e.g. get permission to do something you dont yourself have the authority to do; or do your short sales pitch that the company should invest in some thing you think they should do, etc.
Sometimes, you wlll be doing your sales pitch to someone who is in the billionaire class.
I work for a technology company. One that employs 6 people. Someone who can deal with navigating the social dyanmics of a huge company like Facebook must be so much lacking in autism, I wonder how can they even code. (I have seen someone lacking in autism asking the universe: "Why doesn't the computer do what I MEAN?")
I still call BS on her response rate. Yes if you work for Facebook there’s a chance you’ll meet Zuckerberg at some point but it shouldn’t count as a “5 minute conversation” if you just sit in a corner of a big meeting.
Generally, this seems to be a problem with surveying rare events. Situations that are "almost that" are much more frequent than situations that are "a central example of that", so your statistics will mostly reflect how many people interpreted "almost that" as "that".
Yeah sitting in a corner of a big meeting doesnt count.
I would count, you need to get Zuckerberg's sign-off on something, you go ask him, and he tells you you can go do the thing (or he tells you no ... still counts as having a conversation)
I'm thinking to myself "I totally cant tell that story ..even if I'm allowed to say it, every one of Scott's readers who works for Google will feel obliged to put their hands over their ears and claim they weren't listening when I told that story." I'm sure you guys can imagine something that ends up needimg a high level policy judgement.
Is there any evidence that the current U.S. Presidential polls are correcting for the "shy Trump voter" phenomenon that understated Trump's appeal in the last two elections?
No. I think this is going on: an aggressive extreme alt-right was fighting an aggressive extreme woke. Trump decided to lead the alt-right and his entire platform is on war footing extremists fighting against the other extremists. But in the meantime a centrist vibe shift happened on the left, the Harris campaign jumped on it, dropped the aggressivity and started emitting optimistic and peaceful vibes. So now Trump looks like the fool who is trying to fight something that is not there, and the Harris campaign look like the normal people who love everybody.
Pollsters are constantly attempting to identify and correct bias in their polls. It's probably a lot more complicated than just "shy Trump voter" though, since polls are already a lot more sophisticated than that (e.g. demographic reweighting).
That's one reason why it is hard to predict which way polling bias will go in any given election (e.g. there was no blue bias in 2022 or 2018).
Some polling groups are trying to correct for that, some are trying to overcorrect for that, and some are doing basically the same thing they did in 2016. Since we can see how far off they were in 2016, and maybe tease out correlations between that and other observables, we can apply a fudge factor.
As always, the best bet is almost certainly to look at Nate Silver's polling aggregates. Which, to be clear, is at https://www.natesilver.net , *not* anything associated with 538/fivethirtyeight, which is no longer associated with Nate Silver. And Nate got custody of the polling models in the divorce.
I doubt this is a thing at this point. In 2016 voting for Trump could be a socially awkward thing to admit, but now? Trump is the GOP, and GOP is Trump, he is thoroughly normalized as a politician. If anything, it may actually be a slight weakness for him at this point.
Some polling groups say that they are specifically correcting for that (though how successful is uncertain).
You can also consider that 2020 polling was significantly more accurate than 2016 polling, and that off-year polling seems to be better than the previous presidential polling.
My personal feeling is that it's better, but still not great. I think a +2-3 Democrat polling is probably closer to parity, but it's also within the margin of error so that's not saying too much controversial. You should watch out for national polls that don't talk about swing states as well, as a national poll being up a few percent for Democrats (and being 100% accurate) might still result in a Republican winning because of how the tally gets run up in very high Democrat states like California and New York, whereas Republicans win more electoral votes by small margins.
People do care about the national popular vote margin, and will reward you with clicks if you tell them about it. It's also a useful input to models that try to unskew polling across all the states to better predict the swing states.
Plus you'll want to poll them about Congressional elections, etc, and the marginal cost of asking about the Presidential is small.
This is the thread for the opening passages of books that do not exist.
"As we rolled up, I could tell at a glance that it had happened again, our fifth case in two months."
"Eventually, our hero will pass away away, leaving behind five children, twenty grand-children, and an estate large enough for a respectable college. A naval vessel and a park will be named after him. But all of that is yet to come."
"They call me Sam."
"First, there were millions. They became thousands, became dozens, became a handful, until there was one."
"Last year, almost five million containers arrived at the Port of Los Angeles, far too many to inspect in any detail."
"They didn't come in gleaming rocketships; they weren't preceded by enigmatic radio messages; there weren't even any flying saucers. They came from the inside out, and we didn't recognize what was happening until too late."
Anyway, if any of you want to read a book that does exist, I suggest you try "She Rides Shotgun," a tight little California noir that won the 2018 Edgar award for best first novel.
"I do not exist, but I'm told I'll be in a book, and while the book does not exist, this is how it would begin if it did."
"100 years into the weird bleak future, Lexorealist poet Zofranil farts while writing the last line, and sits ruminating about what modality to use to enfold it in the piece."
"Scott's transformation into Jewish mystic was exquisitely slow and subtle, and when he finally elected to describe the process he produced the finest, most nuanced, must effortlessly persuasive thing he had ever written."
How "opening passage" is an opening passage? How "book" is book? How "do not" is "do not"?
...ahem.
'C Mackenzie Terrence Reginald, Extension S4Z14B18256F3D16O1, Year 3: authorized, one 12-ounce bag salted pretzels.'
'The charred remains of the serving bot still sparked as Tanner crushed his empty pretzel bag into a pocket and crouched down. "Huh", he said, and the scribe bot dutifully recorded it.'
'The flash of light took D'rthgn by surprise; for a few seconds he just floated there, trying to make sense of it. It had been a long time since he'd last been summoned; he had started to wonder if humanity even existed anymore.'
EDIT: Forgot about this one.
'Now listen up you two. Your father will be home soon and I want you to finish your chores. Sally, I want you to wash the dishes, and Bobby, I want you to defeat the Dragons of the Eight Mountains to assemble the God Key and recover the Secret of Fire.'
Agreed on Red Harvest, though I also appreciate the opening paragraph of Raymond Chandler's _Red Wind_:
“There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.”
Redfield Jameson's Touched with Fire (9780684831831) is good, too, but it's about manic depressive illness. If you get around to the anecdotal and personal, Rachel Aviv's Strangers to Ourselves (9780374600846) and Eccentrics (0394565657) by David Weeks, a neuropsychologist, and Jamie James, a journalist, are entertaining and insightful, for different reasons.
I also have bipolar disorder, and while this is different than an informational website, I highly recommend the book An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison. Dr. Jamison is a psychiatrist who herself has bipolar disorder.
I dunno, I've done boatloads of 'em, of all types, but I'm still an Illusionist when it comes to the Hard Problem (ie the problem is like asking "what is phlogiston and how does it work?" and will dissolve on better understanding).
I'm a reasonably fit mid 30's male, where "reasonably fit" means "was highly fit through college and has managed to avoid obesity while strength and cardiovasicular ability has slowly been degrading over time". I'd like to start re-incorporating more physical exercise back into my life, and, as a chronic over-thinkiner, I'm wondering if anyone has a repository on the best evidence based health advice, preferably in a highly actionable format.
Obviously, just about any amount of exercise that I am likely to engage in is going to be better than my current (low but not zero) level.
But is there any (decent, half way reliable, not replication-crisis'd) evidence on how someone should prioritize their fitness effort if they _aren't_ going to go all the way to "this is the optimal amount"?
I've heard/read that strength pays dividends into old age in a lot of ways. Does that mean that, if you aren't going to put in enough time to maximize both cardio and strength, you should focus on strength?
To try and sum up my question: If I'm only going to dedicate say...90 minutes/ week (3 30 minute sessions) in relatively intense physical effort, am I likely to be best served by doing a mix of cardio and strength, all cardio, or all strength?
I'm imagining some equivalent to the Logical Increments website for building a PC. It basically says "If this is your budget, here is the most effective way to spend it for the most performant PC, and if you add $X, the thing you should improve first is Y".
So the translation would be (to completely makeup some hypothetical advice): "If you are only going to spend 10 minutes per week, you should do it with a brisk walk. A brisk walk is your best use of time up to a total of 30 minutes. Between 30 minutes and an hour, your best bet is a simple strength routine. From an hour to 90 minutes, do a strength routine up to an hour with the remainder filled with brisk walking. Between 90 and 180 minutes per week, do a complete strength + cardio regimen"
It obviously gets complicated by the fact that the best use of time is not just based on total time but also probably how large of blocks you can find/make. But hopefully I'm making sense in what it is I'm looking for.
I'm also perfectly willing to accept an answer of "This level of evidence based granular advice does not exist. Pick something and do it since something is better than nothing".
If you want evidence based stuff, checkout Barbell Medicine or Stronger By Science.
But "This level of evidence based granular advice does not exist. Pick something and do it since something is better than nothing" is the acceptable answer.
As someone else pointed out the American Heart Association recommends 150 minutes of moderate excursive each week; however "moderate" isn't very difficult, it's like a brisk walk. So doing 90 minutes of actual tough exercise per week plus trying to walk around as much as possible will be enough.
Not an answer to your question, but if your situation is "I have very little time for exercise", perhaps you should think about ways to spend a little *more* time exercising that would not cost you a lot.
As a specific example, I noticed that if something is in a walking distance of 30 minutes (using Google Maps to estimate this), it is probably better to walk there on foot than to use mass transit or a car, given the overhead of waiting for a bus or looking for a parking place. And from the place where I live, "30 minutes by feet" covers surprisingly many places. So this gives me extra walking time (which is a form of exercise) for virtually no cost.
Another example is installing a pull-up bar in my room's doorframe, so I can spontaneously do pull-ups whenever I remember to, with zero overhead (compared to going to a gym).
Anything is better than nothing but 150 minutes a week of moderate activity exercise is the minimum level recommended by the American Heart Association. They also recommend strength training twice a week.
What Performative Bafflement recommends sounds good. To stick with it, join a trainer-run gym such as Crossfit so you have a schedule and social "pressure" (quotation marks because it's actually fun once you get used to it) to go when you feel like you don't want to.
If you're a book person, I recommend Dan Lieberman's "Exercised" in this case. He's an anthropologist / physiologist who goes over why the various types of exercise are important and why, the effect size on all-cause-mortality of an additional 30/60/90 minutes per week, etc. He has great data, studies hunter gatherers, runs marathons against horses, all sorts of fun. It's also a great inspiration to keep exercising, once you see the extensively data-backed myriad benefits and HUGE effect sizes.
He (pretty boringly) ends at the same recommendations as the 2018 Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans for his "official" recommendation in the book (given he's a famous Harvard prof writing a book about this, I wouldn't be surprised if he had a hand in those guidelines).
The consensus is that both are important, and the recommendations are:
1. Do 150 minutes of moderate intensity or 75 minutes of vigorous intensity aerobic exercise per week.
2. Strength train in a way that hits every major muscle group 2x a week.
If you're going to do 90 min, here's what I would personally do with 90 min (speaking as somebody who's read several in-depth books on both lifting and endurance training, competed as a powerlifter for 5 years, have run triathlons, etc):
1. HIIT sprints 3x a week at 12 min each.
2. Cross-fit style weight training 3x a week for 20 min.
(First workout alternating back squat and bench 5 sets 10 reps at a weight you struggle to finish the 10th rep, second workout alternating deadlift and incline bench 5x10 same effort level, third workout alternating OHP and front squats 5x10, each of these should fit into 20 minutes).
My reasoning is HIIT is much more "benefit per minute" than any other type of cardio. That 12 minute session is worth 30-60 min of "regular" cardio.
Cross fit, because that way they'll also be cardio sessions, while hitting every major muscle group in only 20 min.
You can stack the HIIT and cross-fit workouts on the same days if you've got the stamina, and then you're at your 3x week. But if you can't stack in the same workout, the best thing about HIIT, is you can do sprints anywhere, all you need is yourself and shoes and a phone / stopwatch, you don't even need to go the gym, so you could do HIIT in the morning, then hit the gym in the afternoon or evening and then the stacking isn't so arduous.
Finally, the biggest and most life-changing thing for myself (and a couple of other people I've convinced) would be a treadmill desk for your daily work / internet browsing, and I would actually recommend that over exercising. Especially if you WFH, it's life changing. Just thought I'd throw that out there.
When you say 12 mins HIIT sprints, do you mean 12 mins of sprinting or 12 mins, some of which is sprinting intervals and some not? I know about HIIT, but there are a lot of versions of it, and would like to know which you are recommending. I currently do it informally by putting out maximum effort on the uphills in my bike ride to and from work. Ride's about 15 mins long, hills in each direction take may 30 secs each, so there's not enough sprinting in the mix.
I was specifically thinking of "12 min total, consisting of eight 30s all-out-sprints (4 min) and 1 min rest intervals between them (8 min)."
8 is a nice sweet spot for "number of intervals" in a session for most people, and ends in 12 min, which is a nice compliment to the 20 min weight session to get close to his ideal 30 min chunks.
You're right there's a bunch of HIIT styles - the particular one I'm mentioning is a little closer to REHIT, where you let your heart rate recover to zone 1/2 and try to hit zone 4 in your sprint, creating a series of needle-like heart rate spikes in your graph if you're tracking your heart rate. REHIT has some evidence that it has a little more cardiorespiratory benefits than traditional Tabata intervals, for example.
I think your method is great to keep in the mix of a regular commute, I do something similar anytime there's an elevator / escalator situation (sprint up the stairs for an opportunistic one-time interval). You're probably not getting the full benefits of dedicated HIIT sessions, because a lot of the benefits seem to come from that heart-rate sawtooth pattern, and from going deeper into your anaerobic reserves - but as an adjunct to steady physical activity, I think it's still a good idea overall and subscribe to it myself.
Thank you. I have an exercise bike, and am going to try some sessions of your formula HIIT. About you sprinting up the stairs: I heard a story about a mountaineer who had to live in NYC for a while and couldn't afford a gym. He had a rule of never take an elevator, and always push yourself to climb stairs at an aggressive pace. I believe either the place he was living or the one where he was working was double-digits flights up, so he got a lot of stairs in daily, and found when he returned to the mountains that he was still in condition.
As far as I could tell when I last checked it seems that both cardio and strength exercise provide long lasting benefits and that they seem to be somewhat independent (so doing both is better). The exact details don’t appear to matter much if at all. And that’s about as far as reliable research seems to go. As far as specifics are concerned I think you’ll have to go with less reliable sources and common sense.
However, 3x 30 minutes a week seems not enough for strength training to me. I think you’d need more like 2-3x 1h for that. With such a short budget just getting up and moving at all is what matters most.
I’d recommend to think less about dedicated time spent and more about how to incorporate more movement in your daily routines (aka do time stacking). E.g. taking the stairs instead of the elevator, doing some balancing while brushing your teeth, walking or taking the bicycle to get somewhere, going for a walk or a hike with friends/family, etc.
Some might take a bit longer, but you combine something you would’ve done, anyway, with your exercise. This makes it easier to build a routine you actually stick to.
Beyond that, as far as quality of life goes I think some mobility / posture work and some cardio gives a big bang for your buck and you can do it in very small time intervals and it doesn’t have to be in big blocks. So again you can do that during the day while waiting for something.
There are 2 points where most people fail at transitioning to being regular exercisers: Getting started, and sticking with their plan long enough for it to become habit. Unless you're sure that having an excellent, evidence-based regimen will make it easy to shift into being a regular exerciser and stick with it, my advice would be to start with the thing you're most likely to stick to, and worry later about fine-tuning it so it's optimal. Consider getting a trainer, beeminder, finding an exercise buddy, joining a hiking and backpacking club, kayaking, tennis, squash, exercise classes, etc. Pick the one that's most appealing & do that til your identify has changed back into "active person, in decent shape, likes exercise," then hunt for the ideal regimen.
My advice is get a good personal trainer. You really are not going to push yourself as hard as they will, I thought I was pushing myself before I started with a trainer and I was utterly exhausted after the first session.
from @sophfuji on Twitter, via our favorite gay ex-mormon furry, Tracing Woodgrains; Stanford has a class homework assignment to go on a date with someone, no alcohol, max $15 expenditure.
Passing quickly over the suggestion that Stanford studenfs need lessons on how to go on date, the reaction on Twitter seems to be: "have you seen how overpriced coffee shops are? I'm probably not getting coffee and a croissant for two people out of 15 bucks." The principle that it should be a relatively inexpensive date is, I think, a good one. But we're all going: man, coffee shops are expensive,
Trace says he had to do a similar exercize at BYU. Presumably, there's an additional difficulty if you're a mormon: you can't even have a coffee at the overpriced coffee shop.
Back when I was at university, my idea of a date was to take a walk in the nature or the city, and drink some Kofola afterwards. A girl who doesn't like this probably wouldn't be compatible with me anyway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kofola is a traditional Czechoslovakian soft drink; basically like cola but with 30% less sugar and no phosphoric acid.
My morning 16oz coffee and two bagels is $6.54, in Manhattan. Fifteen dollars is doable. And it is La Colombe coffee, so it isn't crap. But it is straight coffee, not a latte or what have you.
By a date, do they mean "someone you have romantic feelings for" or is it just "you and a friend or a classmate can do this together"?
I'd fail the 'date as romantic event' requirement, but I'm sure I could get a sibling to come with me to McDonalds to hit up the Eurosaver menu for €13.75 for two people!
The coffee shop isn't overpriced; your (and my and Stanford students' and the coffee shop owners') money is simply worth substantially less than it was a few years ago. The fact that anybody blames the coffee shop for this just serves to underscore how astonishingly clueless even "smart" people are about how money works.
Edit: I haven't looked into the Twitter discourse and don't care to, but it occurs to me that whoever designed the experiment *may* have picked $15 precisely because they knew that everybody's mind goes straight to "coffee shop!" at the suggestion of an inexpensive date, and they wanted to force people to be a little more creative than that.
I disagree, given what else you could do with that same $15. The same with the McDonalds comment, as I haven't found McDonalds to offer good value, whatever you may think of what they call food.
I truly hate to be a "not an argument" guy, but this is just you expressing a personal preference. That this preference is far from universal is amply demonstrated by the proliferation everywhere of coffee shops (and for that matter McDonalds, and on that one I share your preference for doing literally anything else with the money).
I suppose, then, that examples are in order. For $15, you could get a footlong Subway sandwich with a drink, and have change left over. I don't buy or drink coffee, but I know one can get a dozen McCafe K-cups for $10, or $7 when on sale. The fast food restaurants all have some kinds of deals ranging from $5 to $10 for meals; even Taco Bell, which has expensive ones for what you get, range to less than $12.
Yes, it's personal preference to actually spend the money however you want, and if you feel you get at least adequate value then that's your judgement, and yours to make. My personal preference isn't universal, but neither is it universally recognized that one must patronize coffee shops.
Nobody said that "one must patronize coffee shops." What I did point out was that coffee shops are very widely regarded as suitable places for an inexpensive, casual *date*. Those other places you mention....aren't.
Of course, one could try to be a pioneer in that regard, but it would be risky. And as I also pointed out way upthread, that may have been the point of the $15 cap. Set it at $30 and every student would lazily go for the obvious "pourover and pastries at a nice third wave coffee place."
I attended college at one of Stanford's peer institutions several decades ago and this would have been an unironically great idea then too. We all would have benefitted from it enormously (while of course making sardonic fun of the whole thing even as we secretly learned from and became happier from the doing of it).
Why doesn't SpaceX land its rockets on a floating platform in the middle of a big lake? Even if the rocket fell into the water, it wouldn't hurt it much since it would be freshwater. I've heard that salt water damages rockets really fast.
The lower risk of damage from debris is a major factor, as carateca points out. But actually, SpaceX seem to prefer landing their rockets on land when they can. The landings on the drone ship take place when the rocket doesn't have enough fuel (either because of the payload mass or because of the target orbit) to make it back to land. Use of a barge here can be quite effective, since it can position itself more or less freely in the ocean and so choose the spot that offers the best combination of fuel efficiency and sea/weather conditions. And, well, SpaceX seem pretty good at avoiding the rockets falling in the water, so the potential for damage is probably not a huge concern.
Though might depend on the size of the rocket.... my university's space flight society does some of their more ambitious launches over land in the US, because the US has bigger empty spaces not containing anyone who might be hit by a rocket than the UK does.
I guess when youre at Elon Musk level, the Nevada desert just isnt big enough.
Fun game (so I'm told) returning on a commercial flight when you've been responsible for fueling an experimental rocket launch. You see, the airlines have gas sniffers to detect explosives, and they are really very sensitive, and your clothing has been at a rocket launch site...
Related amusing incident. A guy I know buys some military surplus lithium batteries. Very cheap, good deal. He doesn't bother to look up what system they were originally part of. When he tries to tale them on a plane, the airline security people do look up the part numbers. Surface to air missile. Now, it turns out tthat comp9onents of a SAM are one of then things they real;ly, rea;;y wont let you take on a plane.
We're particularly interested in improving the experience for new users, and in order to do that, I'd like to get feedback on what it's currently like.
In particular, if you have some interest in forecasting or tracking personal predictions but haven't used Fatebook before, I'd like to have a short call in which you try using the site and we talk a bit about how it went.If you'd be down to try that, you can book a meeting with me here: https://calendly.com/forrest-weiswolf/15-minute-meeting
Hi, I'm a small-time SF author from Finland. You may be unfamiliar with me from such works as The Paperclip War novelette on AI, apocalypses, and unusually harsh game theory. https://waterdragonpublishing.com/product/paperclip-war/
Heh. I mean, that is literally sci-fi. In the classic sense - solving problems with applied science and engineering. Can you add something more than "just read Larry Niven, it is like that" ?
You're not classically wrong, though things change. And, of course, there's the "diversity" part where maybe somebody has their own weirdly interesting viewpoint; with several panelists, I'm sure we can get some comparative studies going. We'll also be covering how we consume fiction and how our focus there might, well, diverge, as they say, from the main.
Then there are the adjacent speculative fiction genres (fantasy, horror, magical realism, new weird and what-have-you) that are also topical for the Worldcon, and classically not AS territory to the same extent.
They cost around 300€, produce up to 800W, and typically consist of two solar panels of about 20 ft² each, one converter box and a couple of cables. You mount them on a sunny roof, on a balcony, or put them up in the garden. Every idiot can plug it in, into a normal power outlet. With power prices around 25 ct/kWh, they pay off in less than three years.
Reasons I can think of: The American power grid is not prepared for a consumer occasionally sending power back into the grid, and everything will burst into flames? Electric power is much cheaper for you, so amortization time is much longer? (No, US average is 18 ct/kWh, not so much less than here.) Neighbors will find it ugly or complain about reflections, and take you to court?
The American power grid is happily accepting that at scale right now. About 4.2 million US homes have individual solar power installations now, up from 3 million just four years ago and continuing to rise steadily. States in which homeowners are now paid for power they feed into the grid appear in every region, ranging across the political spectrum: Arizona, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Ohio, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, New Jersey, parts of Texas, Virginia. A dozen more states are now putting such programs into place.
Aside from the factors already mentioned, power prices aren't "around 25 ct/kWh" in the United States. It's a bit less than half that, on average. So the payoff is more like 6-7 years, which is probably beyond the time horizon of most consumers and comparable to that of other investments or efficiency hacks that don't involve betting your life on your ability to assess the safety of amateur electric power installation.
Also, I've got 7 kW of solar permanently and professionally installed on my roof, as do many of my neighbors, so why would we want your little 800 Watt system? And the Americans who aren't in a position to have solar panels permanently installed on their roofs, are mostly living in apartments or the like where they don't have access to install forty square feet of solar panels..
Still, cheaper electricity, plus tariffs on Chinese panels, makes it much less attractive.
Sure, lots of people here have much larger systems, too. They are great of course, but cost more like thousands, need to be installed professionally, and craftsmen are expensive (at least here). Pay-off should be much longer, and depends heavily on how much they pay for what you feed into the grid. "Bet your life" sounds overly dramatic, when you can just hang the panels on the south-facing balcony railing and plug it together.
Right now I'm in an American house that is literally in the middle of installing these, so you should probably replace "have those" with "have more of those"?
Probably it has something to do with EU regulators using a heavier hand to encourage these things?
"In the middle of installing" sounds like this is a larger system, plastering the whole roof? I was especially interested in the very small systems with only two panels. I guess they exist, but apparently aren't sold in hardware stores or supermarkets in large quantities, are they?
And yes, they are encouraged. The VAT was dropped to 0%, and lots of towns have been subsidizing them, so they reimburse part of the purchase price.
Which is not bad at all, mind you! It also depends on how much they pay for the power you feed into the grid. Or perhaps in a few years it could be worthwhile to add a storage battery to the mix.
Yeah, right now the inverters are connected in a way that won't power the house if the grid goes off (so they'll still use natural gas for that), but that's mostly because it's the most foolproof method. But with more attention and knowledge, there are other possible setups that would work better.
Why? They have enough deserts where the government can just install solar farms in a planned way. If there is a will. Germany just does not have any empty room for that, nothing comparable to the Nevada desert, for example. What we do have a lot of in Europe is those annoying pseudo-greens who think if you can generate a thousand gigawatt of clean energy at the cost of disturbing the mating season of 143 protected swamp dicknewts, then you should not do it...
Sure, but installing giant solar farms in the desert before even trying to produce solar energy closer to where people actually use it is destructive and stupid (not that this has stopped energy producers from installing giant solar farms in American deserts, or American government agencies from letting them do it).
Edit: upon closer reading of your comment, I now realize that you don't care how destructive it is. You are of course entitled to that opinion; however, that opinion is wrong and bad.
OK, so instead of putting up their own solar on their roof and enjoying a smaller electricity bill, people would rather buy shares of some solar farm in Nevada and pay their bills from the dividend?
And please don't draw the poor dicknewts into this. I was just wondering why those small solar systems don't exist in the US while they're ubiquitous here.
You say these systems "don't exist in the US." Are you implying that they are not available in the US and wanting to know why not, or are you implying that they are available in the US and wondering why Americans don't avail themselves of them?
It's 300W for 659$, much more expensive than here. So they do exist, and at such prices it's obvious they aren't so attractive. I wonder whether the price will fall in the next few years.
The link doesn't work for me as of this writing, but there's multiple safety risks to back-feeding power in this way:
* At home, it overrides fusing on the circuit. If your circuit is nominally rated for 16A, then a misbehaving device could draw 14A from the grid, not tripping the house fuse, and 14A from the solar panel on the same circuit. The combined 28A still heats household wring and would be a major fire risk.
* In the community, back-feeding the grid causes problems. It disables the operator's electrical safety systems for the same reasons as it can supply power at home, so if the power is cut for safety reasons (e.g. a line down) the lines might still pose a danger to electric workers or bystanders.
The right way to install such a system is to join it at in at the power box or main distribution panel, ahead of the house's own fusing, and with an automatic transfer switch to ensure that the solar powers disconnect if grid power does as well.
The way it works here is that the system needs the 50 Hz frequency from the grid. When that is missing, it shuts down immediately. Therefore it's safe to touch the "suicide cable" (the male plug connecting it into the outlet), and when the power is cut, it shuts down, too. People who are worried about it not shutting down fast enough in case of a short-circuit could add an RCD.
Your first point is somewhat valid. Old wirings should be checked for their capabilities. Luckily, the solar panel cannot provide the 14A from your example, because 800W / 230V is only about 3.5A (and that is only achieved in broad sunlight). Therefore, the risk is deemed not very high for reasonably modern house grids. But if you're worried about this, you could swap your 15A fuses for 12A fuses.
Your last sentence is what an electrician would indeed say. But thousands of people here have ignored that advice, and it seems no major catastrophe has happened so far.
> The way it works here is that the system needs the 50 Hz frequency from the grid. When that is missing, it shuts down immediately
On a combined system where power is supplied right alongside consumption, it's not straightforward to detect the frequency from "the grid." A large enough synchronous motor running on the circuit will maintain a 50HZ frequency for at least a fraction of a second thanks to its own intertia. Depending on the design, the inverter attached to the solar panel might be able to maintain that frequency, leading to a powered yet disconnected circuit.
> Luckily, the solar panel cannot provide the 14A from your example, because 800W / 230V is only about 3.5A (and that is only achieved in broad sunlight).
And if the resident says "saving a bit on my electricity bill is good, but I want to save more!" and thus buys four of them?
A major part of residential electrical safety is that – to the maximum extent practical – household wiring should fail safe by design rather than require that residents follow particular documented practices.
> But thousands of people here have ignored that advice, and it seems no major catastrophe has happened so far.
No "major" catastrophe is likely thanks to the small scale of things, but would you even hear about an individual line-worker injured thanks to mis-installed home solar panels?
I don't know. But Germans are among the most risk-averse and worrying people there are, so if such mini-solar systems were dangerous, perhaps it would make the news.
The limit for permit-free solar is 800W, so if the resident puts up four of these, it's illegal. And stupid, because he would give away a lot of surplus power for free. Larger systems need a permit, and of course a proper installation directly into the power box, as you wrote, and then you can receive something like 8 ct/kWh or so for the power you feed back.
I think there could be more red tape on sending power back that way, but price-wise, the US has increased tariffs on many Chinese goods, including solar panels (25% >>> 50% iirc).
I'd like to give a shout out to Bean and https://www.navalgazing.net/ , with honorable mention to John Schilling. Today I was able to answer 30 minutes of questions from an 8-year-old boy about naval warfare, starting with why a battleship was being used as a museum, moving on to the current dominance of aircraft carriers, Japanese strategy in WWII, Space Battleship Yamato, and including answers like "actually yes, that's basically what a torpedo is" and "I don't know if they do now, but they used to do that in WWII, and they were called 'torpedo bombers'". (Eventually the questions wandered into geology and engineering via the hypothesized use of lava as a weapon.)
Glad to be of service, and thank you for the kind words. I will now ponder the use of "lava bombers" in some future conflict. Though really that might be a better fit for conflicts a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
Don't forget lava monsters, which my kids are currently obsessed by!
Whether lava monsters would best be used as shock troops, special forces, or terminators, is a question best left to someone with more military nous than I.
Good find. ISTR the Yamato, mighty though it was, had a slight design flaw - Nobody could be on deck when the triple 18 inch guns fired, because the concussion from them was so appalling that anyone on deck would have been blown around like leaves and suffer perforated ear drums and lung injuries etc. So that meant the anti-aircraft gunners had to abandon their posts at regular intervals and scurry below decks, allowing the US torpedo plane attackers easier and safer access!
Not exactly. Muzzle blast was a serious issue for all battleships, but it isn't going to clear the entire deck. Yamato actually went further in trying to deal with this by giving some of the 25mm guns enclosed turrets to protect the gunners from blast. Pity they were using 25mm and bad fire control.
This conversation is making me itch to fire up World of Warships again.
Which my elder brother, a lifelong naval-history geek who could give you all a run for the money, scornfully spurned upon discovering that the game designers took historical liberties for the sake of gameplay and balance. An attitude which at one level I understand but really seemed a shame: to throw say the late-version Warspite into a hard turn in beautifully-rendered detail on a big-ass screen and land a perfect broadside on a frantically-fleeing cruiser which blasts it to bits from say 18,000 yards....is _it_ boys. Truly. Highly recommended.
>Which my elder brother, a lifelong naval-history geek who could give you all a run for the money, scornfully spurned upon discovering that the game designers took historical liberties for the sake of gameplay and balance.
See, I predicted this, and spurned it before. Given the issues World of Tanks has, I don't plan to play until a quarter of Sovietsii Soyuzes fail at the start of the game.
Also, bah, I don't need graphics in my naval games. That's madness. Instead, I have Rule the Waves, which has very little in the way of graphics, and also the best shipbuilder loop. Serious recommendation for your brother:
I'm moving to Berkeley! Looking for recommendations for things to do in the Bay Area, especially:
- Tourist destinations - museums, landmarks, etc. I'm particularly interested in local history, earth science, or engineering + technology.
- Micro-adventures. What is something that's *not* a tourist destination but is worth visiting? For example, a cool sculpture, a bus route with interesting things to look at, your favorite tree.
- Day to day stuff. Food/activities/places to hang out in the Berkeley area, especially near the UC Berkeley campus and in the North Berkeley/Gourmet Ghetto area
- Social dance. I've already found the contra dancing - what else is there?
Things that are transit-accessible from Berkeley are ideal, but I'm not fundamentally against using rideshares or even renting a car for the right activity.
The Marin County Civic Center is one of Frank Lloyd Wright's more underrated buildings. In Marin you might also be interested in the Bay Model museum in Sausalito.
The UC Botanical Gardens are excellent, as are the SF botanical gardens in Golden Gate Park.
When I had lived in Berkeley for a while I was teased for not knowing about the Thai Temple, Sunday buffet Thai food.
Honestly it’s mediocre Thai food (IMM is very good, if you want better food), but it’s kind of an enjoyable weird slice-of-life thing to do.
And it’s right down the block from Berkeley Bowl (East), which is a great place to buy produce (it’s not always cheaper than Trader Joe’s, but it’s almost always dramatically better quality/fresher).
Just don’t accidentally go around Thai New Year, which is 3x more crowded and somehow when I always annually get a hankering for the experience.
Another on my list would be the Pinball Museum in Alameda. Alameda is unfortunately a royal pain to get to by transit, but it’s got a cute small town feel and the Pinball Museum is really just… one or two hundred pinball machines you can play for hours after paying your entry fee. I guess only interesting if you like pinball!
First stop should be Sutro Baths: the ruin of an old (built 1894) swimming complex right at the tip of Land's End. It's historic and extremely beautiful. If you eat fish head to the other side of Golden Gate park after (quite a walk) to get a stellar burrito at Hook Fish Co.
The Cable Car Museum is cooler than it has any right to be. Lots of history of the development and preservation of the cable cars. Lots of cool purely mechanical tech that lets them operate. It's also actually the hub that keeps the cables moving so you can see the massive machinery that's dragging cable cars miles away along.
I'd also take the ferry over to Angel Island. A beautiful spot in the middle of the bay, it was SF/Oakland's version of Ellis Island, and the small museum that's basically preserved immigrant internment housing is a visceral experience.
In the category of museums cooler than they have any right to be, the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum. Delightfully weird, but with a large and impressive collection of ancient Egyptian artifacts well displayed, including a walk-through replica tomb that feels more real than anything seen in any incarnation of "The Mummy".
Also an entire floor devoted to alchemy, which has little to do with Egyptology but is a big deal for Rosicrucians. An elegant pseudoscience for a more civilized age.
Seconded on this one. The alchemy floor manages to never come down on the side of "this is a real thing" vs "this is interesting history", which is the second weirdest museum tonally I've been to in the last few years. (The weirdest is in Missouri.)
The Life Sciences building on campus used to have a cool display of antique microscopes (and perhaps other instruments) in the lobby near the library. Not sure if it is still there.
The Jeremiah O'Brien is excellent. Extremely charming, lots to see, reasonably priced. Pampanito is a normal fleet boat, with bad signage and a price that's way too high. Not saying don't go, but it's nothing out of the ordinary.
Hornet over in Alameda is quite nice. Lots of cool stuff to see.
The Maritime Museum ship collection was awful when I went in 2022. Lots of stuff closed, ships not in great shape, signage was bad. Actively disrecommend, and the National Park Service should be ashamed of itself.
The Eureka was definitely open when I was there in Oct 2021. I'm not sure about the Alma and Eppleton Hall, but I think they were open too. IIRC there were also at least a couple staff members there.
It's certainly weird that things would be so much worse in 2022 than in 2021, but knowing that Bean didn't see the same museum as me makes his anger at least a little bit more understandable.
Has anybody experienced something similar as the folowing? Any advice?
I find myself having a constant runny/stuffed nose inside of some houses/flats (but not others), particularly newer ones for some reason. I have a pollen and dust mite allergies but the pollen season is over and I don't think there is more dust in my new flat than in the previous one.
I've just spent a month in a friend's flat (who lives in a small apartment in a rather old housing block) and I had zero problems there. Then I returned back home (to a different city) to my new flat and I started experiencing that again. I had the same bed (and mattresses) in a different flat (also rather old) before moving and no problems there.
I don't think the new flat is particularly dusty (although I have no carpets, so perhaps the dust ends up in the air more?).
My suspicion is that it has something to do with humidity. Those old flats are not very well insulated so there is actually a lot of air circulation and they are drier. This new flat was just built a few months ago and the building is still somewhat wet (I need to ventilate constantly to keep the humidity acceptable).
I bought a humidity monitor and on wetter days the humidity gets over 60% inside (60% right now, 80% outside but if I don't ventilate, it can get to to 75% in a few days even if the flat is empty in the meantime). I don't know the exact humidity of those old flats but I know I had even worse problems in my ex-girlfriend's place which was very well-insulated and we had to regularly deal with water condensing on the windows from the inside during in winter.
Consider the possibility that it has something to do with carpets. I was having the same problem until I moved to an apartment that has hardwood floors and no carpets and pretty soon, my stuffed nose issues improved enormously. I think that carpets are just extremely hard to clean of allergens, or maybe they themselves just happen to sometimes be made out of materials that are allergens. I vacuumed the carpets in my previous apartment pretty often, but that seemed to do almost nothing compared to just living in a place that has no carpets at all.
You could consider running a dehumidifier for a while (monitoring it with equipment). If it helps immediately, might be the humidity itself bothering you. If it helps after some weeks, maybe an issue with dust mites or mold.
I had some problems like that after moving to a dustier and more humid country. I ended up buying an air purifier and a dehumidifier. Not sure if they're working or if I've just acclimatized, but they're pretty cheap, so I think it's worth a shot. And the dehumidifier definitely helps with mould, at the very least.
It's fairly common where I live. When you have, it just dusting isn't enough, you need special equipment (e.g. a vacuum that has a finer bag than a regular vacuum).
I do have a dust mite allergy. When there is a lot of dust visibly in the air I have the same symptoms. I guess I might want to buy a vacuum with a HEPA filter.
It still does not explain why this wasn't an issue in those old flats (no HEPA filters there either, also more carpets on the floor which the mites should like). But yesterday I did some more digging and it seems that the mites thrive in higher humidity which is more common in newer flats (better insulation and particularly the very new houses need some time to dry up after construction).
I guess I might go see an allergist to confirm. Thanks!
I read somewhere that people's allergies change over time. So maybe your dust mite allergy is gone? Or maybe, as you say, there are more of them in moist places. Extremely thorough cleaning helped, so you could do more of that, but it's a lot of work! What about getting allergy shots? My friend who has the mold allergy is also allergy to mulitiple kinds of pollen and various other things, and spent a lot of the year really uncomfortable, despite taking antihistamines and doing nasal rinses. She just finished a series of allergy shots, and her allergies are now all *much* weaker.
I had the same issues in some flats, but not in others. It was particularly bad in my old flat in my parents' house. Antihistaminika would help during those visits. (A test you could also make.) At some point my mother told me that she very thoroughly cleaned absolutely everything in the flat, and that actually helped. I have no problems in the flat since that time.
I am not sure what it is (or was), but mold spores were my main candidate, even before reading Eremolalos' answer. I am not sure that this fits well with the fact that the problem went away with the thorough cleaning. Perhaps humidity could also help carrying other stuff better. The flat in my case had a bathroom inside without windows and with only a small ventilator, so humidity would stay a long time after showering. That would fit your hypothesis.
I guess it is either the mould or the dust mites. I might try those antihistamines, maybe a vacuum with a HEPA filter and probably a visit to an allergist. thanks!
I think you should get allergy testing, then you'll know. You could, for instance, be allergic to mold spores. I know someone who is allergic to mold spores and hers are worse when it rains in the fall, because lots of mold grows on the fallen leaves.
I guess it is not a bad idea. I've been to one before but that was when I was a kid and never since then. I know I have dust mite allergy, cat allergy (sadly, cause I love cats ... though some cats are somehow better than others) and a mild pollen allergy (which seems to have gotten a lot better over the years). But maybe the dust mites are more active in higher humidity as well or maybe it is the mould spores you mention. Thanks!
Do you know if there was a pet in the apartment and if you are allergic? I am allergic to cats and dogs, and only discovered it after spending time in a home where a cat used to live.
I guess it is dust mites after all. They had a whole month all for themselves when I was away and the humidity inside was about 75% (apparently ideal for them). I would expect them not to have anything to eat (they eat dead skin and stuff like that ) when I was gone but I guess they don't need much.
The symptoms are the worst in the bed, which is why I drew that conclusion.
But I am surprised how much of an effect humidity can have (if it is humidity). I my friend's apartment I had no problems at all and she doesn't have any special hypoallergenic bedding or anything.
I will change all the bed linen (although I have to keep the mattresses) and if it helps then it has to be mites.
I guess that keeping humidity low (and maybe changing the mattresses for something hypoallergenic) might solve the problem. And I should also buy a robotic vacuum with a HEPA filter (robotic, cause I am too lazy to vacuum frequently enough).
My monthly wrap up of the best long form lectures, podcasts and articles continues.
This set includes an interview with an amateur plant biohacker, a study showing almost no correlation between soil and crop nutrient content, an deep analysis of human evolution in Sahul (modern day Australia and New Guinea), and the current tools for genetically engineering human babies.
What do you mean by content? And what qualifies as long-form? Honestly, a little more long-formed description of what you're talking about may be in order — just to lure in the eyeballs.
So, Umar Kremlev of the IBA refused to release the results of the tests that disqualified Imane Khelif (WaPo link below). What's interesting is that initially, the IBA claimed they tested Khelif twice, one year apart. And they continued to allow her to box after the first test. What gives with that? Kevin Drum had a nice summary of what we know and what we can surmise (below the WaPo link).
Mostly I feel sorry for her. She's randomly caught up in a cultural war through no fault of her own. Having intimate details of your medical health including the state of your genitals be discussed by so many people can't be all that fun.
I would've thought just checking your cells for the right pair of chromosomes would be enough! But apparently not.
"Sex verification can be substantially more complicated than checking whether a person's sex chromosome pair[a] is XX vs. XY, or comparing their levels of key sex hormones to distinct reference ranges, to determine an athlete's sex. This is due to variations in human biology where some people are not unambiguously female or male, not all cells in a person's body have the same genotype or the presence of other genetic abnormalities. These reasons, among others, led sporting bodies to abandon chromosome testing towards the end of the 20th century and use hormone testing instead. The downside of hormone testing, however, is that policies on hyperandrogenism (women with naturally higher testosterone) were required, which have sparked both public debate and legal battles."
Sure seems rough for women with naturally high testosterone.
Part of the problem is that olympic athletes are all freaks - if you selected out all athletes on the basis of being outside 1SD of (any marker related to performance), then you'd likely lose a huge chunk of your discipline right there.
This is even worse for female athletes - I recall seeing a paper that claimed that around 1/3 of elite female athletes are intersex, hyperandrogenous or similar.
"This is even worse for female athletes - I recall seeing a paper that claimed that around 1/3 of elite female athletes are intersex, hyperandrogenous or similar."
I'm honestly a little surprised that it's not higher...I don't watch much sports so when I look at pictures of professional athletes I always get a bit surprised at how feminine and conventionally attractive many of them seem to be...like obviously there's a general factor of fitness but it's still surprising to not have any tradeoffs obviously visible even at the elite level.
I think some sports reward 'raw' strength (I.e. total strength as opposed to power/weight ratio) more than others. Sprinting versus marathon, shotput vs skeet shoot, weight lifting vs. floor gymnastics. So that pulls the ratios closer to normal for androgenic traits. They're still freaks* along other axes, though.
* I should clarify that I mean "freaks" in the most positive way possible. These are people out at the ends of the bell curve, who are uniquely strange and beautiful because of it.
When her parents released the birth cert, why was it dated 2018 when she was 19? Note that Algeria does not allow legal gender change - so likely people get one certificate at birth for life.
With the world's eyes turned to the Paris Olympics, some athletes are also looking ahead by four years. They're seeking to introduce the Women's Decathlon to the Summer Olympics for the very first time, when the games are next held in Los Angeles in 2028.
For over a century, men have competed in the modern Decathlon, the marquee 10-event track and field contest. Its winner is often lauded as the World's Greatest Athlete.
But it was only beginning in 1984 that women were finally eligible to participate at the Olympic level in a similar but shorter contest, the 7-event Heptathlon.
Outside the Olympics, however, women athletes are actively competing in Decathlons. As a milestone, the first-ever Women's Decathlon World Championships is being held in Ohio in early August 2024, in parallel with the Paris Olympics.
Organizations like Heaven to the Yeah and Let Women Decathlon are spearheading the quest to bring the Women's Decathlon to the next Olympics. They offer multiple ways to support their efforts, including a public petition, themed merchandise and wine sales, and corporate sponsorships.
More (including links to the organizations above):
I agree it seems like a no brainer in terms of gender parity and am surprised this gap hasnt been closed when theres so much focus on parity overall
The heptathalon already includes throwing events, and the women perform behind specialists in the events by about the same gap as male decathletes, so the same balance is there.
The only thing I might speculate is that the current heptathletes themselves might be pissed off as it scrambles the events they have optimized for.
And yes, a switch from the heptathlon to decathlon would clearly be disruptive for some of the athletes training for the former. There may be some ways to mitigate that; among the most helpful would be the IOC committing, soon after the conclusion of the 2024 games, to holding the decathlon in 2028.
Women's sports brings out my worst opinions, but I cannot help, they seem true. First, in the US 63% watch men's sports and 3% women's sports. Everybody understands deep in their bones, that men's sports are something between simulated war and a dominance contest, which is why men's sports brings out the nationalistic side of people, like how Ireland finds it important to collect more medals than England, this is a message to London, the are Irish are tough, don't try to bully them. This is literally why Ancient Greece invented the Olympics as simulated war. And this is why few care about women's sports, it is basically a pointless thing from this angle. Women don't solve their conflicts this way.
So either the radical feminists or radical antifeminist redpillers are right. Either we despite all efforts live in a society that sees men as warriors and women as baby-makers and we made very little progress on this. Or we are biologically hardcoded to see men as warriors and women as baby-makers and equality is an impossible idea and we should not pursue it.
Or perhaps a third opportunity is that there is a small number of high T lesbian women (yes, there is a correlation), who think like men, compete like men, and very much want equality for themselves, but they are very different from most women. They are driving the equality thing, because they are masculine, ambitious, competition-oriented, but most women are not.
Same. As a mostly disinterested member of the general public I know of several champions through cultural osmosis but I've never heard of a decathlon champion. To me, it's a French sporting goods store chain.
Like, by all means let the women have fun and play that but it feels like a big overstatement of the sport's importance.
Plausible guess, but the United States has actually done well in the Olympic decalthlon competition:
1992 bronze
1996 gold
2000 bronze
2004 silver
2008 gold
2012 gold and silver
2016 gold
2020 4th place
I couldn’t come close to naming all of the Olympic sports, or even all of the ones where the United States wins medals on a regular basis. There are simply too many of them.
It used to be famous as the event The Athlete Formerly Known As Bruce Jenner won a spectacularly record-shattering gold medal in. Which I suppose makes it particularly appropriate to debate where women fit in to the decathalon.
I'm not sure I'm correctly understanding either of these two comments, myst_05 or John Schilling, so please feel free to clarify!
My post was about biological women getting an opportunity to compete in a parallel women's decathlon event, alongside the modern decathlon men's event that has been held since 1912. There are women already competing at a high level, in decathlon events held outside the Olympics, and they'd like to have that become an Olympic sport, as well.
Offering a women's decathlon would be even more central to the spirit of the original, modern Olympics than the various sports which have been added recently, like surfing, skateboarding, and breaking (aka break dancing). (No matter how cool and groovy it is to watch athletes great at these very modern sports, as well!)
Video about men's body image issues and the rise of the bodybuilder aesthetic. Not especially different from anything else on the subject, but I'm using it as a hook for a notion-- that extreme body demands for both men and women are actually anti-fertility. Sometimes people trying for optimal hotness take themselves out of the gene pool.
I'm wondering if we're seeing selection against a certain kind of gullibility.
Certainly a lot of men are trying to look like this. Gold’s Gym is representative. It hosted a few dozen weird hobbyists in the 1970s. Today it has 600 locations and 3 million members.
Sure, but it doesn't mean all these members, or even any sort of a plurality, are injecting steroids and other crap.
FWIW, an anecdatum: I've trained in many gyms around the US (and Europe, and Asia, but I digress), and never once encountered a freak like the ones in the ragebait video (have to agree with myst_05). And I've trained with some pretty strong guys, powerlifters, olympic lifters, etc.
I think it would need to be a pretty large effect to be worth discussing, in the context of the ~halving of the fertility rate since the 1960s in most western countries. I doubt it's in the top hundred factors that have contributed.
No, I'm not looking at the whole drop in the fertility rate, though one thing that might be going on is people wanting partners who meet artificial standards. I'm looking at the possibility of a differential drop for people who are easily influenced by media images.
Yeah, fair enough. But for any differential drop for people who are easily influenced by media images I would blame Sex and the City.
Girls of my generation used to watch Sex and the City in their early twenties and grew up thinking that there was no better fate than to be a brunching thirty-something single career woman blissfully dumping a new man every week. Don't worry, I'm sure that a handsome billionaire will show up to propose if you ever decide you're bored of being single.
Turns out that if you want to have kids you really want to be married by the time you're ~30, and if you want to have more than two kids you really want to be married by the time you're ~25.
Yeah, second this. Male fertility is bimodal (or rather, lopsided) anyways - about 60% have zero offspring, and the other 40% have the rest. So this is long-tail noise piled on top of noise piled on top of a 50% bijection.
I think that men's body standards are anti-fertility but women's generally aren't. For example, boob jobs or BBLs do not cause fertility issues. The degree of musculature very attractive women have still usually has enough fat that they can have healthy children. And some women are considered very attractive despite not being muscular at all. Plus being obese makes having children more dangerous specifically for women due to biological differences.
Meanwhile, men's body standards are generally based around being hyper-muscular to a degree that requires things like steroids or testosterone supplements. These are literally fertility suppressing: they make it harder to get women pregnant. It also requires so little body fat (to get those very defined muscles) that it can cause significant health issues.
That said, I think it's kind of a historical accident that that's the case. A few decades ago women were supposed to be so thin they looked almost anorexic and that was more anti-fertility than the male prettyboy punk aesthetic that was popular. People in general are just willing to sacrifice a lot for beauty standards.
Women in general have more body fat than men so men can get more defined safely. But you really shouldn't get too far below 10%. Women should also stay above their 15% minimum.
Eh. Look at the birth and abortion rates of Russia, who tend to be not vulnerable to this. Iran and Turkey have 1.5! There are many factors in declining birth rates. "Gender ideology" is more like a post-facto justification rather than a cause.
I'm not so sure the psychology here is connected to genetics in a way that biological evolution can work with. I suspect the selection will take place at the level of culture.
Can you walk through how you envision that working, if you've the time?
That is, I think I know what you mean by the latter part — cultures that don't encourage this will eventually outweigh those that do — but only if you posit that falling prey to "hm yes I SHOULD do this popular thing" has no systematic mental correlates, or that genes have no effect on personality, would this be beyond the ability of evolution to influence...
— (barring wild scenarios involving stuff like, I dunno, in-utero effects that are themselves uncorrelated with any alleles, or serendipitous equal-and-opposing SNPs, etc)
— and those are almost certainly not the case; so I think maybe the initial section of the comment isn't right...
...unless I'm totally missing something, which is very possible (keep falling asleep trying to write this comment; might go to bed after this, heh—)
Anyone following the Olympics womens' boxer controversy? It seems like quite the nuanced "scissor statement" where you lose hope in each side of humanity.
The left/liberals (even Destiny) claim there's no evidence Imane Khelif is anything but an XX female, which while "no [definitive] evidence" is technically true, the actual outcome probably isn't.
The right run the gamut of "he's 100% a man" or trans, which isn't true.
But in all likelihood it's another case of intersex, or DSD, where Imane has XY chromosome, male-range testosterone, but was raised from birth as a female and knows nothing else. There was a previous case like this in Caster Semenya with 5-ARD, XY chromosome, male testosterone, and a vagina.
Best evidence so far is that the Olympic IOC corrected their statement that "it wasn't a DSD case." to "it wasn't a trans case." Olympic current determination for their category is based on passport identification, and they don't seem to want to change that.
I have immense sympathy for the position these athletes are in, but I also believe the womens' athletic categories raison d'etre is specifically because of womens' ranges in things like testosterone, and an intersex situation that lands you in the XY / male testosterone should warrant them in the Mens' category. (which is essentially the more permissive open to anyone because of the sex-based athletic differences in most sports. The whole reason Women's exist is to carve out a category where they win.)
DSD has nothing to do with trans of course. One is a biological reality, the other is a feeling.
I personally don’t really care about female sports, particularly if a biological man is running in the female 100M and i can bet on it.
(£100 on the fine sturdy lady with the large chest and prominent Adam’s Apple, if you please).
However in a non clown show world we probably would uncontroversially discuss testosterone, muscle mass and genetics with regard to female boxing, in particular. Given the danger.
Right now trans activists are up in arms about the exact thing, perhaps the only thing, they should be circumspect about, concerning adults and sport. Boxing can kill you. Losing a race to the lady with the very deep voice won’t.
The day that a female boxer dies because the 220 pound trans woman pummels her isn’t going to be a good day for the trans movement, and by extension trans people in general.
But we live in a clown show world where trans activists are building their own grave, blinded as they are by absolutism.
Hot take: we should have a doped-up-the-wazoo category. Maybe not things that have long term deleterious effects, but wouldn’t it be fun to see what the human body can be pushed to if the human race applies all its collective ingenuity to the matter?
See World's Strongest Man competitions for what the human body can do when absolutely jacked on all manner of drugs. For any sport including weight classes or focusing on speed/technique, the results might not be as crazy as one may assume - the primary benefit of steroids is increased muscle mass, and that only goes so far, and can be counterproductive (e.g. a 300lb professional bodybuilder is not necessarily a good javelin thrower, and will certainly lose sprint races against people much smaller).
"I have immense sympathy for the position these athletes are in, but I also believe the womens' athletic categories raison d'etre is specifically because of womens' ranges in things like testosterone..."
This seems like special pleading to me. Athletes aren't a randomly selected subset of the population: they are specifically selected FOR exceptional athleticism. Unless you go completely blank-slate (in which case having women's categories would make no sense) the inescapable assumption is that ALL athletes competing at the Olympic levels are genetically gifted and abnormal in one way or the other. It could be rare mutations or karyotypes, or it could be an unusually high clustering of more mundane genetic factors but you are, once again, *specifically selecting* for a certain set of unusual genetic features.
To turn around and say "oh, but THESE unusual genetic features are disqualifying" is patently absurd. Not only does it require significantly invasive tests (can you think of any other job that would require you to get your genome sequenced?), but it's demonstrably making a problem where none existed before. Intersex conditions are not common, but they're A LOT more common than Olympic Athletes of any calibre. Never have I heard it suggested that any significant fraction of female Olympic Athletes are intersex, so one presumes it's hardly the stand-out advantage that you're making it. I suppose it's possible that many intersex Olympians have simply gone undetected, but in that case well...if it wasn't a problem that could even be *noticed* before, updating on this (highly dubious) case seems little short of farcical.
If you genuinely hold this position I think you should explain in concrete terms what, exactly, you think would be gained by the IOC poking around in athletes' DNA. What would be the benefit for the IOC, for the spectators, for the world at large? (Obviously some athletes would benefit by seeing their competitors disqualified, but that would be true of any arbitrary qualification criterion.)
'To turn around and say "oh, but THESE unusual genetic features are disqualifying" is patently absurd.'
Like what you quoted me said: THESE genetic features are literally the only reason the women's category exists. We make women's categories because XY men have a variety of physical advantages due to that XY. Almost everyone watching the Olympics around the world, from many cultures, understands this. We're not talking about "muscle size" categories, or "height" categories, we're talking about women's categories because that is the distinction people care about watching as a separate competition.
It's only since the 80s that it was even possible to know a woman was XY. Before DNA testing, if you had a vagina, they'd have to let you compete as a woman.
It's somewhat arbitrary which typically female features you consider essential for a woman. You might consider being XX to be the defining feature of being female (though very rarely people with XX can be phenotypically male), or you may consider it to be having a uterus, or female genitalia, or identifying as female, etc. We never clearly defined the women's category.
This comes back to the question of what we want from having a women's category. 99% of people are probably genetically not cut out to be a world champion boxer. Say we discover that there's a strong correlation between having the O+ blood type and developing strong muscles, to the point that people with O+ blood never win boxing competitions. Would that mean we should make a boxing category just for O+ people?
We have a women's category because people identify strongly with their gender. We probably wouldn't create an O+ blood type category in the above scenario because people don't identify strongly by their blood type. But with gender edge cases, it's not clear which group we identify the athlete as. Some women will see Khelif as a woman like themselves, and others won't. The boundaries of who people identify as belonging to a group has more to do with politics, psychology, and culture than any scientific definition.
There is no objective right answer for the edge cases, and as long as people identify with different group boundaries, we can't make everyone happy.
The other link says that in 10% or 20% of such cases, the victim can't produce SRY, and "the reason a male phenotype develops in these individuals is poorly understood".
In the majority case, the argument is available that the chromosome cannot be cleanly labeled "X" or "Y", though X inactivation does apply.
> Would that mean we should make a boxing category just for O+ people?
Why on earth not? We have categories for different weight, why not - if we decide we want to - for blood type?
We make up the categories; we can make the boundaries be wherever we want them to be. The key is to be explicit up front about requirements and decide the new rules calmly and deliberately, well in advance of the event to which they will apply; not retroactively in the middle of a media circus while panicking and crying.
Lack of interest, basically. People don't care much about their blood type. Many people don't even know theirs. I could have used a gene in the example instead of blood type.
People care a lot about gender and strongly identify with their gender.
Alternately, you could just project all the different criteria to a single axis, called 'advantage', and build your bins there.
Like, your current testosterone is so and so, that is +5kg, and estimated from a CT scan of your bones, your testosterone during puberty was that, this is another four kilograms to your weight category.
I think you should maybe spend a little bit more time reading about what congenital androgen insensitivity syndrome actually DOES before you confidently proffer such an opinion. My own knowledge of the biology is somewhat limited, but what you're saying here is plainly, obviously, egregiously oversimplified. If XY were the sole determining factor of everything you are claiming is relevant, than such intersex conditions *could not exist at all.*
As best I can tell, you're equivocating between "XY is the 'factual' way to determine biological sex" and "the XY karyotype confers massive physical advantages." The former is a definition and not subject to falsification. The latter is an *observation* about the world, which can be false as a matter of fact (or partially false, or subject to nuance and elaboration). If you want to hold up the former as your standard you need to abandon the notion that it's actually about controlling for athletic ability at all. If you want to hold up the latter as your standard you need to check if it's actually as universally true as you're trying to represent it.
(Spoiler: the answer is "no." We wouldn't be having this conversation at all if the answer were anything other than "no.")
In a farcical press conference yesterday, Umar Kremlev of the IBA failed to release the results of the tests that disqualified Imane. So far no evidence has been provided that she's an XY.
And the IBA is so corrupt that it makes FIFA blush. Why should we give any credence to this crap?
I agree IBA isn't completely reliable. However, given IOC has said "it's not a trans issue," retracted their statement "it's not a DSD issue," relies only on passport identification, and has nothing to verify it's not DSD, it makes you wonder the missing hole here. If it was IOC vs. IBA I'd trust the IOC. But IOC has not disputed DSD. Do you think it's more likely the IBA is completely fabricating an issue, or that they are disqualifying based on DSD that the IOC guidelines currently allow?
Why on Earth should they? They are in no way beholden to the IBA, they're free to set their own rules and standards and they don't have anything to gain by taking either position. If, as you say, they're relying on passport identification than *they don't know.* Which means you simply shouldn't update on what they say one way or the other.
All of which brings it down to a simple question: do you think the totally unsubstantiated word of a corrupt organization with ulterior motives is all by itself sufficient evidence to noticeably shift your prior? Because that's literally the only thing you have here.
Emphatically yes. The organization may be corrupt, but when they say "these athletes sre male", that should definitely be enough reason to demand a definitive test. That the IOC withdraws to a position of, "they were raised female, have a female passport and have competed as females, and that's good enough for us" in a full-contact combat sport is, frankly, pathetic and outrageous.
"that should be reason enough to demand a definitive test."
Now you're making unsupportable assumptions. There is NO SUCH THING as a definitive test for biological sex. Of course there is not. This *entire conversation* stems from the fact that there is not. There cannot be.
There cannot be a definitive test for biological sex because biological sex is not and never has been a perfect, absolute, platonic set of categories that perfectly partitions the space of humans into two and only two buckets with no exceptions or ambiguity. Now it is actually surprisingly *close* to such a perfect category: if you compare any of the several common definitions, I'd guess probably ~99.9% of humans will test as the same biological sex under all of them. But even if they are only a fraction of a percent of the human population, the exceptions and corner cases still demonstrably exist.
Now a lot of times those corner cases don't matter, but this whole conversation *starts* with the premise of "well, perhaps Khelif is one of the corner cases," so clearly this is not one of those times. When you say "demand and definitive test" you are assuming way *the entire problem.* Different people of good faith can disagree on what constitutes a "definitive test" where the corner cases are concerned: ultimately you'll have to pick one test or another to apply, which is exactly the issue.
Now for a competitive event run by a longstanding organization with an actual rule book, none of this presents a huge practical problem. You choose whatever standard you think best captures the actual criteria you're trying to impose, you write it into your rule book and you'll empower people to apply it (which, of course, might involve adjudicating unforeseen disagreements and ambiguities). To put it plainly, the IOC is free to set whatever standard IT wants[1] (not whatever standard YOU want, nor whatever standard the IBA wants) for determining who is eligible to compete and in what events. Competitors who don't like those standards are, of course, free to protest them, to air their grievances with the media or to refuse to compete.
I say this because every indication I've seen, every report I've read on the subject suggest that this is what the IOC has *already done.* They had standards. They applied those standards. Under those standards they determined Khelif was eligible. The IBA's claims about Khelif aren't even new information: they disqualified her over a year ago[2]. If the IOC was at all concerned that said disqualification indicated that Khelif wasn't in compliance with THEIR standards, they had plenty of time to look into it BEFORE she showed up in Paris, which would be the fair and even-handed way to handle something like that. And of course Khelif competed in the 2020 Olympics: nobody raised concerns then either. Now, if you have some information that the IOC *failed* in some way to correctly apply its own rules, please do share it and I'll update accordingly.
Regardless, once they have determined her eligibility under their rules, they're pretty much locked in. Nothing could possibly be less fair in a sporting competition than changing the rules *in the middle of an event.* Doing so would absolutely destroy the IOC's authority and credibility, and rightly so. If this event causes them to re-evaluate any part of their standards, they can make whatever changes they like in between this Olympics and 2026.
What you're suggesting (as far as I understand) basically amounts to "the IOC should throw out its own rules in this instance and adopt the IBA's rules instead." Which of course they will never and should never do. It seems as though a bunch of people see this as an opportunity to soap-box about what they think the "real" determinants of biological sex are, but nothing could be more irrelevant right now. Even if you're dead certain that you have The One and Only Correct Way to Determine Biological Sex, you can't retroject it into the rulebook in-use in 2024. Call for a future rule change if you believe it's important, but recognize the fundamental reality that here and now the question is settled.
[1] And yes, that includes the standard of "we'll designate other organizations which happen to answer the question for their own use, and then go with whatever they say."
[2] The fact that they released a new statement only after somebody else stirred up the controversy should make their entire position even less credible. It is very poor timing if their goal had anything to do with fairness, but (as we have seen) excellent timing if their main aim is political shit-stirring.
p.s. I think it's speaks very poorly of global human culture that this sort of debate need to happen at all. When you've painted yourself into a corner of *needing* to impose your own categories on reality, even in cases where reality is indifferent to them, clearly you've done something badly wrong somewhere.
You raise a couple of good points, but I think you miss the mark on a few.
Looking at the testing issue without all the political BS that has been wrapped around it: Yes, there are a small number of edge cases. Ideally, we'd have a test that conclusively says "m" or "f"; in reality, we have tests that agree for most individuals, but give different or ambiguous results for a couple of individuals. That would be a problem if we needed to make an "m or f"-classsification, but the two sexes are not symmetrical. "F" is the protected group, so what we need is "clearly f or not-clearly-f", and we can round the edge cases to "not-clearly-f".
I don't even think that Imane Khelif is such a complicated edge case - I would bet that one would find XY chromosomes and internal testes - but we don't know, and we won't find out anytime soon, because neither she nor the IBA seem willing to release the existing reports, and the IOC doesn't care.
Now you say, yes, the IOC is applying its own rules consistently. That may be true on one scale; on a different level, the IOC has published suggestions for the individual sports' governing bodies that state that gender determination should prioritize the safety of athletes and assure that no one has an unfair advantage. Classifying boxers (!) by "if the passport says she's a woman, that's good enough for us" clearly does neither.
Now, when faced with public pressure due to a situation that is widely and rightfully perceived as fucked up, an organization could say "oh, there may be an unforeseen problem in our ruleset, let us understand the situation and find a remedy for now or for next time" - that would indicate blatant incompetence, since this topic has been discussed to death in last two years, but at least it would show a willingness to improve. Or the organisation could say, "everything's working as intended, nothing to see here, move one", which would indicate they are corrupt and evil and don't give a fuck.
To be clear—the only suggestion that Khelif is intersex is a claim from the International Boxing Association, a Russian organization that got banned from the Olympics due to alleged corruption and cheating. The tests that indicate she is intersex have not been released.
Whether or not you think intersex athletes of various types should be allowed to compete in women's sports, there are two positions that I think are ridiculous to disagree with:
1) Everyone in a sport should be held to the same criteria for inclusion. If Khelif is intersex, and she is banned, every other boxer must submit to a genetic test before they can compete.
2) We should rely on actual data, not rumor and hearsay. The IBA must release their genetic test results before anyone can take their claim of it seriously, and the Olympic committee should conduct their own test to verify its accuracy before banning anyone.
> 1) Everyone in a sport should be held to the same criteria for inclusion. If Khelif is intersex, and she is banned, every other boxer must submit to a genetic test before they can compete.
But it hasn't always been done in the same way. Khelif would definitely have passed under some standards. It's unclear whether she would have passed under others (as it depends on private information that is, frankly, none of our business).
- The IBA claims they can't release the tests because they're private medical information. No idea what jurisdiction demands that, but medical confidentiality is a common rule.
- The IOC is clear that they don't care about DSD athletes. If it says female in the passport, you can compete in the women's events as far as the IOC is concerned. This is a terrible rule IMHO.
Obviously your comment is absurd. But I like the idea of taking the implied test literally.
Instead of going by chromosomes or testosterone levels or plumbing, from now on, a panel of Olympic judges will look at someone (fully clothed), and decide whether they look girly enough to be considered female for the women's section of the Olympics.
When you're not arguing on the net, I think you also know that the physique of people with high and low testosterone are very different and easily recognized by us humans.
Ah yes, the very highly scientific method of eyeballing someone and comparing them to your preconceived notions of what [category] looks like. Perhaps you should reread point 2 with an emphasis on the phrase "actual data."
> 1) Everyone in a sport should be held to the same criteria for inclusion. If Khelif is intersex, and she is banned, every other boxer must submit to a genetic test before they can compete.
A testosterone test would probably suffice -- this is of course already done and not considered too invasive?
IIRC the issue with that is that men and women have overlapping testosterone ranges, so there's no line that cleanly divides women from men without edge cases. Set the bar low enough to catch all XY women and you'll end up putting some XX women into the men's division, and the other way around if you set it higher.
I think that you do not recall correctly -- normal male testosterone levels are about 700 ng/dL; normal females are more like 25. While certainly there is some range there, <100 would indicate a serious medical problem in an Olympic age male, and >100 would be fairly unheard of in an XX female.
Approximately 25% of elite male athletes tested in this paper (https://clindiabetesendo.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40842-017-0050-3) have testosterone levels under 10nmol/l, the (perhaps arbitrary) higher limit for female athletes used by some sports bodies. Some have extremely low levels, certainly overlapping with the female range.
This would certainly be better than any standard that currently exists.
My only criticism is that a person's testosterone levels presumably fluctuate somewhat, but aren't subject to the same ease of measurement and small manipulation that weight is. Ideally you'd want to use something like a rolling average starting well before the competition, so boxers less likely to flip-flop between categories.
That is a problem with these sorts of qualifications. I know wrestlers in particular can damage their bodies and develop bad eating habits due to trying to get into particular weight classes. Clearly, if there were a one-time T measurement, people would be doing far worse things to themselves.
Maybe some form of averaging multiple measurements over time would be better?
Agreed. I think if the criteria are sufficiently load-bearing, trying to game them in a long-term sense would be counterproductive: shifting the measure will also noticeably shift the target (athletic ability). But it's much more plausible that people could shift the single day-of measurement without harming their overall ability much.
Also from an event-scheduling perspective, it seem pretty crucial to know what categories everyone is competing in well beforehand.
> 1) Everyone in a sport should be held to the same criteria for inclusion. If Khelif is intersex, and she is banned, every other boxer must submit to a genetic test before they can compete.
I think it would make sense to hold the champions to a higher standard. We'd expect disproportionately many cheaters making it to the very top, and people care more about the champions.
This is a complete non-sequitor. lalaithion is talking about what the rules are for being allowed to compete at all, not about cheating. Nothing at all about this discussion is about cheating.
The (largely unsupported) speculation is about Khelif being intersex: a specific rule about being intersex at the Olympics would need to be in place *before* the competition--complete with a metric for evaluating compliance--before "cheating" against that rule would even be a coherent thing that could happen. A lot of people seem to want to retroactively apply a rule that (AFAIK) doesn't exist. But again, if they do, they need to apply it to *everyone.* No fair competition should claim "we'll wait to see if you win, and then decide on a criterion to retroactively determine if you were cheating, which we will apply for nobody else."
Side note: keep in mind that it's extremely common for intersex individuals not to be aware that they're intersex.
The IBA's announcement of (secret) test results proving her to be intersex came three days after she had defeated a previously-undefeated Olympic boxing prospect from -- wait for it -- Russia! Hence allowing the IBA to "restore" that boxer's unblemished W-L record.
>This is the sort of thinking that led to the TSA strip-searching grandmothers after 9/11.
Which is a good thing. The moment you make an exception for "people who are X" is the moment terrorists start recruiting people who can pass for X. Why would one want to give potential bad actors helpful hints re how to evade security?
So what? The goal is to spend your effort where it's effective. If you're currently checking Arab men ages 15-45, and you want to expand or reorient that program to lower the rate of terrorism, you're better served by putting the additional effort into checking another high-risk group than by putting any of it into grandmothers. You'd only ever check grandmothers as part of a policy that non-randomly checked 100% of people. And that policy still wouldn't drive the terrorism rate down to zero, but it would drive terrorist recruitment back to its natural demographics, making the grandmother-checking look even more ridiculous.
Of course you do random testing, but it's also good to put resources toward the categories that you're most suspicious of. And what's even better is tracking hit rate to see how well your suspicions pay off. And then there's the matter of, as you point out, figuring out whether your targeted suspicions are causing a reaction in the opposition.
Some neighborhoods in my city have a lot more gun violence than others. I think it would be a bad idea to ignore this and distribute police randomly. So do most of the residents of those neighborhoods.
The high-crime neighborhood is a very poor analogy, because it cannot be gamed in the same way as a rule like "don't search little old ladies who set off alarm bells at the airport" can be gained. You know, once upon a time female suicide bombers were unheard of. Moreover,
> For several years the US military had in place a profile for car and truck bombers with one exception, if there was a child in the car, there was no need to worry. Al Qaeda in Iraq used this to their advantage and began to strap children into their car bombs to evade the profile.
Bloom, Mia. "Bombshells: Women and terror." Gender Issues 28 (2011): 1-21 (citing Ricks, T. (2009). The gamble: General David Petraeus and the American military adventure in Iraq 2006–2008. NY: Penguin Press).
Violent criminals in my city have seemed pretty good at identifying places where police enforcement was lax, and moving movable activities there. But yes, things like high schools full of potential drug customers are hard to move.
OK, you are accused of being transexual masquerading as the opposite gender by a Putinophilic organization. Prove that you're not. Until you submit chromosomal proof of your sex, we will consider you of the opposite sex. Does this sound reasonable to you? ;-)
Submitting chromosomal proof of your sex is a really easy thing to do. So yes, refusing to do so is highly suspicious.
As to the precise form of your comment, there are no rules against women competing in "male" events; the reason they don't do that is just that they can't win. So the accusation couldn't even be lodged.
What if we just want to make sure future competitions don’t devolve into mud slinging wars and requests by the losers for extra testing of the victors after the fact every time?
The Olympics should be about athletes competing. The circus is a different kind of event altogether.
Whatever your actual criterion for inclusion in a set is, test for it up front, not retroactively.
It really is. The left insists that we have to ignore our lying eyes and pretend to believe that no one is more likely to do X than anyone else. And so we have to apply equally high scrutiny to grandmothers and middle aged Arab men if we're to scrutinize anyone at all.
IIRC the rationale for screening grandmothers was a little different: it went - (at least some) terrorist organisations are not run by complete idiots, and also demonstrably have ways to motivate people into doing suicidal things. If you leave a gap in your defenses, it will be exploited. They make kids run at soldiers wearing bombs, ffs. If you never check the grandmothers, they will find a way to recruit a grandmother. Sure, profile the people you want to profile, but also be seen to check at least enough of the grandmothers that trying that sort of thing doesn’t look like it’ll be worth the extra effort.
Bruce Schneier wrote at least two books with several chapters each on this sort of thing, well worth a read.
This is a rather different situation to what we have here, where what I really want to see is sports events that finish during the event, and not during a war of accusations afterwards.
Test for your actual decision criterion, whatever it may be, before the event.
A violent sport like boxing is going to attract masculine individuals regardless of their sex or gender, so it's no surprise a number of almost-men participate in Women's Boxing. It's an odd sport. Thank God for stupid culture wars or nobody would care about it at all.
That's pretty much my view as well. The whole thing could, and should, be clarified with a thorough examination of the athlete. If Khelif turns out to have testicles and xy chromosomes, he has no business competing against women (and in a full-contact combat sport at that!), no matter what any passport or birth certificate says. It's embarassing that Western media are dancing around this issue.
What if she has a vagina and xx chromosomes but produces extra testosterone for some other reason?
What if this is all just fallout from her beating a Russian last year and the Gazprom-funded organiser coming up with an excuse to fiddle the results despite the question never arising at any point before this?
If we want to base this stuff on testosterone levels, we should make that explicit up front so we never need to have a culture war over it again. If you want to exclude other classes of people, do it for the next competition.
If once you let someone get disqualified retrospectively based on criteria that were not stated up front or tests that were not performed on entry, you open the door to bad actors and every competition thereafter will become a mud slinging war forevermore.
The IBA clearly states that XY individuals count as men, vagina or not, and XX individuals count as women, and that seems like a good first approximation. I don't know if there are DSD conditions that cause extra testosterone with XX chromosomes. If that is a thing, it might require clarification in the rules.
Your "corrupt Russians" innuendo doesn't lead anywhere - the IBA has informed the IOC about the case two months ago, and if the IOC had taken it seriously and wanted to double-check, they could have. They didn't, and now we have that farce.
But in an interview yesterday Kremlev of the IBA was unable to offer any evidence that Khelif had XY chromosomes — nor even that the tests had been done. So Khelif is guilty until proven innocent in your eyes. While the IBA is above reproach. That seems bassackwards to me.
I have no idea who this IBA guy is, and what he knows about the case, and I don't care. I see the written statement from the IBA, which includes links to the letter they sent to the IOC, and the letter from the IOC acknowledging it. I have no idea if the IBA is "above reproach" here, but if the IOC wants to handle the event, and they are alerted to the potential problem and don't do anything about it, any failures on the part of the IBA are neither here nor there - it's the IOC who's dropped the ball. Everything I read makes me suspect that Khelif is indeed an intersex male, but we shouldn't have to speculate about it. Can't be that hard to test conclusively, can it?
The IOC stripped the IBA of its status as boxing's governing body over governance and finance issues last year, due to the complaints about bribery and corruption among IBA executives — and especially over allegations of match-fixing at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics in return for payoffs. The IOC took charge of the Paris Games boxing competition and they applied eligibility rules from the 2016 and the 2021 Olympics. The IBA has no standing with the IOC. The IOC is not obligated to listen to their complaints nor their squawks of outrage.
And it's worth noting that the current IBA president Umar Kremlev is a personal friend of Vladimir Putin, and he has moved IBA's HQ from Lausanne, Switzerland to Russia. He has spent heavily on apparent self-promotion and has opposed independent appointment of judges and referees. He made Gazprom the sole and only sponsor of IBA events, and he even cancelled their last board election. The only people who seem to regard the IBA as a legitimate sports organization are US Putinophiles.
"It seems like quite the nuanced "scissor statement" where you lose hope in each side of humanity."
Ha!
For my part I've just glanced at it in passing, really, but assumed that it was another Semenya case, where it took me a surprising amount of work to find out that the core problem was that Caster Semenya has working, though internal, testicles. All of Western media (almost!) was extremely reluctant to actually explain this in plain language, clearly because they did not want to admit that the complaint against Semenya had merit, which in turn is clearly because of the comically heavy political skew of journalists as a group.
So I just took it for granted that something similar must be the case with these two controversial boxers: obviously unfit to compete in the women's division, but defended by the media because we... can't let chuds win, with their awful reality fixation? Or something.
"Best evidence so far is that the Olympic IOC corrected their statement that 'it wasn't a DSD case." to "it wasn't a trans case.'"
To be fair, that guy's tongue clearly just slipped at the press conference and IIRC he corrected himself, then and there, on the fly; it's not like they made a forceful claim and then had to issue an official correction or anything. He just made a mouth typo.
Agreed. But hindsight is 20/20; in advance one often feels like a fool going by something that looks dangerously close to superstition, even though it's ALWAYS ACCURATE!!!
….so we should remove gender from the divisions and make them about the thing we actually care about: the way we have boxing divisions based on e.g. weight, have them based on testosterone level, body mass index, amount of force behind punches, whatever it is. Low testosterone, mid testosterone, superheavy testosterone, whatever.
Or if it turns out gender is the thing we actually care about after all, stop bringing testosterone into it.
What do we actually care about? There's some reason we're not just having one competition for everyone, but what exactly is it? If there was only an NBA, women effectively wouldn't be able to play basketball, but men who are shorter than average still can't play basketball. If we're so concerned about half the population not being allowed to play, why don't we have a shorter-than-average league?
Boxing has weight classes, which seems to follow that principle. Maybe we should make it take testosterone into account as well as weight? But ultimately, whoever win will always have some advantage that will just be something we didn't account for. Maybe it's testosterone. Maybe it's how much time they spent training. Maybe it's whatever genes get people to work harder, or whatever parents get people to work harder. If you account for everything, it's an 8 billion way tie. So what things are we supposed to account for and what aren't we?
The argument and reason for having sporting events just for women is that in most sports women have zero chance to compete with men, and are thus excluded from elite sports if there is no female category..
That’s why the parent poster used basketball as an example. Height disqualifies way more than 50% of the population from playing basketball at an elite level and nobody bats an eye.
So why is it that when women want to play basketball, we should make sure they have their own league so they get a chance, but when short people want to play basketball, we just tell them that a competition where everyone has the same chance of winning is not a sport, it's a lottery?
Advantages in a sport can come from skill and training rather than biology. It's not a fundamental property of sports that people will always have biological advantages.
For example, there are sports that don't rely on muscle power at all, such as target shooting.
…I actually don’t even care that much what the answer is. What I want is for the people who do strongly care to decide what the answer is, test whether or not people qualify for the event based on that criterion before the event and stick to those results for that event, so that the winner of the event is determined by them winning the event rather than by them winning a media circus afterwards. We already have elections for the latter; I’d quite like sports to be a different kind of event.
I sympathize with your point, but I'd also offer that we only have a rudimentary understanding of how sexual development works, and of all the ways that the two standard paths can go awry. Settling on some random criteria now is unlikely to produce something that seems viable in 10 years. We're literally figuring this out as we go, and that happens one outlier at a time.
Sure, why not? Changing the rules every ten years, in a civil calculated manner before a game, is much much better than changing them in a media-fuelled rush after a game and applying the changes retroactively.
Whatever it is is vague enough that you can't keep politics from seeping into it. One side will always say biological sex is important. Another will say gender identity is important.
I don't really care for sports, but if I was watching the, I would prefer women's sports. Women are attractive. But should our test really be a beauty contest?
Well, in sports, the side that says that biological differences are what counts is clearly correct.
And I honestly don't think the issue is that hard to resolve: if you want to compete in the women's division, you have to be an XX individual without any clear DSD. If someone raises doubts, you undergo a test to prove that is the case, or you sign up for the men's division.
That will disqualify a small number of edge cases in favor of fairness and simplicity, but there's a long list of medical conditions that can prevent a person from participating in athletic competitions, and I don't see the problem with adding a couple more, especially since the men's division is open as an alternative.
> Well, in sports, the side that says that biological differences are what counts is clearly correct.
Usually, transgender people use hormones which minimizes the differences. I haven't seen actual studies on this and any differences that remain are lost in the noise of politics, but that's remarkably easy to do so it doesn't really say much. In any case, I wouldn't call it "clearly correct".
But that's not what I was talking about. I mean, under what circumstances should we make a separate sports league for group X so they can compete fairly? Why should we include women, but not short people? Should it be about biological women, or psychological women? If it's about psychological women, that would imply that we shouldn't let trans men who haven't used hormones compete in women's leagues, not because they'd have any sort of advantage, but because the whole point of the league is to make it so women have a chance to compete, and giving a trans man the chance to compete in no way helps with that.
If it’s too vague to make a decision, you shouldn’t use it to make decisions.
Whatever you do use to make decisions for any individual event, test for it up front and stick to the rule you set. You can update the rules for future events if you want, sure, but if you refuse to, say, run genetic tests up front because your rule is that the information in a birth certificate is good enough, don’t retroactively change that afterwards just because a loser complained loudly enough.
I feel like you've made up this rule just so you can get the outcome you want. If a loser suspects that the winner of an event cheated, why shouldn't he be allowed to complain and draw attention to this after the event? And perhaps more to the point, are you suggesting that isn't how it works now and has always worked? Why should this case be considered special? (Entirely leaving aside the fact that the IBA *did* warn the IOC in advance, and they could have checked in advance, but refused.)
Or just do it by sex. The point of women's sports is to have sports that women can win. As a father of a daughter I support this general concept. If my daughter wants to play sports then I want her to be able to do it safely and with a reasonable shot of winning, so she can have fun and stay healthy. Nothing wrong with that.
If Khelif is a genuine edge case (let us charitably assume that she is phenotypically female and went her whole life assuming she was a normal female until the day she did a genetic test and got the shock of her life) then that sucks for her that she'd be disqualified from womens' tournaments and too weak for open tournaments. But it sucks a lot less than a world where all women are outcompeted in all sports by the 0.1% of the population who are sex edge cases.
According to everything I've read so far, Khelif was born a girl, grew up as a girl, competed at every level as a girl/woman, and there was never any controversy until she beat a Russian in a Russian-controlled IBA bout, AFTER which Khelif was suddenly disqualified. IBA used a "test" that they refuse to release or even describe (one guy says "testosterone", the other says "chromosome", they can't even coordinate their story). The whole thing is just one of myriad ways Russia makes everything suck.
For context, I'm a martial artist, I have female friends who compete, I care deeply about fighting sports and am very much against M-to-F trans competing in women's divisions. This case is not it.
Frankly, you don't know this. IOC has not disputed the DSD claim and retracted a statement where they said it wasn't DSD. I don't trust the IBA but we won't know until the IOC chromosomal tests and cases like this, Semenya, have happened.
The IBA says they had two independent chromosome tests done, and both came back with the same result that disqualifies Khelif. They also formally informed the IOC about the issue two months ago, after first alerting them in 2022; if you don't trust the IBA, then you have to ask why the IOC didn't commission its own tests to clarify the facts.
That "clarification" doesn't describe the tests, and I frankly don't care what the Russians "how-dare-you-say-we-plan-to-invade" truth-tellers have to say about anything at this point. You can also read the transcript of their press conference where they themselves can't tell what the tests were: https://www.bbc.com/sport/olympics/articles/cq5dd2lz8y8o
Edit: the letter sent to IOC states that "The disqualification took place after the IBA had conducted two gender tests which concluded that the boxer's DNA was that of [black bar] chromosomes."
Neither you nor the IOC is obligated to take the IBA at their word, but their repeated warnings shouls be cause for the IOC to clarify the issue. If a test shows that Kheluf is a bona fide women, everyone can shut up and continue with the competition. Otherwise, the IOC should follow their own guidelines that suggest being inclusive while prioritizing the physical safety of the athletes and ensuring that no one enjoys an unfair advantage.
“The point of women's sports is to have sports that women can win.”
…but a woman won, and we apparently have a problem with this. So something has gone wrong in this argument, and the thing you claim is the point is not /actually/ the point. We may profess that it is our true belief, but we do not act like it.
Either we need to act like it, or we need to change what we claim so that it matches what we do.
That would depend on your definition of "woman". In sports, the reasonable definition is "biological female"; if Khelif is indeed an intersex person with XY chromosomes, internal testes and corresponding high testosterone level, that would mean Khelif is not a female, and hence cannot compete as a woman.
My definition doesn’t matter here; the IOC’s does. They have been very clear that they have a definition: the athlete is a woman if her passport says she is. This is widely reported, e.g. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/olympics/articles/cq5dd2lz8y8o
They may well now think it is a terrible definition and needs to be changed. I am fine with that! The bit I think should not happen is applying rule changes retroactively. Decide on the rule for the game and stick to it for that game! Don’t apply requirements retroactively that you did not announce beforehand.
The IOC also generally leaves it up to a sport's governing bodies to make the detailed rules (with IOC guidelines suggesting inclusivity while ensuring safety and fairness, which the IOC happily seems to ignore here). Fortunately, most governing bodies have found reasonable standards in the last few years, otherwise we'd have a couple more athletes to talk about.
And the passport criterion is completely useless, particularly now that more countries have self-determination laws (which are another travesty IMO).
Sure, don't change the rules retroactively. But they should have better rules in the next Olympics and if left-wing media downplays this enough where they don't, that's a problem imo and only going to stoke unpopular tension in the future.
Testosterone levels between (non-intersex) males and females do not overlap. Which is why biological sex, not gender, is a very useful criterion for a simple but fair classification. (On top of that, weight classes as needed.)
This paper suggests they do (https://clindiabetesendo.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40842-017-0050-3). The authors measured various properties of elite athletes 2 hours after completing an event, and one of the things they measured was testosterone. Just looking at the men, 25.4% of the elite male athletes had testosterone levels at 10nmol/l or below. 10nmol/l is the "lower end of the reference range for non-elite men" according to the paper, and the top of the permissible limit for women's sport. The variability in testosterone levels in the male athletes is pretty high, actually. Check out Figure 10.
AFAIK, the 10nmol/l is an artificial limit set by some associations to allow trans-women to compete if they reduce their T levels far enough. The normal range for females is given as 0.7 to 2.4 nmol/l.
Edit: looking at Fig. 10, you have to wonder what's up with the female outliers. The vast majority is nicely clustered below 5, and then you have a small number of freakishly high values. Hmmmmm.
That's why I didn't talk about the female athletes. I couldn't find anything in the paper about checking for DSD or intersex conditions, so thought it simpler to just discuss the men. Who, as mentioned, varied widely from pretty much 0 to 40nmol/l (interestingly, both the lowest and highest values were from rowers. Not sure what that says, if anything). And they certainly overlapped with the female athletes, even leaving out the ones with over 10nmol/l levels.
I agree that gender is more of just a proxy for the things we actually care about, but I think it's still necessary for gender to be the main division. The same way 18 years old is the division from child to adult. The number of years old a person is isn't inherently important, but it's a good proxy for the things we do care about - maturity, rationality, independence, etc. So 18 is the main division, but in certain circumstances it's shifted (e.g. a minor being tried as an adult for a crime).
And I think this methodology - having a simple proxy (gender) and then the ability to zoom into the actually important characteristics (testosterone, weight, strength, etc.) in edge cases - may be the best combination of simple and just that you can get.
Do human rights contain the seeds of its own destruction?
The discussion on the latest book review brought to mind old thoughts. Human rights first largely applied to basic negative rights, the right to not be arbitrarily arrested, to freedom of religion, to not be killed, etc. It has since been expanded dramatically: right to housing, right to healthcare, right to education, right to marry the same gender, right to force people to call you whatever gender you want, right to claim asylum, right to euthanasia, etc. And, once based on the individual, the right of governments to conduct foreign affairs how it wishes without regard to the interests of other countries. Note that I'm not commenting on the merits of each of these.
There are obvious incentives to try to cram your political aims under the concept of human rights. Eg, there's much less need to first prove its financial feasibility before its implemented, you can bludgeon your political opponents as immoral monsters, the policy can be placed beyond the reach of popular will, you can more safely disregard potential unintended consequences, etc. Accordingly, it's reasonable to expect that the ambit of human rights will keep expanding. I'm predicting that as more political projects are appended to human rights, the less sacred the concept will become, the more people will realize that it's a cheap trick. Ultimately, it'll become meaningless to invoke human rights as a tool to further your aims. If everything is a right, nothing is a right.
It's not that the concept of rights contains the seeds of their own destruction, so much as the concept has become unmoored from its dual. I.e. I've said it before and I'll say it again: "for each right, is an equal and opposite obligation". This is *necessarily* how contractual agreements work. E.g. a right to housing necessarily implies someone else's obligation to provide that housing; a right to die necessarily implies others' obligation to let them die; etc.
I suspect, though cannot prove, that the obsession with rights is tied to the arc of progress and democratization. I don't see any reason for cthulu to stop swimming left. Thus, I expect the ambit of rights will continue expanding, at least in the near future. But who knows.
You are right that it is a trick. When at the World Cup footballists were wearing rainbow armbands and the FIFA reminded them the no politics on the field rule, they replied human rights are not politics. But so far this trick is working - and I predict it will be working. Your prediction is that all the liberals all the time talking about human rights is making it cheap and less sacred. But it can have an opposite effect - just talking about it a lot makes it look big and important.
They have to be careful to not talk about human rights violations - that will desensitize people to them.
But to talk about strengthening human rights? I don't think talking about it a lot will somehow make it look less important. Politics does not really work like that. If something draws a lot of attention, it does not become cheap and less sacred. Rather more.
People need a replacement religion and so far human rights works.
>They have to be careful to not talk about human rights violations - that will desensitize people to them.
I agree that talking about violations is somewhat distinct, though it seems to come part and parcel with human rights discourse in general. And I did mention that as a "benefit" of framing your pet political project as human rights, and it certainly doesn't look like there is any care taken at all to not accuse political opponents of violating/threatening to violate human rights. It doesn't help that it's usually aimed against the right half of the population due to the left's capture of the chattering classes.
I would encourage you to look into the libertarian distinction between natural rights and human rights. Roughly speaking, negative rights that exist in a state of nature are natural rights, and anything that requires another person's labour is a human right. Libertarians generally believe that natural rights exist and cannot be taken away, while human rights are bunk.
I share your worry about rights, and see the same euphemism treadmill–esque thing happening to various other taboos in our culture, from the old days of calling everyone a "Nazi" to modern usage of the word "genocide".
I'm aware of the classical liberal conception of natural rights (what we would call libertarian these days). I was trying to say, albeit not very clearly, that rights language started with natural rights (eg, given to humans by God as Locke believed) and has gradually (and rapidly, in the past few decades) expanded far beyond that.
I suppose the same goes for any emotionally laden category, whether it's Nazi or genocide or rights. It's much easier to categorize X as Y rather than push for or against X on the merits. I'm not worried about it though. If anything, I want the process to be played out already.
Ah, then I agree. Yes, people are going to expand the usage of emotionally-laden words beyond what was previously used for political gain. It's the Worst Arguments in the World, but it works. I think that's it's somewhat inevitable, but fighting back can help (we managed to keep the word "genocide" largely unsullied for nearly a century).
A while ago, the U.N. tried to pass a "make food a human right" resolution. The only votes against were the U.S. (and Israel), and this resulted in many harrumphs from the usual suspects. Upon reading the actual resolution, it turned out that what it actually did was force U.S. agricultural companies (e.g. John Deere) to give up their patents, for free, to the entire world. Even if, when pressed, people might not endorse the statement "farmers should be forced to work, without pay if necessary, to provide food for the world", the phrasing of "human right" is easily abuseable.
In theory "human rights" could be framed as you mention, but I would much rather have a phrase like "ideal welfare" to communicate the idea. Using the word "right" in such a way degrades its ability to communicate information, much like with the word "Nazi" as I mentioned.
> Upon reading the actual resolution, it turned out that what it actually did was force U.S. agricultural companies (e.g. John Deere) to give up their patents, for free, to the entire world.
I don't see what the problem with this is supposed to be from a natural rights perspective. Unenforceability of patents is a negative right in the same way freedom of religion is a negative right.
And if this were the UN "make patents unenforceable" resolution, you would have a good point. But if it's buried in the "make food a human right" resolution, and it only applies to agricultural patents, then that isn't a statement about the negative right of patent unenforceability. It's implicitly accepting the general premise of intellectual property as actually being property, and then stating that if someone's property can help feed the poor starving moppets of Ethiopia then we can just take their property without asking or paying.
Yes, sorry, I meant to draw the illustration of how so-called human rights are enforced in reality. The forcing people to work is a worst-case scenario.
Human rights originally worked because it was agreed on by the US and the USSR as well as most other major countries. It worked because both sides basically agreed on the underlying ideology and because both could use it as a way to bash each other in competition. This contained compromises from the beginning. For example, the USSR changed the definition of genocide to not include the destruction of economic classes. You see similar compromises in the wider diplomatic system intended to prevent a new war.
The human rights framework is falling apart because there's no longer even such a theoretical consensus. Russia, Iran, and their allies have attacked the entire concept. China has redefined it but has failed to get any other major power (including Russia or Iran) to sign on. So what human rights effectively coordinates at the moment is the consensus between Europe and the US and their respective allies. That's something. But it's not what it used to be.
In my view the adoption of rights language in international affairs is more another example of how the concept has been stretched ever further, in this case from a framework based on rights of individuals seamlessly to rights of states. I don't particularly see the Axis of Evil(tm) as unique actors in this regard. They have the same incentives as those who argue that trans athletes being able to compete with biological women is a human rights issue.
And I don't think the decline of the framework is due to them either. Few in the West take their invocations of rights seriously. However, many take trans athletes' rights very seriously.
The concept of human rights was invented by the United Nations in the 1940s in a negotiation between various countries. Russia and other nations have had their leaders say they no longer believe in those original declarations. China has put out its own redefinition. These are simply facts.
Your theory has at least two flaws. It requires China/Russia/etc to not be acting differently when even they claim they are. (They have justifications for why they're doing that. But they do not deny they're doing it.) And the rights of states are not a component of human rights to begin with. Those are actually older.
>The concept of human rights was invented by the United Nations in the 1940s in a negotiation between various countries.
I disagree. Human rights as we know it goes back at minimum to the classic liberal contract theorists.
>And the rights of states are not a component of human rights to begin with.
Sure, Westphalia and all that, but it's increasingly been dressed up as such because of the popularity of human rights as a concept and the dominance of Western soft power.
What's the long-term prognosis for SF? Will the city start putting repeated low level offenders in prison and allow housing to be built, or will it go the way of Detroit and experience a prolonged exodus that leaves it a hollowed-out shell, or something in between?
It wouldn't need more housing if it would put criminals in prison. Get rid of all the criminals and all the illegal aliens from San Francisco and you've immediately got a quarter of a million extra housing units.
In terms of actual population counts, SF from the 2010 to 2020 censuses had a net gain of 68,000 residents, to a total representing the city's all-time record by a good distance.
Then the Census Bureau's annual guesstimates for 2021 and 2022 were of giving back almost all of that gain, to a total population just a few thousand higher than it was in 2010. And then the annual guesstimate for 2023 was of a small net gain.
As always we have to wait for the next actual census to have real data, but SF certainly does not at this writing look much like the sort of "hollowed-out shell" pathway of Detroit during the middle/late 20th century. The city's boundaries have not changed in decades after all so its not as if the steady population gains from 1980 to 2020 were due to expanded footprint.
Also worth noting that SF has had ups and downs before (a net drop of ~100,000 during the 1960s/70s) and swung back out of it.
I'm seeking feedback regarding a fundraising mechanism based on the idea of "Giving Vouchers" / "Donation Gift Cards"
The idea is that instead of people donating directly to charities, create a platform where they can send the money to their friends, and let them choose which charities to donate the money to. Basically saying: "Hey I'm donating money to charity, here's some of it, help me choose which charity to give it to". This allows donors to leverage their donations to engage their friends in charitable giving too.
The basic flow is:
1. You create a campaign on the platform, choosing say 3 charities and committing say $100
2. You download the coupons from the site and send them to your friends
3. Your friend redeems the coupon by clicking a link or scanning a QR code
4. They read about the 3 charities you selected and pick one
5. They are asked to optionally match the donation
Such a system allows donors to raise awareness of charities, engage others in philanthropy, create social proof of giving, and raise additional funds when their donations are matched. Such coupons can also be distributed by corporations and institutions, not just individuals.
I previously ran a successful small scale trial. I'm currently looking for feedback, ideas and collaborators to potentially scale up this project and would appreciate any help!
There's a burger chain around here that does something vaguely similar. With your order you get a token, and you are asked to put it in one of three containers to vote for which of three charities will get a donation this month.
Maybe some people like this sort of thing, I'm far too cynical. Don't guilt me into being some kind of low-level participant in your PR campaign, just give me a burger.
I have regular old gift cards in my wallet that I got back at Christmas, because I never got around to using them. My take is that giving someone a gift card will not get them to do something they weren't already interested in doing.
The point of this seems to be "emotionally bludgeon your friends into donating to your three favourite charities".
There's a lot of intermediate steps that seem superfluous - why on earth would I need to redeem a coupon you send me? Is it to prove that I read your email? Is it to get the money into my bank account (in which case, thanks for the hundred bucks)? Is it to get them to pick the charity for you?
That last would be, in my case, "I don't know and I don't care, why can't you pick your own charity? If you're really having trouble, just close your eyes and land your finger on one at random".
If you're trying to get me to donate to one of the charities you selected, but you're trying to trick me into thinking I picked it because you gave me three options, nice try but I'm not going to donate just because you ostentatiously showed off to me about "oh look *I'm* giving to a Good Cause, isn't that nice, isn't that wonderful? wouldn't you like to be as Nice and Good as me and donate, too?"
It seems like the mechanism could result in no money actually getting donated, because Alice is sending the coupons to Bob who is sending coupons to Carol who is sending coupons to Dave who is sending coupons to Alice, because they're all pushing off the selection onto their friends about "no, *you* choose which charity gets the money".
If a corporation gave me a charitable coupon, I'm afraid it would end up straight in the bin. I'm not interested in these kind of virtue games, and if I'm going to give to charity, I'm picking my own and not the "pick one of my three" going on here.
"Social proof of giving". Why not just get a T-shirt printed up on Redbubble about "I'm SOOOO Virtuous, here's my proof of giving"? That way even more people would know by simply looking at you that you are Socially Proven to Donate!
What's the base case if the friend never opens the link?
It seems like the intent is to "encourage" the friend to think about donating to charity as well. As described, the cost of this is delaying (or is even preventing?) the original donation from reaching any of the listed charities. Assuming it's a delay, there must be some tipping point where the extra pressure on the "friend" isn't worth delaying the original funds further.
Regarding euthanasia, until someone who’s undergone the procedure can report back on whether they’re satisfied with the results, it’s difficult to adopt an informed position on its effectiveness.
This absence of testimonials to the potentially enormous amount of suffering euthanasia has already prevented, leaves little quantifiable measure of its benefit. Instead we’re left with metrics like:
- Reported prospective satisfaction (post-decision to euthanize but pre-procedure)
- Reported family satisfaction
- Healthcare cost reduction
- Reported psychological relief for the terminally ill
On the other hand, it’s hard to ignore the very quantifiable measure of its primary drawback:
- Near 100% post-procedure mortality rate
Despite euthanasia’s potential benefit of relieving the most severe and needless suffering, there is very little hard data to support its defense, while any critic can blithely point to the premature death of every patient that’s undergone the procedure as its unacceptable drawback.
Basically, whether euthanasia is a moral triumph or moral abomination appears unknowable now and most likely forever. In this perpetual ignorance we’re left frustratingly dependent on our own intuitions and the expressed wishes of those in interminable, incurable misery who are asking us to please help them die.
I've heard refusing liquids and foods advocated people who want to end their life. If the person is not in a hot area it is not suppose to be painful and a person who has a painful physical condition will probably will be dead in a week.
A competent person has the right to refuse liquids and foods and they have a chance to change their mind for day or so.
From what I understand, VSED is very painful but not as severe if accompanied by the appropriate palliative care (meds for pain, agitation and dry mouth). I can’t find credible sources that say that dying of starvation and thirst is painless.
That said some terminally ill people elect to attempt VSED to end their suffering in the absence of euthanasia and some of those people manage to see it through. I think this might speak more to the desperation of the sufferer than the relative comfort of VSED.
There are plenty of people who work with the terminally ill and can speak to the variations in quality of life during the final days. Some patients are able to spend a good amount of the end of their life in relative comfort, others are doomed to prolonged agony. Some get one and then the other. At a minimum for those patients whose bodies are already irreparably ruined on a functional level and every waking moment is saturated with pain and nausea, I think it should be an option. Also, at least for now, all humans are mortal. Every medical procedure has a 100% post-procedure mortality rate on a long enough time horizon. Hastening death under intolerable conditions seems like a moral good.
I only mean that if the upside of euthanasia is ending a patient’s misery, the downside is that they’ll be dead after.
Edit: Maybe you’re saying that dying itself could be the gateway to bliss. Could be, I’m not unsympathetic (neither is most modern religion). But still if you ask 100 random people whether they prefer life or death, I think death will be a very unpopular choice.
> I only mean that if the upside of euthanasia is ending a patient’s misery, the downside is that they’ll be dead after.
I agree, but the way you worded that was making it sound like the downside was more clear than the upside. You are ending their life. That is clear. What's less clear is whether their life is worth living, but in a lot of cases there's very good reason to think it is not.
I’m not impressed by the argument that most jumpers who survive say that the moment they jumped they regretted doing so. For one thing, so fewjumpers survive that the sample is probably too small to use in drawing conclusions about what jumpers in general feel. But the main thing that’s wrong with the argument is that people are talking about the reflexive the terror of a falling person as though it were a considered judgment — as though it were in the same category as regretting an impulse buy on the day after.
Here’s a relevant experience from my own life. On my Outward Bound course we were given the chance to dismount from a high place as a pendulum. You sat on the edge of a little platform about 50 feet in the air, and attached your harness to the end of a rope that was maybe 70 feet long, and attached at its high end to a strong tree at a point way higher than you were. That rope, when it dangled straight down from its 70 foot high attachment point, reached to about 10 feet from the ground. So anyone who swung on that rope would not hit the ground, but end up dangling a little bit above it. After you were securely attached to the rope, all you had to do was lean forward and fall off the platform, and then you swung back and forth in a giant pendulum until it eventually wore itself out and somebody helped you dismount. So before my turn came, I watched several people take the ride, and nobody got hurt, and several were whooping in delight. And I trusted Outward Bound by that point. So I felt confident the ride was safe. I also saw several people dither for a while on the platform then elect not to use the pendulum. They climbed down a ladder instead, looking demoralized. So by the time my turn came I had decided that as soon as I was clipped in to the pendulum rope I was going to just immediately lean forward. And that’s what I did. So of course right after you come off the platform you go almost straight down. It takes a couple seconds to begin to feel the pendulum effect, and realize you are moving more horizontally than vertically. So, during those 2 seconds of falling, I was horrified and terrified. I felt as though I had made a terrible, stupid, lethal mistake. In other words, I felt the same thing the bridge jumpers feel. But that was nothing like believing, in a sincere, conscious way, that I had made a terrible mistake. I didn’t believe that. I was too terrified and in-the-moment to even think anything as complex as “It was a terrible mistake to decide to take the Breathtaker, apparently it is unsafe after all.:” What I was feeling was some deep, hard-wired terror of falling. And that, I think, is the most reasonable way to think about what jumpers feel. I expect they know, before they jump, that the fall will be horrifying, just as people who hang themselves (in a way that compresses their windpipe) know that they will struggle to breathe and to pull off the noose. But in both cases the person goes ahead with the plan because it will end in death, and they know that whatever reflexive resistance to dying they feel once they have taken the plunge will not enable them to save themselves. They just say, “too bad for you, buddy” to their future selves.
Thank you for your testimony! Yes, I generally agree with your conclusion, although I wonder how much trading of current-me-happiness versus future-me-happiness we ought to socially allow (e.g. it seems wise to encourage people to work hard in school).
Sure, I agree. I'm not in favor of a prescription for lethal drugs being available on the spot for anyone who asks. But currently there is no place that does that. Even the European countries that are most liberal about these matters require the person to be examined by a professional and declared to be of sound mind, and also require the person to tell a professional several times, or a period of -- I don't know the period, but it's more than a few days -- that they want to commit suicide. These countries have, though, sometimes allowed people who have a longstanding painful psychiatric illness, but are not physically ill, to have an assisted suicide. And I'm not sure that's wrong. I worked in a mental hospital for several years (I'm a psychologist) and sometimes saw patients who had been tortured by anxiety or severe depression for decades. They had not been helped by any of the available treatments. And they were sane -- ie, they did not have hallucinations or delusions. If one of them wanted to throw in the towel, and asked for the drugs for an assisted suicide, I can see allowing them to do it. While it's possible that a new drug that would have given them great relief would come out the out day after they died, it is very unlikely.
But people who commit suicide by jumping, because of depression o a life crisis, are a very different population from terminally ill people whose doctors have told them they have 6 months or less to live, and are intolerably uncomfortable or flat out on agony. Those people are just regular people who, until they got sick, were no more interested in suicide than most people, ie not interested at all in committing suicide. They are doing it because of an unfixably awful life situation. In order to get a prescription for a lethal dose of drugs (in states where assisted suicide is allowed), they most convince a psychiatrist they are of sound mind, and must also tell the psychiatrist, in 2 separate interviews separated by a time interval, that they want to commit suicide. So I think all this rules out impulsivity, and regret like that of people who just jumped. Also, suicide attempts via a lethal dose of pills are not, like jumping, done by one irreversible act. It takes a while to swall all of the lethal drug, because it is a large dose. The person can stop at any time. If they have not taken much, they will probably be ok. Even if they have I’ll
bet they could save themselves by taking an emetic promptly.
Assisted suicide is different in every respect from jumping exact one: both result in death. I don’t think what’s known about jumpers has any bearing on whether dying people should be given lethal drugs.
People who jump off bridges are, by definition, people fit and healthy enough to climb bridges in the first place. That's a very different population than the typical euthanasia-seeker.
It also suggests that if you take away the means of suicide accessible to bedridden invalids (assisted euthanasia, some sorts of pills, firearms if you already have one handy, not much else I can think of), then you may wind up pushing a lot of those people into offing themselves earlier, while they're still up to the more challenging sorts of suicide. And for some of them, that will be the wrong decision, realized too late.
Another factor to consider is that suicide by pills or gas is acceptable to many more people than death by guns, ropes, jumping, etc -- things that cause pain and/or mutilation. Everybody has always known that suicide is possible using the grisly methods I named, but I think the main reason the terminally ill are not using them is not that they are too disabled to, but that they are too horrifying for most people. That's why there people push for doctor-assisted suicide, or go to Switzerland for assisted suicide; These options make it possible for people to end it all by taking a bunch of pills, falling asleep and never waking up. Far more people can face that than can face the grisly methods. I'm pretty sure that no matter what godawful disease I had I could not make myself jump off a bridge or shoot myself. (I realize that shooting oneself in the head kills so quickly that there is no time to feel pain. But it is hard to get past the illusion that it would hurt like hell.) But I think I'd be able to swallow a bunch of barbiturates.
I think most of the people who would have loaded guns close at hand even when they are bedridden or nearly so, are rather more willing than you are to contemplate shooting someone as a means of resolving a serious problem. Even if the "someone" whose continued survival is considered undesirable, is themselves. Most of them would probably prefer something that doesn't leave as much of a gory mess for their family or caregivers. But guns do seem to wind up being the preferred suicide method for people who have them.
So, the common means of suicide that might be available to invalids, tend to be quick and/or painless, whereas the ones you have to work for are often the opposite. That's a weird incentive structure, and I don't think it is improved by taking the painless solutions out of the equation.
I think I understand the first part of what you said: If people have to do something physically effortful to initiate and painful to complete, that reality functions as a pretty good test of how serious they are about dying. But it's unfortunate that the means available to invalids (guns, lethal meds prescribed by a doctor)are both quick and painless, because that makes an impulsive suicide more likely. Is that right? But then I don't understand why you don't think the situation is improved by taking the painless solutions out of the equation.
Also, I think taking assisted suicide drugs orally is importantly different from a gun. Both methods are painless. But the gun kills instanteously, whereas it takes a while to swallow enough pills to kill you. Pharmacies do not make huge-dose pills for the convenience of those carrying out an assisted suicide. The person has to take a bunch of therapeutic dose pills. So people overdosing can stop and change their mind, either stopping before they have taken many pills, or taking an emetic after swallowing the lot. I think being willing to swallow 30 or so pills, and then elect not to vomit them, is a reasonably good test of whether someone is being impulsive or carrying through on something they are fully committed to doing.
Not necessarily. About 15% of suicide attempts via gun fail. If the suicidal person hasn't done a little bit of research on gun suicide, at least enough to avoid the position most commonly depicted in movies, one has a worryingly high chance of surviving with catastrophic injuries.
I've owned guns since I was 18, I actually do know the most effective positions for suicide by gun, and yet I would still choose a couple of different options over the "instantaneous" and "painless" gun option. Partly because I don't want to leave a mess for people to clean up, but partly because even knowing what I do, I still don't quite trust myself not to flinch and end up in *much* worse circumstances than whatever it is I'm attempting to escape.
I imagine either one would hurt like hell if done wrong. But I think the same is true of overdosing on pills. Your suicide attempt failed, but hey, good news is, now you're on the liver transplant list.
I don't think that tells us much of anything about terminally ill people who choose assisted suicide, though. Most of the former are people who until they were ill found suicide no more appealing than the average person does. Their suicides are not impulsive -- they are motivated by suffering due to their illness, and the knowledge that it cannot be relieved. To be given a prescription for the drugs that will kill them they have to tell a psychiatrist several different times, during more than interview, that they are sure that they want to end their life. And, of course, the day they take the drugs is an additional occasion when the person actively chooses to die. In fact they probably choose it multiple times that day, because it's not possible to get all the meds down in a single swallow. There is every reason to think these people truly, and over an extended period of time, want to die. For them death is not a permanent solution for a temporary problem, it's a solution to a very painful problem that cannot be fixed and will never go away.
I really think there's some kind of fundamental difference between suicide done in response to a painful terminal illness and suicide done in response to a bad breakup, or even to serious depression. I mean, if you hear about some kid who shot himself because his girlfriend broke up with him, or some 30-year-old guy who shot himself after his lifelong depression finally caught up with him, you think "my God, what a tragedy." If you hear about a 70 year old man with terminal cancer shooting himself, probably you think something more like "my God, what a terrible situation he was in" or "at least he's out of his misery now."
Many Thanks for the links! Looking briefly at the first link, one factor that I see missing is what fraction of suicide attempts leave people in a state sufficiently damaged that they are physically unable to make another attempt. Do any statistics quantify this?
I can’t find any studies with specific numbers on that. As you’d expect, methods such as firearms and jumping from height have high incidence of disability when unsuccessful. There are also lots of studies that point to the higher incidence of all kinds of health problems in people who survive suicide attempts.
>As you’d expect, methods such as firearms and jumping from height have high incidence of disability when unsuccessful.
Yes, that makes perfect sense.
>There are also lots of studies that point to the higher incidence of all kinds of health problems in people who survive suicide attempts.
That also makes sense, though the causality could go either way: They could have had health problems that led to depression that led to the suicide attempt, or they could have had depression, which led to the unsuccessful suicide attempt, which then led to health problems.
I think that this post is probably a good place to start. I will also note that 80–75% of those who attempt suicide, then, don't try it again, given that statistic. Logically, it would make euthanasia an abomination.
A long time ago now, I read an account (on Imgur of all things, I think?) of a man who had tried to commit suicide by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, but miraculously survived. He said something like "the very instant that I started to fall, I knew that all the problems I had accustomed myself to seeing as permanent and insurmountable were actually completely contingent and fixable if not wholly irrelevant – *all* of them, except one: namely, that I had just jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge".
>Still, I'm not seeing any articles or studies saying that unassisted suicide attempts have definitely decreased anywhere after the introduction of assisted suicide, so it may be that the more straightforward effect that making suicide more socially acceptable leads to more suicides does indeed outweigh any other effects.
A poster here shared it with me recently (thanks for everybody’s counter arguments—I learn from them). It doesn’t prove any connection between the unassisted suicide rate and the introduction of assisted suicide in the Netherlands, but it does seem to suggest a significant increase in unassisted suicide following euthanasia’s introduction. I don’t know enough about the Netherlands, or this evidence specifically to understand why unassisted suicide might be on the rise there, and whether it’s even out of line with global/regional increases in other countries with/without euthanasia.
Someone involved in an assisted suicide organization did try the method used in the Sarco device, up to the point of nearly losing consciousness (they had a helper with them, of course). Their report was of no physical distress of any kind. And I’m sure there are also reports by people who were exposed to the same agent accidentally
Other things, such as family satisfaction, and improved peace of mind in the ill who know they can exit without pain at a time of their choice, can be measured and probably have been.
There's a science fiction story where they've invented the technology to replay the memories of the recently dead = so you can find out what death is like - and it turns out that knowing that death is, typically, not that bad actually has an unfortunate psychological effect on people.
Has your stock portfolio got you down? Don't worry friends, what goes up must come down, or maybe it's what goes down must come back up? Either way, you need something to soothe the nerves and I've got just the thing, Chinese noodles. I cracked the code and came up with a recipe that's easy, doesn't take a dozen crazy ingredients you don't own, and is delicious! You're welcome: https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/chinese-noodles
My grandma is weird about going to the doctor, so the only way she will get around to getting hearing aids is if I get them for her and help her set up all the correct frequencies or whatever.
What's the consensus about over-the-counter hearing aids? Does anyone here have experience with them, or know of a brand with good reputation?
I was recently fitted with hearing aids at Costco. I chose Costco primarily on the suggestion of a user who has been hearing impaired since birth. As I recall, everyone I asked for recommendations agreed Costco was the best choice.
At Costco a hearing aid technician gave me a detailed examination and generated plots of the frequency response of each ear. The results showed a gradual drop off in frequency response from about 250Hz up to 4kHz, and then a more rapid drop in frequencies above 4kHz. The technician adjusted the gain and frequency response of the devices to fit my requirements.
For my part, it was worth the extra money to to get the professional help from Costco, along with the excellent guarantee, support, and convenience they provide.
Additional comments:
1) It is my understanding that there are several causes of hearing loss. Exposure to loud, high frequencies can damage the cilia, and that damage is irreversible, at least with today's medical technology. Aging results in a different mechanism, which is related to ion differentials in the inner ear, similar to a battery losing charge. At one time there was some hope this could be overcome with technology.
2) The hearing tech said the high frequency drop off in my hearing was likely due to exposure to high sound pressure, while the low frequency degradation was related to age.
3) Since wearing my hearing aids, I have found that my unaided hearing sounds "muffled," indicating loss of high frequency response. The hearing tech told me this is the result of my brain processing differently.
4) It struck me as funny that the only way to make an appointment for a hearing test at Costco was over the phone. That might be the basis for a Bob Newhart routine.
I guess they're not really OTC. You have to have an exam by an audiologist to get them. But if you have hearing loss, I can't think of any reason they wouldn't sell them to you.
Not sure if you're jesting or serious ;-) . Just in case, "hair cells" refer to tiny long sensor cells in the inner ear. They are thin and long, which is why whey're called that. Nothing to do with the actual hair! :)
Just to be that annoying person, you are nearly but not quite right. Hair cells bear bundles of stereocilia on their tops, and that's why they're called hair cells (and they're very pretty to look at via scanning electron microscopy too). The tips of the stereocilia bear mechanically-gated ion channels. The stereocilia flex with the motion of the sound wave, and with that flexing, the mechanotransduction channels are pulled open, and the hair cell depolarises, creating a signal which is passed on to the spiral ganglion neurons and thence to the brain. The cochlear hair cells themselves come in two flavours, the inner hair cells, which are flask shaped (bulbous at the bottom) and the outer hair cells, which are more thin and long. Outer hair cells are a mammalian specialty and act as amplifiers; inner hair cells are the actual sensors.
While watching the Olympics, I'm seeing a few ads in support of Kamala Harris in her pursuit of the Presidency of the United States.
One of the claims in those ads was that Kamala Harris, as prosecutor, was very aggressive against sexual predators.
When I search for any story that names the predators put in jail by Kamala Harris as Prosecutor, I don't find any... I instead find articles about victims of sexual abuse complaining that Harris as Prosecutor stonewalled release of information that could help him remove former-abusers from positions of power.
Most of the articles are from the June 2019 time frame.
Kamala Harris shut down and arrested the creator of backpage. In law enforcements worldview people involved in the sex trade who are not themselves prostitutes are sexual abusers and many other bad things.
You may not share that worldview. You might think sex trafficking is the sort of thing depicted in the movie Taken. But to her its any time a sex worker crosses a stateline.
> But to her its any time a sex worker crosses a stateline.
That seems overly strict. What if a customer in California responds to a prostitute in California, the two of them meet for sex, money changes hands, and then we learn that the customer was using a VPN?
That one seems like an entire thicket of thorns to get tangled up in. The linked stories mention one guy who is a self-described survivor and activist, and it's the "activist" label that has me going "Hmmmm, I wonder?"
Mr. Piscitelli has one book out, with a doozy of a title: "A Witch Wins Justice: A Memoir of Victory Worthy of a Witch" and the blurb is even better (and plainly self-authored because it jumps right for "Inquisitor General" and "Pagan Witch" territory):
"In 2008, the High Appellate Court of California re-addressed an unprecedented jury trial case of clergy sex abuse, which was filed, and won 5 years earlier in 2003 by Joey Piscitelli, a former Catholic clergy abuse victim in the San Francisco Bay Area. This non-fiction story reveals the lengths the Catholic clergy and hierarchy were capable of going through to shield a predator, during Piscitelli's school years, and the lengths they were capable of going through to fight a victim for the cause of saving face for mother church. The irony of the case is magnified by the fact that Piscitelli subsequently returned to his roots as a Pagan Witch. To add to the irony, the present day Pope Benedict, and the present day General Inquisitor, Cardinal William Levada, had kept the accused sex abuser as pastor in active ministry intentionally. The abusive cleric had access to children in San Francisco, throughout a vicious litigation, without regard for his accuser; and the added potential danger to children at his parish. It is estimated that the Catholic Church and the Salesian Order of priests spent several million dollars for the 5 year battle, and hired several law firms to represent the church and the accused sex abuser priest, Fr. Stephen Whelan. They had refused to compromise or settle the case. Although over ninety-nine percent of clergy abuse cases in the USA are settled out of court, the Catholic hierarchy and the Salesian Order had no intention of losing this case, nor settling a highly publicized case against a practicing Pagan Witch. Despite Piscitellis relentless public protests, press conferences, and letters sent to Cardinal Ratzinger - now Pope Benedict, and to the Inquisitor General - Cardinal Levada of San Francisco, to remove the accused priest from having access to children, his countless efforts went ignored. The Catholic church had never lost a court jury trial to an abused Witch in history, and this unprecedented battle was literally at the Inquisitor Generals' front door. But this was no ordinary case, and Piscitelli was not the typical abuse victim who was included in the ninety-nine percent of clergy abuse settlement victims, none of whom were admitted to be Witches. Piscitelli takes the reader through an autobiography of his early life as a devout Catholic, his transformation, the discovery of his past, and the traumatic journey through his abusive experiences in a Catholic school. He describes the aftermath of child sex abuse with a surprisingly different twist, and the multiple ironies that take place throughout his exposure to corrupt clergy, their protectors, and the ultimate war with the top officials of the Salesian order, and the modern day Office of the Inquisition. The story culminates with an unusual turn of events and conclusions, unlike any other story of clergy abuse, leaving the reader to ponder the after effects of clergy abuse; and induces questions as to the reality of Pagan Magick; and also what may actually occur when a practicing Witch goes to trial in the present day clergy abuse battle against the Roman Catholic church."
So Harris may well have "stonewalled". *Or* this guy could be a serial/nuisance litigator who liked getting his name in the media and what better way than to do protests and letter-writing and then ring up the local paper or TV station with "I am a survivor of abuse and the DA is protecting the abusers!"
I don't want to take either side here because I think it'll probably turn out to be six of one, half a dozen of the other.
The case that Piscitelli seems to be alluding to is this:
"Editor of the Salesian Bulletin in 1997. A civil suit was filed in 2003 by a man alleging abuse, including rape, by Whelan when he was a student at Salesian High School in 1969-early 1970s. Whelan’s accuser said Bro. Sal Billante witnessed the abuse and said nothing, that he told a counselor and was then chastised and threatened by the school principal. Also, that school administrator Rev. David Purdy tried to get him to commit suicide. Whelan was still active in 8/2005. Civil trial started 7/7/2006. Jury awarded the plaintiff $600K on 7/19/2006. Whelan was removed from his position after the verdict and resided at the provincial house. CA Appeals Court upheld verdict in 8/2008. Removed from ministry. On the Oakland diocese’s list in 2019."
For the others, it was a fishing expedition by Piscitelli:
"Asked by email if the archdiocese asked Harris not to make the clergy files public, Marlow responded, “We have no knowledge that anyone from the Archdiocese of San Francisco made any such request.”
Piscitelli’s abuse took place in Contra Costa County, not in San Francisco. The documents he sought were not for his own case, he said, but rather to publicize the names of predators in other cases.
“If you had a kid in grammar school in fifth grade and there was a child abuser there, would you want the names released?” Piscitelli said. “You want to know who these priests are and where they’re at. Absolutely.”
We have just published an important review on the nootropic "peptide concoction" Cerebrolysin. It has exploded in popularity after a video of Bryan Johnson injecting it went viral on X.
TLDR is that it likely does not contain neurotrophic peptides and is just amino acids, salt, and water -- probably not dangerous, but likely a waste of money.
What we saw in the literature is indicative of more widespread problems in the biomedical literature.
I've never heard of this, but I continue to be boggled by how many things in medicine come from some guy in the 50s saying "hey this might work" and nobody double-checking their work for the next 50 years.
I could not resist the temptation to poke into the "Bismark" fella's* promise of riches and power for his followers. Amazingly to no surprise, scratch a bloviating master-morality-dudebro, find a small-time fraudster. Know what his secret way to power is? Ta-freakin'-daaa: get TWO jobs. Or three. No, I'm not kidding, it's "job stacking":
- get >1 fully remote job (!)
- collect multiple paychecks from the "clueless" corporations (!!)
- get RICH and POWERFULL (!!!)
What's his angle? For a small subscription fee, a link to a secret Telegram channel with legal advice and other perks.
I can't even, as the kids used to say.
* named his character after THAT Bismark? The inventor of modern welfare state? what irony...
So I read your first link. Is that an example of the kind of person you are thinking of sending to Bismark for help? I might be able to suggest some alternatives to the Bismarck guy, but I don't feel like I have a clear 8dea of the kind of person you have in mind. What is their situation? They have tech skills that could earn them about $150K a year and can't find a job? They are aimless and not looking much? they have a job but life seems empty and pointless? And what do they ask for you for when they come to you for help?
I got a couple of glimpses of Bismarck think in his first post here, and then in a long exchange I had with a guy who seemed allied with him, and came away with the impression that shared hate and contempt for certain categories of people was an important element of the Bismarck bunch's bond with each other, and of the way they feel cheered up and energized. Bismarck's first post disagreed with Scott on a couple of points, but didn't present an argument -- instead it used mockery and insults. Overall thrust was that Scott was a weird little gnome so anything he says is lame and funny. In my exchange with the Bismarck acolyte, his essential attack on my criticism of Bismarck's post was that I sounded like a fag. (I tried to get him to clarify what he objected to in the points I had made and the way I made them, but he really had nothing substantive to say -- just that I was so damn faggy it was ridiculous ergo my post could be disregarded.)
If you're saying guys perk up when they identify with Bismarck, I find that easy to believe. But you should give some thought to the mechanism that's doing the perking. If it's dumb, shared hate, I doubt that it's good for them in the long wrong, and it sure as hell isn't good for the people they know to be seen as gnomes, fags and twats. And speaking of twats, I had a patient who gave me some very clear glimpses of the appeal of these macho, we-love-to-hate-lame-people types. My patient had terribly low self-esteem, despite being enrolled in an extremely high prestige grad program and having a FANG tech job paying $200K waiting for him. He was convinced no woman would ever want him. Actually, plenty would have been happy to date him. Besides his academic success and good prospects, he also was funny, kind, well-groomed and not ugly (though not handsome -- just average). But he as so terrified of rejection he did not date -- so, of course, he did not have a girlfriend. Red Pill stuff fit well with his picture of himself as despised and cruelly rejected by women (even the scornful and rejecting women were all in his mind). He saw the way it was not fair minded, but felt *much* better when he spent a day on REd Pill Youtube. There was a whole fresh take on things that cheered him up. The problem was not that he was a hopeless loser, or that he was too scared to date. It was that women have an agenda of making the most alpha possible male their spouse before they get crows feet, and have no compassion, don't see anything about the guy except how conventionally good looking he is and how much money he makes, and lie and play games to hook an alpha and reel him in. In short, it's a hate-based take on life that cheers up guys who feel bad about themselves and their lives.
What's the scam? I looked into his substack a bit after the previous thread and he's not hiding the fact that his whole idea is job-stacking. It's not necessarily a good idea, but it's not a scam.
Well, he's taking money from people in exchange for helping them commit fraud. Job stacking may not be technically "illegal" (I'm not a layer so I don't know), but every employment agreement I've ever signed had a clause to this effect: "I agree that, during the term of my employment with the Company, I will devote myself full time to the business of the Company."
There’s little evidence that tech suffered from people working from home during Covid, unlike say shipping. That fell off a cliff with people (not) working from home and I’ll leave as an exercise to the reader as to why the difference.
I see no evidence that any major deadlines were missed either, even Apple released in time although they must need the hardware guys mostly in the office, quarterly reports were triumphant across all the industry that I follow, hiring was accelerating.
After covid, this changed.
So why oppose wfh? I think managers like to visibly manage and bean counters like to justify the office rent.
I've read a few threads on the job stacking subredding "overemployed". It's mostly tech jobs, and it sounds like there are three major clusters:
1. People who could be top performers if they concentrate their efforts on one job or mediocre performers if spread between two jobs. They've concluded that they can make better money collecting two early-mid-career plateau salaries rather than finding one job with good advancement tracks and reaping the rewards of being a top performer. They're probably right in the short term, but in the long term they're badly underestimating how much a principal engineer at a big tech company can make.
2. People who are taking jobs where the average workload is very light but you're being paid a premium to make sure you're available for crunch times. This is all fun and games until two jobs have crunch times simultaneously.
3. "Churn and burn" people who have at most one job where they're actually giving a reasonable effort. For the rest, they only put in a token effort and ride it out a few months at a time until their employer fires them. This doesn't hurt prospects for future employments because they only put their primary job on their resume. This was probably a lot more practical during the Covid-era tech hiring boom when it was a lot easier to get hired quickly than it is now.
None of these strike me as terribly ethical, except for the subset of #1 where both employers are aware of the situation (this seems to happen from time to time but is very much not the norm). #3 is by far the worst.
Yes, being a high-level, e.g., Principal Engineer, is quite comfortable.
The thing is, there's no way to have one of those as a stacking job, at this point in your career you're a well-known quantity, there are connections all over the community, people know who you work for, etc.
So you're stuck in Senior Eng. level, at most. Say, you handle - incredibly - three of these. Your total earnings at this point may be 20 to 50 % more than what that Principal Eng. earns.
That's it. That's freakin' it! FFS, is this "Wealth and Power"-getting amount? The whole thing is laughable.
I don't think he's promoting a hateful world view to lure people into a sketchy as hell wealth generation scheme. I think that the hateful world view and the sketchy wealth generation scheme are two separate projects and I'm sure he'd be promoting the former even if he'd never thought of the latter.
Broadly agreed. I wouldn't engage with this guy directly, it's a waste of time, but pointing out to a broader community that he's nothing but a small-time fraud is, I hope, somewhat useful.
I’ve got a question on Zvi’s last post on AI where talks about the risk of “superpowered cultural evolution running under non-human selection pressures.” [https://thezvi.substack.com/p/ai-75-math-is-easier]
I was wondering if anyone has thoughts on some specific examples of what this might hypothetically look like in practice.
Zvi says that in the near future, AI might “do ideological innovation and come up with genuinely new and improved (in effectiveness) rhetoric and ideological arguments and attacks.” He references another argument from Richard Nog that “just as AI will speed up biological gain-of-function research, it’ll also massively speed up ideological gain-of-function work.”
My understanding of this is that “superpower cultured evolution” means LLM generating an ideology that is particularly rhetorically compelling and convinces people to go out onto the streets and riot or overthrow their government. Is it everyone entrusting their social media accounts to bots and then the bots making more and more divisive memes? This seems plausible in theory, but what would a specific example of this look like?
The idea of generating ideologies and then somehow promoting them in such a way that they gain a lot of adherents -- it's odd. Seems to me that that's not how ideologies come into being. They more sprout in the populace the way lots of mushrooms of a certain kind sometimes do overnight in wet areas. Before that night there were lots of spores around, but people were unaware of them -- then conditions made the spores sort of actualize.
I sprouted a crop of druggy, counter-cultural ideas and tastes when I was in college. Mostly that process felt to me like a bunch of stuff that me and my friends were all realizing at the same time. I was aware of alternative explanations, especially the idea that my generation was a bunch of weak, self-indulgent drug addicts, and I knew that theory was wrong. But even in retrospect I don't know what the right explanation was. To me it seems like such changes happen because there are the equivalent of certain spores in the air, invisible to all, and then some change in the world makes them sprout, and then weather over the next period happens to be good for helping that field of mushrooms mature and at spreading their spores. And if it happens that there's enough favorable weather in enough areas then some tipping point is reached and you end up with 20% of US lawns sporting a bunch of mushrooms.
That's just my personal theory, don't know what the dominant ones are among sociologists and historians. If my theory is mostly right, then in order to be successful with spreading an ideology an AI couldn't do anything like just talking up the ideology and its advantages, giving courses in it, etc. It would need to become good at recognizing the spores in the air, finding spores for the mushrooms it thinks are desirable, then at replicating the conditions that help them grow and spread. So it would have to be good at And the latter would involve either creating big events that stir emotion in a lot of people or in somehow inflating the impact of smaller events.
So being able to do all that requires expertise in an area where so far AI is kind of dumb. It has a tin ear for speech and for nuance in communication, for instance. It can't even tell when I'm being sarcastic, it is easy to trick, etc. But I can see a path by which AI could become smart about what ideologies would appeal to people, and what would help an ideology spread and become popular. Maybe you'd start by training it to predict Google trends, using things like news media headlines and twitter topics as a basis for its predictions about trends. (Actually, I wonder if anyone has tried something like that. It seems very doable. Maybe you should!)
Substack's my platform of choice, and for a while I was receiving emailed suggestions of new blogs to check out. (I don't know whether Substack's suggestions were algorithmically curated -- do you?). Anyway, for a while I actually checked out the suggestions I got, but I didn't like a single one of them. None were ridiculously off the mark, they were all just blah in my book. So I stopped reading the emails. I haven't gotten any lately, and I wonder if Substack stopped because it wasn't getting good results with them.
It's whatever the political equivalent of "youtube video thumbnail with bright yellow text and ugly doofus making shocked and confused face" is.
It turns out that this was the most attention-grabbing thing in existence, all along, outcompeting even girls in bikinis, but nobody had ever realised it until someone created the incentive structure whereby small pictures could compete for our attention side by side with the results quickly analysed and billions of dollars riding on the result. Now every fucking video is a doofus making a shocked and confused face beside some bright yellow text.
What could the political equivalent possibly look like? I don't know, but consider how many people can be called into the street to protest about something dumb like George Floyd or Gaza without the slightest understanding of the issue.
> It turns out that this was the most attention-grabbing thing in existence, all along, outcompeting even girls in bikinis
I don't know; I still remember a youtube video titled along the lines of "bodycam - officer administers sobriety test to girl with NO PANTS". It had a lot of views.
> Now every fucking video is a doofus making a shocked and confused face beside some bright yellow text.
On the other hand, I'm not even familiar with this thumbnail format. Are you sure it's not just you?
No, it's not just him, Melvin is onto something here. Even the most innocuous topic videos often seem to have a doofus making a shocked and confused face beside some bright yellow text as the thumbnail.
I just spent a while scrolling down the main page of YouTube and there are (for me) zero videos matching this description.
There are a few that come close, with a guy making a funny, arguably shocked or confused face accompanied by white text, but in that case he's a standup comic, the video shows one of his acts, and the funny face is a part of the act.
A wider category of "an in-your-face mug + screaming bright text" is about half of what I see when I open YouTube, and it infects even what should have been fairly bland topics, turning, "Chord sequences that sound good" into "Use THESE chords to BRING your AUDIENCE to TEARS" or something...
The dumb face thumbnail with bright text is standard for the influencer crowd. Bloggers, streamers, people who make their living on the internet. I don't see it very much on other types of videos though.
> This seems plausible in theory, but what would a specific example of this look like?
The usual example given is that if you or I play chess with Gary Kasparov or Magnus Carlson, we know we'll lose, but can't specify how. Similarly, it's probably hard to come up with examples of propaganda designed by someone smarter.
Still maybe we can use our imaginations. Take your favorite political coalition in whatever country you're in. You're probably aware of all of its internal stress points, even if you don't like thinking about them, even if it would be disloyal to talk about them or even articulate them in your own mind. That's the sort of weak spot that someone smarter than us could see and understand and exploit.
Let's say that the coalition has two parts, group A and group B. Imagine the worst sort of event that could happen that could pit those groups against each other, irrevocably destroying the compromise between them. Imagine the sort of irresponsible news coverage that could inflame passions on both sides against each other. Imagine that the facts dribble out slowly enough that people feel the need to stake out a position based on incomplete information, and unconsciously assume that the facts will match their prejudices, only to find that the actual facts require them to become more and more extreme in order to preserve face.
And that's just me extrapolating from two recent flashpoints in American politics: the Israel-Hamas war and Joe Biden's aging. There are going to be lots of other factors that aren't obvious to me, but would jump out clearly to a superintelligence, the way I can spot a mate in 1.
I think the most powerful force to exploit would be the suffering of some sympathetic victim.
There's no shortage of suffering in the world, we mostly just treat it as background noise. But if someone were to create a direct pipe from the suffering of (say) some exploited twelve-year-old cobalt miner in Congo named Ntoki to your living room, if they gave you hour-by-hour updates on Ntoki's suffering and the iniquities of his oppressors, you would be willing to take to the streets and demand whatever it took to get justice for Ntoki.
Or take Kony 2012. A film made by mere humans and not actively pushed down people's throats, and yet it managed to get people to briefly care about the problem of African warlords. It flamed out, but a better optimised version would not flame out, and we'd all be sitting around occupying Uganda right now.
I agree with what you and Moon Moth are saying, in that it'll be better at rhetoric than we are. But I think that misses that other AIs might be creating counter narratives. For example, Moon Moth talked about one AI splitting a group apart. But what if everyone is under pressure from these sorts of rhetorical attacks? Another AI could also feed some powerful narrative to unite those groups.
I'm also curious about this part of what Zvi said in particular: "superpowered cultural evolution running under non-human selection pressures." This makes me think that Zvi is talking more about a feedback loop of various AI competing with each other. That phrase "selection pressure" makes me think that he sees AI as consumers of culture, as well as producers.
> But what if everyone is under pressure from these sorts of rhetorical attacks? Another AI could also feed some powerful narrative to unite those groups.
There's a fantasy series starting with the book The Dagger and the Coin about some priests who are maximally persuasive, in the sense that anyone who can hear their voice is magically compelled to believe whatever they say.
Within the story, this is eventually revealed as a technology developed by dragons thousands of years in the past for the purpose of getting humans to kill each other. They aren't able to persuade people who can't hear them, so they can't organize at large scales without schisming.
An equilibrium caused by competing pressures isn't going to be stable. If you have three people holding something by pressing into it very hard, all it takes is one stumble and the object goes flying. That trope in movies where two swords are pressed together for long enough that the people exchange glances, is a bad idea because proper technique is to nigh-indtantly identify the incoming pressure and re-route it.
Plus there's almost no chance that competing AIs will exactly balance out. Even if they're identical, reality isn't, and some positions will be easier to exploit than others, and individual events will be more suited for one purpose or another.
I only picked splitting because it was a convenient example that came to mind. There's a lot of other stuff that could be done, too. The basic upshot is that we're going to lose control sooner or later.
As for AIs being consumers of culture, I didn't know what Zvi meant. To me, it's going to be a medium they exist in, and they'll ingest and every it with every action, like a fish in water. (Or like us.) Perhaps there'll be an important inflection point where they devote more of their effort to manipulating each other than manipulating us, but maybe not.
Yeah, the big problem with all the AI doomer narratives is how they always assume there's just one AI that's infinitely more powerful than anything else, even other AIs (which usually seem to not exist at all).
Also, underestimate Murphy's Law at your peril. In real life, your elaborate clever plans will often be foiled by random chance in ways you never even thought of.
But the lack of other AIs follows logically from the assumption of fast takeoff. Which is I think extremely dubious for a number of reasons, but it's a common belief in the AI community and it isn't *completely* absurd.
If there are True AGIs, then the first ones will be created by humans. There will be a first human-created AGI, and a second human-created AGI, and the second AGI will follow the first on a timescale in the normal range for human achievement. Even in a fast-moving world like software development, that means whole *weeks* at very least.
But the usual conception of fast takeoff means the first AGI will hack the internet, grab vast quantities of compute, and bootstrap itself into full ASI status literally overnight. Well, maybe over a long weekend. At that point you'll have one Artificial SuperduperIntellgence looking at a world of glorified monkeys tinkering with not-quite-AGI, and wondering whether it should allow the creation of rival superduperintelligences not aligned to its goals.
Even if the first ASI isn't ready to literally Take Over the World quite yet, it's presumably capable of discretely sabotaging other AI development projects.
I'm looking for a new weight training routine, focused around a barbell, power rack, and a bench. I found the "AllPro" routine via an old SSC comment thread years ago. Still really like it but a little tired of it now. Any (relatively) recently popular/effective routines or other resources been bouncing around here/reddit/whatever?
I second 531 for strength progression - it's fast, it has good progression, and it's got plenty of variants or additions (like BBB) if you want to up the volume in a bulking cycle.
And for what it's worth, I was a regionally competitive powerlifter when I was younger and competing, so I've tried and talked about a lot of different routines over the years. 531 is still my "training base" for baseline strength, though I'll use Mag Ort in mesocycles for progression.
I haven't been serious about lifting heavy for years, but when I was, I had a lot of luck with the high-volume approach of nsuns. A fair warning that these workouts are time-intensive: they can take 90+ minutes 4 or 5 days a week.
A quick google for the AllPro routine makes it look like it progresses on volume weekly, and then goes up in weight after 5 weeks.That seems like a very slow progression that would be best suited to lifters that have already plateaued in their growth. This might be where you're at - though for those newer to their weight training journey (say, not anywhere near the thousand pound club, lifting for less than a year, or simply seeking a more aggressive lifting progression), I might recommend a program that increases weight more frequently. Nsuns, if I recall correctly, increases weight as frequently as weekly - and a beginner program like StrongLifts increases weight as frequently as every two workouts.
Absolutely agreed on the advanced vs novice programming question. I'd recommend Starting Strength over StrongLifts for novice programming, though. The 5 sets x 5 reps used with StrongLifts is more appropriate for the volume phase of intermediate or advanced programming, while the 3 sets x 5 reps of Starting Strength is plenty for a novice, lets you get further without stalling, and makes more efficient use of your workout time.
I agree with 5 x 5. Simple and easy to remember. Start off just an olympic barbell. First day 5x5 squat, bench press, row. Second day rest. Third day 5x5 squat, overhead press, deadlift. Repeat and increase weight by 10 when you feel ready.
There's some nuance with the deadlift and raising the weight *every* time in the official program, but I think the above is the simpler way to get started.
1. It sure seems like the large majority of what American special forces actually did in the GWOT were just raids via helicopter to capture or kill specific people. Are raids really 'special operations' per se? I kind of feel like the definition of what's SF has really been stretched quite a bit, AFAIK conventional militaries were carrying out raids decades before this required special units
2. Seems odd that the large majority of raids in the GWOT were carried out by the SEALS, who in theory are America's naval special warfare unit. Neither Iraq nor Afghanistan involved a lot of maritime operations AFAIK. How did the SEALs take this job on land (for the most part) from the Army and Marines?
3. Hard to believe that the US' current SF model is going to survive a major war against a peer adversary. 2 year long training pipelines where 95% of the enlistees wash out..... feels like a luxury of being without a major war where you're taking serious casualties. Whatever the benefits of such a rigorous pipeline are, I can't imagine that in a future war in the Pacific where we're taking WW2 levels of casualties, the US can really await a 2 year training pipeline for new SF guys. I feel like that's gonna get cut down a lot once the lead starts flying
2 is in a lot of ways related to 1. The US Army doesn't really have a generic "special forces" unit on the lines of the SAS for complicated reasons of internal politics. The 75th Rangers come close, but they're a bit too much normal infantry. Army SF (Green Berets) are mostly trained to do guerilla warfare, and generally do things that aren't shooting. Delta is trained for this, but they're too small and too elite. The Navy doesn't have an existing ground combat force that can object to building a more normal elite unit, so they went ahead and did it with the SEALs. (Well, they did, but it got independent enough that it wasn't really a player.) The SEALs were also helped by getting lots of publicity., and by the fact that they weren't running their recruitment pipeline through a lot of other units. Traditionally, to be in something like Delta, you needed a long time in infantry, whereas you could go straight into the SEALs after the mid-2000s (a mistake, IMO) and even before that it was a pretty quick pipeline relative to other elite units, and you didn't have to spend time in the regular Army.
Re 3, that's not really what SF are for. The SEALs have been deemphasized over the last decade as attention has shifted towards China.
Thanks. Interesting to think that we have less effective special forces in general just due to service internal politics I guess? Infantry types just didn't want resources going to a large, dedicated elite unit?
I think you can go directly into Army SF via an 18x contract FWIW, though I also think that's relatively new. How do other countries do it?
>Interesting to think that we have less effective special forces in general just due to service internal politics I guess?
To be clear, I'm not saying that they're less effective. They're just designed to do different things. Rangers are a very elite infantry unit, but not big on sneaking around behind the lines and such. Army SF is for insurgency and counterinsurgency. Delta does do dramatic raids, but there just aren't that many of them.
>Infantry types just didn't want resources going to a large, dedicated elite unit?
Pretty much. There's always been tension between SF and line units, which see them as siphoning off the best people.
>I think you can go directly into Army SF via an 18x contract FWIW, though I also think that's relatively new. How do other countries do it?
Yeah, that's happened within the last 15 years, and I suspect that this is not working as well as they'd hoped. No clue about other countries.
Actually, I should expand on 1 a bit. It's not that conventional units couldn't do "raids", broadly speaking. But that's not a particularly unitary category, and if you're trying to do snatch and grab raids in the middle of hostile territory, a typical infantry unit isn't going to do a good job of it. The main army is an organization designed to take teenagers camping with maximum firepower and minimum supervision, and the level that that kind of unit can operate at is a lot lower than the level you can get with more selection and training. And you really want everyone to be competent and capable when you're in the middle of hostile territory and need to be gone within an hour or you're in huge trouble.
1. Raids are pretty much the central example of "special operations", and I'm wondering what it is you think *would* be "special" in this context. The baseline, for almost every regular military force in any society functional enough to field an army, is to take *and hold* territory. And that goes triple for the infantry. The purpose of "boots on the ground", is to control the ground. A force that conducts an attack and then hands the territory it just attacked right back to the enemy, is something rather special in military terms. And it does call for different training, tactics, and gear than regular infantry.
2. The SEALS are legitimately good, and they didn't come in to the GWOT with a recent history of embarrassing failures like most of the other SOF elements in the US military. The original Special Forces were still carrying the stink of Vietnam, Delta Force had Iran, and the Rangers had Somalia. The last of which, OK, was really a victory, but not the sort of victory we were going for and not the sort of thing that would lead commanders to say "I want more of that next time; are those guys available?"
3. In the modern era, major wars between high-level peer adversaries have generally lasted only a few weeks or months at most. If you take the leash off a modern war machine, either there won't be anything left to fight after three months, or there won't be anything to fight *with* because the other side's even more capable modern war machine has demolished yours.
Ukraine is a singular exception, but two of the most notable exceptions are that neither side has been able to gain air superiority, and that one side is apparently being drip-fed weapons at
just the rate necessary to prolong a stalemate because Team America is afraid of having *either* side lose. Neither of these will apply to any future war where the United States is directly engaging a peer adversary. The US will almost certainly gain air supremacy, ending the high-intensity phase of the war in months, or if it doesn't it will *lose* the war in months because America's regular forces have absolutely no clue how to hold territory without air supremacy and have been essentially taught not to try.
Raids are a conventional infantry tactic taught to every military around the world. And as I note below, what the SEALS et al spent 15 years of the GWOT doing is air assault, or raids via helicopters. This is standard infantry stuff that the 101st specializes in:
Certainly there are levels of raids- raiding a North Korean nuclear facility requires Tier 1 special operations, no doubt. But my point is that the whole GWOT wasn't that- it was just raiding Abu Whatever's home, probably along with his family, to capture or kill him. In vastly less hostile terrain. I've heard & internalized lots of criticism that we turned the SEALs and Green Berets into just door kickers, basically- like a glorified SWAT team.
I'm just skeptical that you need a 2 year pipeline with a 95% washout rate to find guys who can do this. What's the connection between swimming 10 miles at BUD/S and raiding the villa of some random tribal schlub...... It seems to me that the US SpecOps should be less like the SEALs and more like the Rangers- 3 or 4 month training pipeline, difficult but not impossible course, and then just train up as many guys as you can this way. Better to have a few regiments of elite light infantry plus guys than a few companies of insanely tough, insanely trained types who take 2 years to replace
Yes, they're practically the definition of special operations. Special ops as we know it today basically started with British WWII commando raids. Special ops are almost always "get your special forces in there, they complete an objective (destroying something, killing someone, killing everyone, stealing something, rescuing hostages, or extracting someone), then they leave. So most special operations fall under the general category of "raid". That's what special ops do! What was you understanding of special operations that you believed raiding wasn't the primary example?
2. "SEAL" stands for "Sea, Air, or Land" which reflects the fact that the group, while being part of the Navy, is meant to be used in operations everywhere. They grew out of the Navy Underwater Demolition Teams (UDT), which were primarily sabotage teams at first but had started to take on commando duties as well over the years. As the Vietnam war was starting up the military knew they needed special forces to perform anti-guerrilla operations, and the Navy created the SEAL team to fill that role, staffing it with experienced UDT operatives. So, essentially, we needed an all-purpose anti-guerilla special ops team and the Navy happened to have a team ready that could be easily spun off for that purpose.
I think you're looking at things backwards. We send in the Navy Seals (or other highly trained group) only partly to get the job done. We also send them in so that they always have recent combat experience. If you go 5-10 years without sending them somewhere, and maybe your entire force lacks any real combat experience.
I've heard (and may agree) that the US starts or jumps into wars periodically to get real combat experience (and real logistics, and real everything) for our troops, so that they never become a novice/rookie force. All of the military's incentives line up to encourage this as well, with better funding, new equipment, opportunities to prove themselves (individually for rank and institutionally for credit when winning).
1. What do you think special forces are for, if not secret raids deep into hostile territory to take out high-value targets?
2. I'm not sure if this is true, Army special forces did many of these raids.
3. Yeah, a lot of things in the US military would cease to work so well with WW2 scale casualties. I'd be less worried about the Special Forces training pipeline and more worried about the lack of factories to churn out equipment.
Raids via helicopters are air assault, which is a normal infantry function. The 101st has been doing air assault for as long as helicopters have existed AFAIK. Reinforces my view that all we've done is give regular infantry jobs to SF types and gussied it up
This is misleading. More precisely, the US Marine Corps is part of the United States Department of the Navy. The US Navy is *another* service, also part of the United States Department of the Navy, but independent of the US Marine Corp and equal to it.
Your concerns are not misplaced. Our military is really optimized for small policing/clean-up/get-Bin-Laden operations. The irony is that back in the 0's the Russian military apparently underwent reforms to similar effect, establishing a smaller military good for whacking a small country like Georgia. This proved to be utterly disastrous in a large land war.
If you asked me what's scalable for SF in the middle of a major conflict, I'd say take the 75th Ranger Regiment as a model. It's only a 3 or 4 month pipeline to get in, they only take experienced guys who are already in a major infantry unit like the 82nd or 101st, and they're elite light infantry that does borderline SF stuff (like raids) all the time. No one's pretending that they're Jason Bourne and there's no 2 year pipeline where they learn every single skill under the sun
Actually, I think there's a direct pipeline in these days, or was as of 10 years ago. You could be a year out of high school, and doing raids in Afghanistan (basically direct quote from a book).
My very hypothetical solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict is to have a generation on both sides which is sick of war. Any thoughts about what might make this possible?
Otherwise, we've got a case of "We've got to stop hurting each other. You first."
One factor here is that Palestinians (and other groups) get a lot of money from outside forces (usually Iran and the UN via UNRWA) for keeping this going.
UNRWA is unique in that it lets refugees have inherited status they keep under resettlement (and in that it's absurdly well funded compared to the other UN refugee agency - the one that handles every other refugee case in the world). So it gives a strong financial incentive to keep the conflict going, because if it ended Palestinians would probably stop getting the cash infusion.
Similarly with Iran - e.g. part of the reason Hezbollah in Lebanon is so strong is thag in parts of Lebanon it's the only available employer for a lot of people.
Bush wasn't wrong that both sides were sick of the war. What he underestimated was anti-democratic resilience. If you could put it to an honest vote I think the vast majority of Palestinians would vote for an end if they could be convinced it would lead to security and prosperity. But the ruling terrorist organizations would not because that would be the end of them.
But how do you take power out of their hands and put it into the hands of a civilian leadership? How do you keep them in power when the terrorists will shoot any civilian leadership that defies them? When there are outside powers that will actively keep those factions alive because it makes Palestine geopolitically useful to them? When the Palestinian government is so weak it cannot credibly promise Israel no more attacks because they can't effectively police their own population?
That's the issue. Israel's current government might not be good for peace but I know how to get rid of them. They just need to lose a vote. If we need to change the IDF in some way then I believe the government could do that. Palestine has no similar mechanism.
The Chinese have solved this exact problem with "re-education camps". They're criticized as inhumane etc but they definitely got rid of any trace of extremist ideology.
They didn't though. Uighur separatism still exists and now has a large diaspora of refugees who've been radicalized. Also, China didn't solve the problem of anti-democratic forces running Xinjiang. At no point did the Uighurs have a separate government that effectively ran the region. Even China doesn't claim that.
Are these refugees settled in a nearby country, well armed and preparing for an invasion? A bunch of angry people protesting in front of a Chinese consulate in Berlin is of zero consequence. For something as grand as overthrowing the Chinese regime in western China you’d need at least 100,000 armed men and some way of getting to the flat part of the Chinese border efficiently. Which country is going to let them do that? There can be a billion angry refugees out there but they’re completely powerless to change anything without guns in their hands.
And the lack of “democratic forces” is a feature from the Chinese perspective?
> And the lack of “democratic forces” is a feature from the Chinese perspective?
That was the original topic. China did none of the things that I said would be difficult in Palestine. You changed the topic for some reason.
> Are these refugees settled in a nearby country, well armed and preparing for an invasion?
They're not preparing for an invasion, no, because that's not how terrorism works. Most of them are in nearby states and relatively few in Europe. There are multiple states nearby that don't care enough to really help China and one outright terrorist state on China's border.
You're changing the goalposts a great deal here. No one talked about overthrowing the Chinese regime.
> China did none of the things that I said would be difficult in Palestine. You changed the topic for some reason.
China didn't do those things in their other provinces either, that's how China works. Re-education is about suppressing extremists in society. That it wasn't followed up with democracy is just a consequence of China not having free elections in the first place. The question was about how to stop radicals from influencing local society - and "re-educating" the population is something that clearly works.
> They're not preparing for an invasion, no, because that's not how terrorism works. Most of them are in nearby states and relatively few in Europe. There are multiple states nearby that don't care enough to really help China and one outright terrorist state on China's border.
So far these "radicalized" refugees have been a complete and utter failure? The last serious attack in Xinjiang was 10 years ago. They might be extremely radicalized or whatnot but this appears to be no match for Chinese security forces.
I don't think we can emphasize enough how important Iran is to that conflict. Israel could probably just win without Iranian interference. If Israel could outright win, it might (hard to guarantee, but it at least puts it on the table) actually give rights to the Palestinians.
If Iran wants to keep putting hardliners in charge and give them weapons, it's going to be really hard for anyone else to end the cycle.
I agree Iran is the main force behind the current attacks. But just as Israel has switched patrons so have the Palestinians. If you could deprive them of any support at all then it would get easier to defeat them. But they already sided with the Soviets and Iran and have recently made overtures to China. So I'm not sure it's that easy. Likewise I don't think the US can just force Israel to do what it wants.
"The Rwandan genocide, also known as the genocide against the Tutsi, occurred between 7 April and 19 July 1994 during the Rwandan Civil War.[4][5] During this period of around 100 days, members of the Tutsi minority ethnic group, as well as some moderate Hutu and Twa, were killed by armed Hutu militias."
Apparently 800,000 to a million people were killed in that timeframe. Not exactly a great solution here. We're at maybe 150,000 in the current war, going on 10 months.
Anecdote: When I was a young IDF OCS cadet I spent a week doing guard duty in Otniel, a relatively big Area C settlement. The town's security chief told us that he used to have Arab youth from the surrounding villages regularly vandalize their fences, throw rocks at cars, occasional molotov cocktails etc. Then he went to each of the villages one by one and offered these people construction jobs in the expansion of Otniel. My time there was a very peaceful week of just checking IDs and work permits of dozens of Palestinian men paid well building Jewish homes.
This contributed to my personal vision that violence will always exist, but a high enough level of economic and political cooperation will incentivize both sides to actively fight against it - the Palestinians to clamp down on their terrorists in-house (preventing the need for the IDF to come in), and the Israelis to stop settler violence and reduce counterterrorism to minimally oppressive levels. The high level of cooperation with the PA Muhabarat (despite Netanyahu) and the hundreds of thousands of West Bank Palestinians that used to come work every day in Israel are my main sources of optimism.
It is worth noting, in general, that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has five sides at least: The Israeli society with a wide range of value systems including land vs life, the Palestinian society (societies? Israeli/WB/Gaza Palestinians all have very different contexts) with a wide range of value systems, the anti-Israel axis (Iran-Hamas-Hizballa-PIJ etc) with a narrow range of values optimizing for using Palestinians to destroy Israel, and different global superpowers with their own interests. Which makes navigating it with minimal life loss much more challenging than simple two-sided blood feuds.
I have a model of Palestinian and Israeli psychology that goes like this: Palestinians, as the underdog, want a better future for their children by changing the status quo. They see two possible paths there: 1) The fake easy path, by which you 'retvrn' to some mythical glorious past Palestine where everything was great by removing all the Jews, and 2) the hard real path, by which you cooperate with Israel in building the Palestine you want. How many people follow each path (and therefore, how much they are likely to follow/tolerate/stop Iran-backed terrorists trying to push path #1 versus participate in the hard institution-building of path #2) depends on how likely they find each path to be. For example, if you're in Gaza, think that there are only ~1-2M Israelis that will run back to Europe at any moment, and anything good you build ends up standing in the way between a Hamas tunnel and a bomb from an F-16, you understandably find path #1 more likely. There's an excellent scene in the series Fauda where a PA Mukhabarat official takes his son, who is beginning to be swayed by a charismatic Isis terrorist, to have coffee in Jaffa. The father points at the Tel Aviv skyscrapers around them not with a lesson about how Israelis are good and deserve to live, but just about how much of Israel there is, how no one is going anywhere and how the most his son is going to achieve is killing himself and a few Israelis, getting no one anywhere.
Israelis on the other hand, are very anxious about preserving what they know (even before Oct 7th) is a very precarious status quo of relative prosperity, security and safety. When and only when you return, with military supremacy, to the level of confidence and safety Israelis had before, you will find willingness to compromise and take risks for some longer-term peace. The 1979 peace deal with Egypt, for example, with considerable territory concessions, came on the heels of successfully beating back the 1973 invasion. And lots of peace talks in the early 2000's came only after somewhat stemming the flow of suicide bombers by 2002 IDF work in the West Bank ("Operation Shield Wall") and building the wall.
As Israelis, we need to thread the very difficult and contradictory needle of ruthlessly killing any hope for path #1 and simultaneously building and promoting path #2. It's hard because the first requires somewhat oppressive counterterrorism and the second is very harmed by it. That's why IDF supremacy over Hamas/PIJ/Hizballa/Iran, professionalism (e.g. punishing the fuck out of soldiers raping Hamas Nukhbas), stopping settler violence, and cooperating with the PA on everything from security to investments, are all so crucial.
Do you think something like $2 billion a year in aid, probably from the US, could go to Gaza for the purposes of building up a real country, pieces at a time? And such aid would stop for a year after any attacks on Israel?
There *will* be attacks on Israel, if only because there will be Palestinians who would wind up relatively worse off in the hypothetical peaceful and rebuilt Gaza so if they can stop that with a few rockets they will.
If you're going to offer aid but yank it away for a year after any attack, and the attacks are inevitable, then what's even the point?
The one thing Gaza absolutely needs as a precondition for peace and prosperity, is for its streets to be patrolled by a force that will immediately shoot dead any Palestinian they catch trying to launch rockets at Israel. And as it turns out, the only force willing to take on that job is the IDF.
It's true it isn't a perfect plan, and I don't know how to fix the specifics of the crazies who don't want it to work. One aspect, I think, is the people's unwillingness to give up the aid that is making their lives better, so they may root out those that would fire those rockets and prevent it happening. This would effectively be the patrol force you mentioned.
Maybe instead of saying the "aid stops if Israel is attacked" say "the aid MAY stop if Israel is attacked"? Some other stipulations?
What little I understand about middle-east thinking indicates anyone NOT receiving that aid may be jealous enough of those that ARE receiving the aid to stop the aid from coming, which would, of course, make this fail.
>What little I understand about middle-east thinking indicates anyone NOT receiving that aid may be jealous enough of those that ARE receiving the aid to stop the aid from coming, which would, of course, make this fail.
That's not middle-east thinking, that's everywhere-thinking. And it's not just the people who are NOT receiving the aid, it's the people who aren't CONTROLLING the aid but think they ought to be. The ability to decide who gets aid and who doesn't represents real power, and commands real deference and respect. Whoever has the power, wants to expand their power to ensure they remain on top, and that means they want *all* the aid to go to themselves, and then through them to their loyal supporters.
Pretty much anywhere aid is being delivered, without an armed escort with permissive rules of engagement, the local Big Man's armed thugs are going to show up and take the aid to distribute themselves. At best, they'll let the aid agency's people and trucks make the deliveries, but with the Big Man's thugs riding shotgun so everybody knows who's in charge - and only to the places populated by the Big Man's loyal supporters.
> so they may root out those that would fire those rockets and prevent it happening
And this is pretty much Nowhere Thinking. Well, nowhere outside of thought experiments populated by the simplest ECON 101 automatons. In the real world, and especially the real Arab world, the benefits of such action are diffuse and unreliable, whereas the costs are real, substantial, immediate, and certain. Even if everyone collectively would benefit from such a policy being applied collectively, pretty much everyone individually will look at the situation and say "Someone else go first. And second and third".
> What little I understand about middle-east thinking indicates anyone NOT receiving that aid may be jealous enough of those that ARE receiving the aid to stop the aid from coming, which would, of course, make this fail.
Something like this is my biggest problem with sending aid to dysfunctional states. During the '90s in Somalia, there was a huge famine and outbreak of a civil war. The UN and US launched a huge food aid operation to the tune of billions of dollars per year. When the food arrived in Somalia, it was deliberately targeted by militant groups. These militants would kill opposition peoples to steal the food and starve them into submission. Gangs of thieves and looters would target the food shipments. Rampant corruption saw food delivered to kitchens and towns that didn't exist. The aid organizations had to hire Somali mercenaries to protect themselves (which is where the term "technical", referring to a civilian truck with heavy weapons mounted on it came from). During the worst parts of the war/famine, somewhere between 50-80% of the food was lost or stolen.
Food shortages in the world today only happen because corrupt and/or dysfunctional states break down the needed distribution networks. As long as Hamas is in control of Gaza, they will take all of the aid they can and use it as leverage to further entrench their own power structure.
A lot of things in politics are economic anxiety. The strange part is this, people do not express their economic anxiety directly. They do not hold demos demanding more jobs and higher paying jobs. They express their economic anxiety by getting angry about random unconnected matters.
Look at universities in the West. The pay is shit and the working conditions bad. Are they talking about this? No, they talk about random unconnected social justice stuff.
If people weren't sick enough of war after WW1 to stop WW2 from happening, this seems like a rather difficult goal to achieve. But after WW2, the former axis powers all seem to have grown tired of war. Some of the things that were done to Germany, such as rapes and mass murder of civilians and other grave war crimes, it seems to me that Israel will not do to Gaza, but ethnic cleansing and occupation and massive propaganda seem to still be on the table, and perhaps that will be enough.
That would be the mass murder of civilians that I mentioned, but I'm not convinced that Hiroshima would be that much more of a deterrent than Dresden in that regard. On the other hand, Egypt and Jordan have come to accept peace without any such events.
The implication is that the difference between WW2 and WW1 is that Germany experienced greater war crimes at the hands of the USSR, which made them not want to try again. I'm skeptical that that actually is the explanatory factory in Germany giving up on belligerency.
The big difference in NI is that you had both the Republic and the ex-NI UK to be the ‘adults in the room’ against the extremists. There’s nothing like that in the Middle East. The Palestinians are a convenient abstraction to the other Arab states, but they sure as hell don’t want them coming to their countries. And while secular Israelis opposed to the settlers in the WB are probably still a narrow majority in Israel, they’re sufficiently small that they can’t do much about Netanyahu.
The discussion here is about the broader I/P conflict, not about the current war.
If the end goal is something like a functioning and economically viable sovereign Palestinian state that isn’t a security threat to Israel - i.e. what most moderates at least claim to want - then the sizable minority of Israelis who want to totally annex the WB are are a sizable obstacle to that.
One gets sick of war by experiencing it, and this region has been a shit show for generations, so this seems like a moot point. Inhabitants are likely sick of war.
The hostile nations fueling these terrorist organizations don't have to endure the hardship first-hand.
Hamas pre-empting Israel in no way helped them avoid getting conquered. You just need them to be sick enough of war to not attack the obviously more powerful opponent.
When it comes to sex, socially progressives and socially conservatives often argue from not only different moral standpoints but from different theories of sexuality development:
- Conservatives have a "vice" model: everyone is born more or less with a standard heterosexual vanilla kit of sexual preferences, but the more one is exposed to different temptations and to sex itself the more prone one is to developing and fixating to unnatural sexual preferences. That's why conservative-minded people work to limit exposure and expression of sex in public discourse, and also argue for a more restrained sex life (saving oneself to marriage and whatnot) lest one degrades its own sex instinct
- Progressives have a more "inherent" model: people are born with different sex preferences that may lie dormant within oneself until one is exposed to the right stimuli. This may be necessary for one to fully blossom into its own and achieve happiness. That's why progressive-minded people argue for more exposure and expression of sex in public discourse
Apart from the moral pov, this question seems like it has a very objective answer. Which of the models more accurately represent the development of the sex drive? I think conservatives have a point, it seems to be a widely agreed experience that consumption of pornography leads one to remarkably specific (and sometimes extreme) fetishes., for example. However, I think progressives also do have a point in the sense that some people seem to have a pretty strong innate preference to being e.g heterossexual or homossexual
What does science tells us about the development of sexual identity, and how would this help us shape policy on the matter more effectively?
Science does not have an answer yet. But our concepts of gay/straight do not cut reality at its joints. The Roman Model works better, Ozy wrote 1930's London or NY used the Roman Model. That is, there were feminine men being penetrated during sex, they were very camp, very stereotypically gay. And there were men penetrating them who mostly looked and acted like everybody else and they were not considered gay or anything unusual, because the important factor was not the gender of the partner, but whether being penetrated or penetrator. The Roman Model keeps popping up everywhere - for example in Russian prisons, they rape gay men and other "roosters", but they do not consider the rapist gay.
I am not saying the RM is inherently true, a lot of people object to it (Dommes for starters), but I am saying patriarchy seems to engineer an RM everywhere.
I think that homo/hetero aside, people are pretty susceptible to social pressure in terms of how they have sex.
Consider oral sex. At some point this was a weird specialty thing, now it's pretty much compulsory. Whether you enjoy giving it or not, you are expected to, and if you don't it will limit your prospects.
_Sex Is Not a Natural Act and Other Essays_ is about the premise that sex, like music, is strongly influenced by culture, and it's just cruelty to tell people it's natural, and they should just be able to get it right.
A possibly-related thing: new mothers and babies do *not* automatically get nursing right. In fact, there are lactation consultants (doing a job that was probably being done before humans had language) who help women and babies figure out how to get nursing to work. This is right on the critical path for successful reproduction, much as sex is, and yet we can't get by on just instinct, but instead often need accumulated knowledge to get it right.
Maybe there are natural instincts there, but they eventually figured out better ways. If we are not taught to eat with a fork, we can still just grab food and bite it.
I admit it: It's 14 transsexuals who dance on the head of a pin held in the mouth of Bigfoot while he rides a unicorn to the College of Gender and Leprechauns.
But I swore an oath not to tell anyone, so keep it close.
Apropos the science, this study found that feelings of gender dysphoria are highest in kids at the beginning of adolescence (age 11), and they fall until age 19 when the rates level out into young adulthood. From 11.8% for males and 12.9% females at age 11, down to 2.7% for males and 2.8% for females at age 19.
I was probably around 11 when as a boy I started doing things like trying my moms make-up. No one thought I am trans because that was not a thing in 1988 Budapest. But they also did not yell at me for being unmanly. They just treated it as exploration. It was. Eventually I stopped.
The study uses the term "gender non-contentedness", since they're using a much lower bar than a clinical diagnosis for gender dysphoria: answering "sometimes" or "often" rather than "never" to the prompt "I wish to be of the opposite sex". This should capture actual gender dysphoria, but will also capture vague "grass is greener" dissatisfaction that has nothing to do with a desire to transition.
The "sometimes" response is doing the heavy lifting in the top-line numbers. If you only look at "often" to the first question, you get a very different picture. The dissatisfaction rate starts in the 1-2% range at age 11, declines to about 0.1% by the late teens, and then increases again again in the early 20s.
Figures 2 and 3 also breaks down the population into three cohorts based on an LCGA clustering analysis. 78% show consistently no dissatisfaction over time. 19% show decreasing gender non-contentedness (most of these all of these responding "sometimes" in the youngest assessment wave and then "never' in most or all of the subsequent waves; almost none of these answer "often" after the second wave) and 2% showing increasing non-contentedness (starting low for both sometime/often and both increasing gradually over time to about 20% "often" and 75% "sometimes").
My own experience is that I would have started answering "sometimes" starting around age 13. I am trans. I started transitioning about two years ago, at the age of 41, and my only regret is not starting sooner.
My intuitive sense is that heterosexual/homosexual/bisexual comes down to innate preferences, but how intensely a person desires sex and how often a person thinks about sex, is influenced greatly by the surrounding culture.
If you grow up in a conservative culture where sex is rarely talked about or showcased, it really is likely that you'll think about it less than if you grow up in, say, modern America. You'll still have sexual desires, because that's innate to who we are, but it probably won't dominate your thoughts like it does for many modern people in the west. Well, unless you meet that special someone that you have an immediate crush on... but perhaps that's a good thing? Sexual desires heighten due to a specific person catching your attention, not out of society showcasing lots of sexual content to you.
The above being said, there's probably a golden mean somewhere between the conservative view on sex and the progressive view on sex. Perhaps it can be argued that this golden mean was achieved in 1990s or 00s America? Just a thought.
Personal story. I think I grew up in a fairly liberal culture, yet considered sex just disgusting, like eating or pissing, an animal thing people of the mind should be above. I didn't like my spirit being trapped in a body with animal needs.
Yet I liked girls, and I liked them for their beauty, but it was a non-sexual desire, more aesthetic, I sort of saw them as artwork I would like to own. I liked those girls who looked very pure, angelic, sort of not looking like someone who does sex.
Many decades later the LOTR movies happened and Liv Tyler as Arwen looked exactly like those non-sexually beautiful girls I used to worship.
So maybe this is actually a thing and not just me alone being weird? Does this has a name? I do get it it might be rooted in some kind of Madonna-whore complex, but usually ,most men most of the time like sexy women and like them in a sexual way.
I understand where you're coming from. Or at least I think I do.
"Beautiful" and "sexy" are two pretty different things in my own eyes. It's possible to be both, but also very possible to be strong in one while not having much of the other. Liv Tyler's Arwen is a great example of this sort of strong non-sexual beauty. It's a beauty that's just pleasant to see with the eyes, to have around. It's passively life-affirming, like great architecture or great weather.
Well, given falling reproduction rates in modern 1st world countries... maybe Darwinian ones? Current levels of sexual progressivism certainly doesn't seem to support Darwinism if by Darwinism we mean "survival and propagation of the species".
Anyway, I was thinking along the lines of general societal well-being. Happy and successful marriages, stable supportive families, etc...
Yeah, the point is that if the metric was Darwinian success, one wouldn't use a below-replacement outcome for a mean.
Last week I waded into an argument on whether the blue or red state model was more conducive to stable marriages. https://x.com/TeaGeeGeePea/status/1818864999940431892 It's true that divorces are more common when people marry early rather than later. Latest of all would be immediately before death, resulting in a 0% divorce rate, but not actually constituting meaningfully stable marriages. I suggested a metric of years in longest marriage (rather than total years married, though thinking now that would ding people whose marriages ended in death rather than divorce).
I'm curious as the evidence that exposure to porn leads to fetishes. I understood that to be false, and largely a boggeyman. My understanding was that the rate of fetishes over time has more or less been constant, and that it just the internet enabling fringe communities to form that has lead to greater fetish awareness (e.g. 100 years ago, Kevin might privately like feat - but nobody else would know, and he certainly wouldn't be part of any foot fetish community).
I was 19 in 1997, hadn't the slightest idea fetishes exist, except that I found the whipping scenes in Conan books cool. Then I stumbled upon one S/M fictional story online and it felt like I was plugged into an electric outlet. I knew it immediately.
So it was not created by exposure. But the rate could not have been constant either as I simply had no idea this is a thing before. Not everybody read Story of O or Gor.
> Then I stumbled upon one S/M fictional story online and it felt like I was plugged into an electric outlet.
I just made a satisfied "Humphyes!" sound, out loud, by myself, reading this.
I'm just about your age. I had an emotionally secure, trauma-free childhood and wasn't exposed to anything to do with sex or kink (this was the '80s, so not even a basic bird and bees for kindergarteners chat), but cartoons about princesses being kidnapped and/or tied up and/or imprisoned nevertheless made such a strong impression that I would tie up my stuffed bunnies acting out those stories every night. Once, when I was five or six and deeply bored after being put to bed much too early, I tied myself up with a jump rope, couldn't get free, couldn't summon my parents over the sound of the TV, and had to fall out of bed and inchworm to the living room to be cut free with scissors.
When I got old enough for text rather than subtext, I likewise knew immediately.
I can't locate any studies in Google Scholar that discuss the exposure to porn and the development of fetishes. There may be some, but the various key words I used didn't turn up anything useful. There seem to be lots of therapy-oriented sites that deal with fetishes that claim porn is the cause. I think it's one of those urban myths that everyone assumes is true but have never been proven.
I doubt that. People can't have a fetish for, say, latex, if they don't even know that exists. If you came from a culture where spanking didn't exist, you also wouldn't have a fetish for that prior to discovering its existence.
Yes, but fetish knowledge doesn't require ubiquitous porn or social media coverage to spread. For instance, latex fetishism dates back 200 years to the invention of latex-coated rain gear in the 1820s. Almost immediately some people noticed that latex could provide a smooth friction-free source of stimulation, and underground publications sprang up discussing the sensual pleasures provided by the smooth new Mackintosh raincoats — along with a slang term for the fetish: "macking". In the UK in the 1920s latex fetishists founded The Mackintosh Society, one of the UK’s first modern fetish organizations. Latex fetishists were forced underground during the conservative resurgence of the 1950s, but I think it's safe to say, with the exceptions of phone sex and sexting, that most fetishes predate ubiquitous pornography.
Underground publications are like a lower-reach version of the internet. And the 1920s is after pornographic films began, and longer after pornographic photography.
I read le raz as claiming fetishes are effectively zero-sum. The distribution might change but the rate of fetishists in the community stays about the same.
I have no idea if this is true or not but I can imagine reasons why it might be.
My reading of the inherent model you propose is that people are trying to introduce discussion of sexuality into public discourse so that people engage in sex earlier in life than they would have otherwise. Is that what you mean to say? I've never heard anyone argue that starting sex younger is _good_; I've only heard people argue that young people are going to engage in sex whether we like it or not, so we should probably try to make sure they at least understand it.
I've never seen people flat out argue that early sex is good, but I've seen people boast about their own early sex as though it's a sign of gusto for life.
How early is early? Nobody is pushing 13-year-olds having sex, but Hollywood definitely promotes the idea that you're weird if you're a virgin when you graduate high school.
Consent is super important kids! But you'd better consent to sex with _someone_ in your so far incredibly limited social circle, or else you're a weirdo.
Sex education is also weird or contradictory in that it supposes that teenagers are having sex from about 13, while mostly the law and culture also abhors that.
Is it that contradictory? We don’t want them to, but some will, and the outcomes are better overall if we tell young kids “tell a trusted adult as soon as possible if someone touches you in a swimsuit area”, slightly older kids “here’s what periods are, your bodies might start doing that to you any time in the next few years” and slightly older kids “here’s how a condom works, don’t ever touch privates together without one, if you need one here’s where you can get one” than if we do none of those things.
Do you remember being a kid? Default playground discourse is at the level of “douse the area in Coca-Cola afterwards, it’ll be fine”. Absence of correct information won’t stop kids being idiots or bad things happening to kids; it’ll just make the results worse when they do.
We don't want thirteen-year-olds to be drinking, or shooting people whether deliberately or accidentally. But we know that some will. And yet both "we should teach people how to drink responsibly in their early teens" and "we should teach people how to handle firearms safely in their early teens" are minority positions of the political left and right, respectively. As a libertarian, I of course favor all three.
Yes, inevitably, some people will do these things even if nobody teaches them. Also inevitably, some people will do these things *only because* somebody taught them and normalized the concept. It isn't obvious that the reduced risk per participant due to education, outweighs the increased number of participants due to education.
I think it probably does, but most people are driven more by loss aversion, status quo bias, and "first do no harm". So solutions where the first step is to nudge people sex/drugs/guns/whatever as a Thing They Could Do If They Wanted, and then hope it works out because of the education, are rarely going to be popular.
I don't think that's true at all - I think two things are being conflated here. There's "sex ed" in late-elementary/early-middle school (~11-14) and "sex ed" in high school, which despite being named the same are two very different things.
The former (which I had at 12) mostly focuses on *puberty*, which all 13 year olds *are* going through, and might touch on "you're going to get horny, you don't have to be ashamed". It's an education in "(biological) sexual development".
Then there was the "sex ed" I had in high school (15-17) which definitely had "safe sex" and stds and stuff as a major focus. It was an education in "sexual relations"
The two are similar, and there's arguments to include some of the latter in the former since they'll need it eventually, but the former is taught when it is for a reason.
This is way out there in hypothesis land, but in retrospect, did it make sense for Israel to take over the West Bank? Originally, it seemed reasonable to worry about Israel having a very vulnerable narrow stretch.
The actual consequences of taking over that land has been making a lot of Palestinian's lives worse, even before 10/7.
It may be possible to end Hamas in some sense, but I assume there will be successor organizations.
Maybe it would have made more sense to establish a few military installations to defend the region, and not do more than that.
I think if I could go back to 1967, I'd tell them to either give the west bank back to Jordan at once (tactical loss due to its elevation but long term gain), or if they're taking it, expel the population back into Jordan rather than having this constant half status for the next fifty years (it'd be ugly, but not as ugly as what actually happened). I think holding the west bank as is turned out badly for everyone involved.
On the other hand, that was sixty years ago and rethinking what we could've done then probably isn't useful anymore.
The Jordanians would almost certainly not have accepted them, and the Israelis would have been properly blamed for the consequences. It's pretty basic in international law that if you round up a bunch of people and dump them on a country that is neither theirs nor yours and say "these are your problem now", you're the baddie.
But I think things worked reasonably well for the decade when the West Bank was just Palestinians and IDF soldiers, the latter guarding the border and backstopping the local West Bank authorities in the "this *will* be an orderly society with absolutely no Jew-killing" department. It was the addition of settlers to the mix that ruined things for just about everyone.
So, keep the West Bank but don't let the settlers get started, would I think have been the winning move.
Maybe the same deal for Gaza, but I think there would need to have been more of a focus on economic development there.
On a practical level, The Jordanians had just lost the war and weren't in position to object. On a "it makes you the baddies level", I agree with the moral implications being bad, I just think it would've been less bad than what we ended up getting. My preferred solution would be no occupation at all (you could make the case for minor border adjustments for security reasons, which wouldn't require much moving of actual people), but even a full rip-the-bandaid occupation+eviction would have been better than the result we got.
Re "it was fine without the settlements", I think that part is actually false. Compare Gaza, which doesn't have settlements, and is much worse and more militant than the WB. (You can make the argument that if there had never been any settlements to begin with the militancy wouldn't have developed, but I don't think that really holds up).
On a practical level, Israel couldn't really get away with invading Jordan, so Jordan really could object to having refugees pushed across that border. And when they all died of thirst in the five-foot strip between the Jordanian border and the Jordanian razor wire, that wouldn't be seen as Jordan's fault.
Yeah there's a moral case for that. But I think if they decided not to expel people they should have drawn borders without them and stuck to those borders rather than keep a significant number of people in a half/half status, which was worse than either extreme.
They're worse off than Jordanian citizens in Jordan. It's not clear that they're worse off than Palestinians in Jordan, but you hardly ever see or hear about them in the news.
And any plan that proposes to solve this problem by having the Jordanians (or Egyptians or Lebanese or Saudis or whatever) arrange for Palestinians to be living good lives in *their* countries, is probably a non-starter.
>We should drop this idea that solving a problem isn't worth it if the solution is only temporary. Many problems can only ever have temporary solutions.
Agreed. In a broad sense, I'd guess that the _vast_ majority of problems can only ever have temporary solutions.
I don't think a generation sick of war is a permanent solution, since there are always more generations. It could be a fairly long term solution, though.
Many Thanks! Mostly agreed. Even if the populations on both sides are sick of war, the population also has to control the leadership, which is, at best, only partially true, even in democratic nations (and much worse in Gaza and similar places, as other commenters have noted).
I'm an early-30s Canadian planning to move to NYC this October. I'm looking to sublet a room or apartment for 1-3 months to help me get settled before finding my own place.
If anyone knows of a potential sublet opportunity, either for a room or full apartment, I'd love to hear about it.
Additionally, I'm aware there are many Facebook pages and websites where people post NYC sublet and housing opportunities. If you have any recommendations on where I should be looking or posting, I would greatly appreciate your suggestions.
I can provide more information about my background and lots of references if needed.
Check out HousingPanda.com. You can probably find some decent options on there. I’d also post in the r/nyu r/baruch r/columbia subreddits saying you’re looking.
Maybe there's a difference between designing for developing countries and designs that get picked up independently in poor countries. The conspicuous examples for the latter are bicycles and cellphones.
Bicycles are almost intuitive-- all you need to do is see someone ride one.
So far as problems with mosquito nets used for fishing are concerned (the mesh is so small, they catch all the fish, even the tiny ones, it's like clear-cutting), maybe it would be a good idea to make cheap fishing nets with a larger mesh. Or not. Perhaps research is required.
I suspect the video is too hard on mosquito nets. Some ill effects aren't the same thing as a hopelessly stupid project.
As I recall, one of the problems with the playground water pump is that it was necessarily was harder to push than a proper toy, since some of the energy went into pumping water, so it wasn't as good a toy.
This is certainly more than I knew about what went wrong with One Laptop Per Child.
I think the video is mistaken about how much help children need with learning to walk, but it's at least true that children see people walking, I haven't raised a child. Do children need help with learning to walk?
Well, is it? I think of smooth roads as a necessity of biking, but (1) mountain biking is a sport; and (2) I don't expect poor countries to have smooth roads. Though I'd have to admit that when I say "poor countries" there, I really mean sub-Saharan Africa; I see no real obstacle to other poor countries having working roads.
Which poor countries were you thinking of as an example of voluntary adoption of bicycles? Normal bikes or mountain bikes?
I was thinking that roads are needed, but they don't have to be very good roads. Presumably that's how it is in sub-Saharan Africa. I'd be surprised if people are riding bikes in totally unpaved jungle.
There might be areas where, for at least part of the year, unpaved ground is good enough.
> I'd be surprised if people are riding bikes in totally unpaved jungle.
Riding a bike through an unpaved jungle is most definitely impossible. Following an elephant trail might make it possible in some sense, but I can easily imagine that it would be worse than walking.
My impression is that SSA countries are generally able to put roads down, but not able to maintain them, such that roads that go through remote regions may often be impassable to cars. But this is actually much less of a problem if you have a bike; when you come to the break in the road, even if you can't ride across it, you can just walk or carry your bike over it.
Flat tires look like more of an issue if you're going cross-country.
For local trips... I do voluntarily bike over rough cobbled-ish sidewalks occasionally, for distances of 0.5 - 1 city blocks. But it's not something I'd expect a lot of people to do regularly; biking over a road that isn't smooth basically means being constantly kicked in the crotch.
I was involved years ago in a UNICEF planning project to build the water pumping carousels, before it became clear they weren't effective, and consequently I've spent a lot of time stewing on how I could have noticed it wouldn't been fun for kids to actually use, if I'd exercised the right sort of attention.
It didn't take long when I applied myself to the question to come up with alternatives which would actually be fun to use. Any sort of play equipment where applying force against resistance is part of it's proper function should be a candidate. So, something like a Zipline, or a pole children can slide down, where the force of decelerating them against gravity could be used to pump water. I haven't done the calculations on the yield you could get from something like this, but it's better in its fundamentals than the carousel. If anyone wants to help explore the feasibility of this, let me know.
I can imagine designs that would be more fun to play with. But they'd still be expensive, complicated pieces of machinery that can easily break, and which produce a tiny amount of energy on a very sporadic basis.
A small electric pump with a generator (or solar panel) to charge it would surely be far cheaper.
Checking the numbers is definitely an important step, but I think there was another issue at work here (if not exclusively.) The device works in terms of basic physics, but it's trying to reconcile two separate functions which are at odds with each other. If it's good at being a device which pumps water out of the ground (which requires applying resistance against the work the children put in to spin it,) it's bad at being a playground carousel (which requires it to have low friction and continue spinning when the children apply force and then jump on.)
But I guess it goes to show how bad the do-gooder instinct can be. If people were willing to put effort into this idea that any undergrad can tell you is a bad idea, how much effort is going into improving the lives of poor Africans via ideas which are flawed in subtler more economic ways?
What seems like one of the first numbers you'd check?
When I was involved in the project, I was about twenty, and the notion of running the numbers for how much water you'd actually be able to draw that way definitely occurred to me. But my understanding was, a) whoever originally designed it had already run the numbers on that, and b) it was never intended to be a grand scale project to draw all the water the communities needed, but a cheap way to decrease the shortfall by drawing water with "wasted" energy children would have spent anyway, in communities with very limited access to electricity which were already drawing much of their water by hand. The problem wasn't that it didn't occur to anyone that this wouldn't be able to draw very much water as a matter of basic physics, but that it didn't fulfill its purpose of making use of "wasted" energy in communities which already had to draw much of their water by hand, because nobody actually wanted to use it.
>it didn't fulfill its purpose of making use of "wasted" energy in communities which already had to draw much of their water by hand, because nobody actually wanted to use it.
Not to say anything that hasn't already been covered, but if you want to devote your energy into drawing water out of the ground, you can already do that by using a well or a pump normally. It's one of the most infamously unpleasant tasks that a rural existence calls for. (Well, not necessarily drawing water. Carrying water around is the famously unpleasant task. Water is heavy! But being heavy seems like a downside for extraction too.)
It seems unlikely to get *more* pleasant if you replace the pump with a less efficient pump.
Or from another perspective, the energy the children were spending wasn't being wasted, because it was entertaining them, and the design specifically sought to remove that benefit from the energy expenditure.
I don't know whether those phrasings might usefully apply to other similar project proposals.
My take away was that the core problem is that much more labor is needed to pump water than is available via children freely playing, even if the device is fun to play with.
It seems that a child’s toy is best used as an augment to a regular water pump and should not replace a normal pump.
It may be that both are the case, but it's definitely *a* problem with the original design that the point of a playground carousel is to be able to spin it around and ride on it, with it continuing to spin for a long time with low friction. A version which extracts work to pump water is not a playground carousel which incidentally pumps water as a side effect, it's a labor wheel.
> More than one Latin student has been profoundly confused by enslaved persons in Roman literature (especially Roman comedy, with heavily features enslaved protagonists) being threatened by being sent in pistrinum, which gets translated as “to the bakery” by the hapless student (Roman milling and bakery was often done in the same facility, so ‘bakery’ is often the first translation a dictionary offers for ‘pistrinum‘), when what is meant is “to the gristmill” to work turning the millstone. Such labor was brutal and backbreaking; moreover the continual inhalation of pulverized grain dust damages the lungs. Being thus sent in pistrinum was essentially a deferred death sentence, much like being sent to work in mining. Consequently, in large, muscle-powered mills, the fellows actually turning the millstone were likely to be captives, criminals or enslaved persons (often being punished for some transgression), or else very desperately poor; in any of these cases they probably had sadly short lives.
It was only in the last year that I learned to be pretty confused why so many African villages seem to be built in places without easy access to water. Why are there villages in these places? Why not live where the water is?
Well, you can't live in a place without easy access to water. I assume, where an African village looks like it lacks access to water, the water falls out of the sky.
Almost certainly. In my experience, most degrowth activists become extremely uncomfortable almost immediately if you buttonhole them about what exact standard of living they want to "degrow" the average western country into and that will be indefinitely sustainable for 7-8 billion humans. Even worse when the same people are also complaining about the rising cost of living.
I think there's a wide streak of internet "one weird trick" thinking. Sometimes there are big returns to rethinking a problem, but this doesn't happen as often as one might wish.
The development thing doesn't seem to be about solutions that have been kept secret, it's about "we can be clever and come up with a low-effort solution".
I am undecided on the question of whether doing net-negative things so you can have an ego-salving story to tell yourself is actually rational, or whether it's a totally central example of human irrationality. How many of our worst decisions can be explained as rational attempts to give ourselves ego-salvaging narratives about our lives?
Perhaps the value of being a "rationalist" is in changing the sorts of stories you tell yourself, which gives you an "out" in situations like these. "I'm not a quitter, I'm rational!"
I took the sunk-cost fallacy to be less a logical fallacy and more an empirical fallacy, something like "on average, humans over-value the benefits to finishing a delayed project".
Yeah, every fallacy exists for a reason. The true nature of a fallacy is applying a heuristic in a situation where the conditions that it is designed for don't apply. They're a bit like optical illusions.
a proposal for a new type of social-contracting network inspired by the ideas of enlightenment, anarchy, socialism, ecology, feminism, cyberpunk, solarpunk, amongst others.
I apologise in advance in case it causes offense but it got a few chuckles out of me since I just read about someone offering a new social organisation, whose exposition would "occupy at least ten evenings". The attention spans have indeed decreased in the last 150 years.
Wondering if anyone has any thoughts / readings / musings on the negativity and 'meanness' of the internet?
Causes? Is it getting worse? What does it say about us?
To bump it back a very small level, I'd say it's the result of a culture that celebrates meanness. In theory, it's only celebrated when directed at appropriate targets, but there are so many targets, and aim is so bad, and there's more than one faction.
But that just calls for the question, where did that culture come from? I think some is from politics, some is from odd corners of the old Internet that spread their culture memetically, and some is from nigh-universal 24-7 Internet access, unmediated by a higher authority that aspires to something better. Like "Lord of the Flies".
Maybe it's our social-ape nature coming out, as we unknowingly and unintentionally shift our social organizations from forms that restrain our base impulses, to forms that enable them.
Maybe it's always been like this, and previous generations merely did a better job of editing the historical record, to pretend otherwise to the future.
Maybe this is the driving force behind "decadence": we feel no external threat, so we seek enemies internally. Which destroys social institutions, and lasts until the next external threat that can't be dealt with by muddling through, at which point we pull together and succeed, or we fail (by not pulling together or simply not succeeding).
This is an interesting answer. Thanks!
I've posted the same question on the recent thread (with your answer, cited). I hope that is ok!
One of Aella's latest polls asked respondents if they've spend 5 minutes of more talking to a billionaire.
Some people are expressing surprise at how many people answer yes, but ...
a) Many of Aella's respondents work for technology companies
b) Technology companies tend to have relatively flat mangement structures, with CEO's/VPs who are strong believers in going and talking to people to find out what is going on
... so it's really not *that* unusual to find yourself needing to have a 5-10 min or so conversation with someone much more senior than yourself to e.g. get permission to do something you dont yourself have the authority to do; or do your short sales pitch that the company should invest in some thing you think they should do, etc.
Sometimes, you wlll be doing your sales pitch to someone who is in the billionaire class.
I work for a technology company. One that employs 6 people. Someone who can deal with navigating the social dyanmics of a huge company like Facebook must be so much lacking in autism, I wonder how can they even code. (I have seen someone lacking in autism asking the universe: "Why doesn't the computer do what I MEAN?")
I still call BS on her response rate. Yes if you work for Facebook there’s a chance you’ll meet Zuckerberg at some point but it shouldn’t count as a “5 minute conversation” if you just sit in a corner of a big meeting.
Generally, this seems to be a problem with surveying rare events. Situations that are "almost that" are much more frequent than situations that are "a central example of that", so your statistics will mostly reflect how many people interpreted "almost that" as "that".
Yeah sitting in a corner of a big meeting doesnt count.
I would count, you need to get Zuckerberg's sign-off on something, you go ask him, and he tells you you can go do the thing (or he tells you no ... still counts as having a conversation)
I'm thinking to myself "I totally cant tell that story ..even if I'm allowed to say it, every one of Scott's readers who works for Google will feel obliged to put their hands over their ears and claim they weren't listening when I told that story." I'm sure you guys can imagine something that ends up needimg a high level policy judgement.
The closest I've come is having a billionaire ask me to take his picture on his phone.
Or, to put it another way, typical examples have the charactreristic of not being fit for public consumption.
"Flat" in like an issue only needs to get escalated through about 3 levels of management before you find yourself explaining it to a billionaire.
What "recent Two Arms And A Leg review"?
Is it about octopi, who have a brain in each leg?
Because I only recall a "recent Two Arms And A Head" review
Is there any evidence that the current U.S. Presidential polls are correcting for the "shy Trump voter" phenomenon that understated Trump's appeal in the last two elections?
No. I think this is going on: an aggressive extreme alt-right was fighting an aggressive extreme woke. Trump decided to lead the alt-right and his entire platform is on war footing extremists fighting against the other extremists. But in the meantime a centrist vibe shift happened on the left, the Harris campaign jumped on it, dropped the aggressivity and started emitting optimistic and peaceful vibes. So now Trump looks like the fool who is trying to fight something that is not there, and the Harris campaign look like the normal people who love everybody.
Pollsters are constantly attempting to identify and correct bias in their polls. It's probably a lot more complicated than just "shy Trump voter" though, since polls are already a lot more sophisticated than that (e.g. demographic reweighting).
That's one reason why it is hard to predict which way polling bias will go in any given election (e.g. there was no blue bias in 2022 or 2018).
Some polling groups are trying to correct for that, some are trying to overcorrect for that, and some are doing basically the same thing they did in 2016. Since we can see how far off they were in 2016, and maybe tease out correlations between that and other observables, we can apply a fudge factor.
As always, the best bet is almost certainly to look at Nate Silver's polling aggregates. Which, to be clear, is at https://www.natesilver.net , *not* anything associated with 538/fivethirtyeight, which is no longer associated with Nate Silver. And Nate got custody of the polling models in the divorce.
I doubt this is a thing at this point. In 2016 voting for Trump could be a socially awkward thing to admit, but now? Trump is the GOP, and GOP is Trump, he is thoroughly normalized as a politician. If anything, it may actually be a slight weakness for him at this point.
I see the shyness as less about Trump and more about tax and immigration, issues peole have been conflicted about for decades.
FWIW I've never met anyone shy about their opinions on these issues when they come up (or even unprompted).
I relate to that but I suggest you and I may be less agreeable than average and choose friends who like a good argument.
Some polling groups say that they are specifically correcting for that (though how successful is uncertain).
You can also consider that 2020 polling was significantly more accurate than 2016 polling, and that off-year polling seems to be better than the previous presidential polling.
My personal feeling is that it's better, but still not great. I think a +2-3 Democrat polling is probably closer to parity, but it's also within the margin of error so that's not saying too much controversial. You should watch out for national polls that don't talk about swing states as well, as a national poll being up a few percent for Democrats (and being 100% accurate) might still result in a Republican winning because of how the tally gets run up in very high Democrat states like California and New York, whereas Republicans win more electoral votes by small margins.
I honestly fail to understand why anyone would even poll someone in California. Complete waste of money and updates nothing.
More generally, "red state" vs "blue state" is largely just a question of the relative balance between the cities and rural areas in the state.
It’s still pointless to poll them about the Presidential election.
People do care about the national popular vote margin, and will reward you with clicks if you tell them about it. It's also a useful input to models that try to unskew polling across all the states to better predict the swing states.
Plus you'll want to poll them about Congressional elections, etc, and the marginal cost of asking about the Presidential is small.
This is the thread for the opening passages of books that do not exist.
"As we rolled up, I could tell at a glance that it had happened again, our fifth case in two months."
"Eventually, our hero will pass away away, leaving behind five children, twenty grand-children, and an estate large enough for a respectable college. A naval vessel and a park will be named after him. But all of that is yet to come."
"They call me Sam."
"First, there were millions. They became thousands, became dozens, became a handful, until there was one."
"Last year, almost five million containers arrived at the Port of Los Angeles, far too many to inspect in any detail."
"They didn't come in gleaming rocketships; they weren't preceded by enigmatic radio messages; there weren't even any flying saucers. They came from the inside out, and we didn't recognize what was happening until too late."
"Cardboard? What were you thinking?"
"The moonlight shown through the small window of the small room, to be outshone by the light of the small fire of a small amount of burning money."
The third one there is almost from Roger Zelazny's *Lord of Light*.
Anyway, if any of you want to read a book that does exist, I suggest you try "She Rides Shotgun," a tight little California noir that won the 2018 Edgar award for best first novel.
https://www.amazon.com/She-Rides-Shotgun-Jordan-Harper/dp/006239441X
"I do not exist, but I'm told I'll be in a book, and while the book does not exist, this is how it would begin if it did."
"100 years into the weird bleak future, Lexorealist poet Zofranil farts while writing the last line, and sits ruminating about what modality to use to enfold it in the piece."
"Scott's transformation into Jewish mystic was exquisitely slow and subtle, and when he finally elected to describe the process he produced the finest, most nuanced, must effortlessly persuasive thing he had ever written."
How "opening passage" is an opening passage? How "book" is book? How "do not" is "do not"?
...ahem.
'C Mackenzie Terrence Reginald, Extension S4Z14B18256F3D16O1, Year 3: authorized, one 12-ounce bag salted pretzels.'
'The charred remains of the serving bot still sparked as Tanner crushed his empty pretzel bag into a pocket and crouched down. "Huh", he said, and the scribe bot dutifully recorded it.'
'The flash of light took D'rthgn by surprise; for a few seconds he just floated there, trying to make sense of it. It had been a long time since he'd last been summoned; he had started to wonder if humanity even existed anymore.'
EDIT: Forgot about this one.
'Now listen up you two. Your father will be home soon and I want you to finish your chores. Sally, I want you to wash the dishes, and Bobby, I want you to defeat the Dragons of the Eight Mountains to assemble the God Key and recover the Secret of Fire.'
"My mother was like a suction cup."
"The roomful of people liquified and I was the tank they were all swimming in, and what I wanted to know was how to go back to being just one fish."
"Tomorrow there will be no weather, and I don't mean by that the weather will be typical and unremarkable -- I mean there will be no weather."
Agreed on Red Harvest, though I also appreciate the opening paragraph of Raymond Chandler's _Red Wind_:
“There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.”
Proof that nobody in the SNL writer's room has ever traveled west of the Mississippi. Or really even the Hudson.
Google says it's from the opening of Season 10, but also says it's not going to let me watch Season 10. Or read transcripts of Season 10.
Someone did a train-of-thought-type review on the episode that at least quotes a few lines from the sketch. Not the opening of it though.
https://www.onesnladay.com/2019/02/21/october-6-1984-no-host-the-thompson-twins-s10-e1/
If Harris was serious about diversity and inclusion she would have picked Bruce Jenner. They could put him back on the Wheaties box.
> him
Jenner is a trans woman these days though
"Life imitates Veep" is still on track:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1wrvrYKhdHQ
> Two Arms And A Leg
wait, isn't the book's name two arms and a head?
Should be. "Two Arms and A Leg" would be a primer on college tuition costs, not spinal injuries.
I'm amazed I missed that.
Hello! I have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
While addressing other conditons, the content at lorienpsych.com seemed darn interesting and useful.
Could you recommend similar content on bipolar disorder? (Must be written by a psychiatrist)
Obliged!
Redfield Jameson's Touched with Fire (9780684831831) is good, too, but it's about manic depressive illness. If you get around to the anecdotal and personal, Rachel Aviv's Strangers to Ourselves (9780374600846) and Eccentrics (0394565657) by David Weeks, a neuropsychologist, and Jamie James, a journalist, are entertaining and insightful, for different reasons.
I also have bipolar disorder, and while this is different than an informational website, I highly recommend the book An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison. Dr. Jamison is a psychiatrist who herself has bipolar disorder.
Is understanding of the hard problem of consciousness mediated by IQ, theory of mind/empathy or something else entirely?
The hard problem of consciousness is solved by completely accepting that it is not really a problem.
Probably psychedelics. Nothing else seems to have produced an explanation that made sense to me.
I dunno, I've done boatloads of 'em, of all types, but I'm still an Illusionist when it comes to the Hard Problem (ie the problem is like asking "what is phlogiston and how does it work?" and will dissolve on better understanding).
I guess I've been Doing It Wrong™.
But see, that makes more sense to me than most of the papers that come out of academia! ;-)
I believe this to be a fitting response.
LOL!
I'm a reasonably fit mid 30's male, where "reasonably fit" means "was highly fit through college and has managed to avoid obesity while strength and cardiovasicular ability has slowly been degrading over time". I'd like to start re-incorporating more physical exercise back into my life, and, as a chronic over-thinkiner, I'm wondering if anyone has a repository on the best evidence based health advice, preferably in a highly actionable format.
Obviously, just about any amount of exercise that I am likely to engage in is going to be better than my current (low but not zero) level.
But is there any (decent, half way reliable, not replication-crisis'd) evidence on how someone should prioritize their fitness effort if they _aren't_ going to go all the way to "this is the optimal amount"?
I've heard/read that strength pays dividends into old age in a lot of ways. Does that mean that, if you aren't going to put in enough time to maximize both cardio and strength, you should focus on strength?
To try and sum up my question: If I'm only going to dedicate say...90 minutes/ week (3 30 minute sessions) in relatively intense physical effort, am I likely to be best served by doing a mix of cardio and strength, all cardio, or all strength?
I'm imagining some equivalent to the Logical Increments website for building a PC. It basically says "If this is your budget, here is the most effective way to spend it for the most performant PC, and if you add $X, the thing you should improve first is Y".
So the translation would be (to completely makeup some hypothetical advice): "If you are only going to spend 10 minutes per week, you should do it with a brisk walk. A brisk walk is your best use of time up to a total of 30 minutes. Between 30 minutes and an hour, your best bet is a simple strength routine. From an hour to 90 minutes, do a strength routine up to an hour with the remainder filled with brisk walking. Between 90 and 180 minutes per week, do a complete strength + cardio regimen"
It obviously gets complicated by the fact that the best use of time is not just based on total time but also probably how large of blocks you can find/make. But hopefully I'm making sense in what it is I'm looking for.
I'm also perfectly willing to accept an answer of "This level of evidence based granular advice does not exist. Pick something and do it since something is better than nothing".
If you want evidence based stuff, checkout Barbell Medicine or Stronger By Science.
But "This level of evidence based granular advice does not exist. Pick something and do it since something is better than nothing" is the acceptable answer.
As someone else pointed out the American Heart Association recommends 150 minutes of moderate excursive each week; however "moderate" isn't very difficult, it's like a brisk walk. So doing 90 minutes of actual tough exercise per week plus trying to walk around as much as possible will be enough.
Not an answer to your question, but if your situation is "I have very little time for exercise", perhaps you should think about ways to spend a little *more* time exercising that would not cost you a lot.
As a specific example, I noticed that if something is in a walking distance of 30 minutes (using Google Maps to estimate this), it is probably better to walk there on foot than to use mass transit or a car, given the overhead of waiting for a bus or looking for a parking place. And from the place where I live, "30 minutes by feet" covers surprisingly many places. So this gives me extra walking time (which is a form of exercise) for virtually no cost.
Another example is installing a pull-up bar in my room's doorframe, so I can spontaneously do pull-ups whenever I remember to, with zero overhead (compared to going to a gym).
Anything is better than nothing but 150 minutes a week of moderate activity exercise is the minimum level recommended by the American Heart Association. They also recommend strength training twice a week.
What Performative Bafflement recommends sounds good. To stick with it, join a trainer-run gym such as Crossfit so you have a schedule and social "pressure" (quotation marks because it's actually fun once you get used to it) to go when you feel like you don't want to.
play tennis with a mate or 3 a couple of times a week
If you're a book person, I recommend Dan Lieberman's "Exercised" in this case. He's an anthropologist / physiologist who goes over why the various types of exercise are important and why, the effect size on all-cause-mortality of an additional 30/60/90 minutes per week, etc. He has great data, studies hunter gatherers, runs marathons against horses, all sorts of fun. It's also a great inspiration to keep exercising, once you see the extensively data-backed myriad benefits and HUGE effect sizes.
He (pretty boringly) ends at the same recommendations as the 2018 Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans for his "official" recommendation in the book (given he's a famous Harvard prof writing a book about this, I wouldn't be surprised if he had a hand in those guidelines).
The consensus is that both are important, and the recommendations are:
1. Do 150 minutes of moderate intensity or 75 minutes of vigorous intensity aerobic exercise per week.
2. Strength train in a way that hits every major muscle group 2x a week.
If you're going to do 90 min, here's what I would personally do with 90 min (speaking as somebody who's read several in-depth books on both lifting and endurance training, competed as a powerlifter for 5 years, have run triathlons, etc):
1. HIIT sprints 3x a week at 12 min each.
2. Cross-fit style weight training 3x a week for 20 min.
(First workout alternating back squat and bench 5 sets 10 reps at a weight you struggle to finish the 10th rep, second workout alternating deadlift and incline bench 5x10 same effort level, third workout alternating OHP and front squats 5x10, each of these should fit into 20 minutes).
My reasoning is HIIT is much more "benefit per minute" than any other type of cardio. That 12 minute session is worth 30-60 min of "regular" cardio.
Cross fit, because that way they'll also be cardio sessions, while hitting every major muscle group in only 20 min.
You can stack the HIIT and cross-fit workouts on the same days if you've got the stamina, and then you're at your 3x week. But if you can't stack in the same workout, the best thing about HIIT, is you can do sprints anywhere, all you need is yourself and shoes and a phone / stopwatch, you don't even need to go the gym, so you could do HIIT in the morning, then hit the gym in the afternoon or evening and then the stacking isn't so arduous.
Finally, the biggest and most life-changing thing for myself (and a couple of other people I've convinced) would be a treadmill desk for your daily work / internet browsing, and I would actually recommend that over exercising. Especially if you WFH, it's life changing. Just thought I'd throw that out there.
When you say 12 mins HIIT sprints, do you mean 12 mins of sprinting or 12 mins, some of which is sprinting intervals and some not? I know about HIIT, but there are a lot of versions of it, and would like to know which you are recommending. I currently do it informally by putting out maximum effort on the uphills in my bike ride to and from work. Ride's about 15 mins long, hills in each direction take may 30 secs each, so there's not enough sprinting in the mix.
I was specifically thinking of "12 min total, consisting of eight 30s all-out-sprints (4 min) and 1 min rest intervals between them (8 min)."
8 is a nice sweet spot for "number of intervals" in a session for most people, and ends in 12 min, which is a nice compliment to the 20 min weight session to get close to his ideal 30 min chunks.
You're right there's a bunch of HIIT styles - the particular one I'm mentioning is a little closer to REHIT, where you let your heart rate recover to zone 1/2 and try to hit zone 4 in your sprint, creating a series of needle-like heart rate spikes in your graph if you're tracking your heart rate. REHIT has some evidence that it has a little more cardiorespiratory benefits than traditional Tabata intervals, for example.
I think your method is great to keep in the mix of a regular commute, I do something similar anytime there's an elevator / escalator situation (sprint up the stairs for an opportunistic one-time interval). You're probably not getting the full benefits of dedicated HIIT sessions, because a lot of the benefits seem to come from that heart-rate sawtooth pattern, and from going deeper into your anaerobic reserves - but as an adjunct to steady physical activity, I think it's still a good idea overall and subscribe to it myself.
Thank you. I have an exercise bike, and am going to try some sessions of your formula HIIT. About you sprinting up the stairs: I heard a story about a mountaineer who had to live in NYC for a while and couldn't afford a gym. He had a rule of never take an elevator, and always push yourself to climb stairs at an aggressive pace. I believe either the place he was living or the one where he was working was double-digits flights up, so he got a lot of stairs in daily, and found when he returned to the mountains that he was still in condition.
Nice - best of luck picking them up, I hope you're one of the people that turns out to enjoy them.
If you commute regularly and do HIIT, I think you're pretty much maxing out your cardio training in terms of health and fitness benefits.
As far as I could tell when I last checked it seems that both cardio and strength exercise provide long lasting benefits and that they seem to be somewhat independent (so doing both is better). The exact details don’t appear to matter much if at all. And that’s about as far as reliable research seems to go. As far as specifics are concerned I think you’ll have to go with less reliable sources and common sense.
However, 3x 30 minutes a week seems not enough for strength training to me. I think you’d need more like 2-3x 1h for that. With such a short budget just getting up and moving at all is what matters most.
I’d recommend to think less about dedicated time spent and more about how to incorporate more movement in your daily routines (aka do time stacking). E.g. taking the stairs instead of the elevator, doing some balancing while brushing your teeth, walking or taking the bicycle to get somewhere, going for a walk or a hike with friends/family, etc.
Some might take a bit longer, but you combine something you would’ve done, anyway, with your exercise. This makes it easier to build a routine you actually stick to.
Beyond that, as far as quality of life goes I think some mobility / posture work and some cardio gives a big bang for your buck and you can do it in very small time intervals and it doesn’t have to be in big blocks. So again you can do that during the day while waiting for something.
There are 2 points where most people fail at transitioning to being regular exercisers: Getting started, and sticking with their plan long enough for it to become habit. Unless you're sure that having an excellent, evidence-based regimen will make it easy to shift into being a regular exerciser and stick with it, my advice would be to start with the thing you're most likely to stick to, and worry later about fine-tuning it so it's optimal. Consider getting a trainer, beeminder, finding an exercise buddy, joining a hiking and backpacking club, kayaking, tennis, squash, exercise classes, etc. Pick the one that's most appealing & do that til your identify has changed back into "active person, in decent shape, likes exercise," then hunt for the ideal regimen.
My advice is get a good personal trainer. You really are not going to push yourself as hard as they will, I thought I was pushing myself before I started with a trainer and I was utterly exhausted after the first session.
from @sophfuji on Twitter, via our favorite gay ex-mormon furry, Tracing Woodgrains; Stanford has a class homework assignment to go on a date with someone, no alcohol, max $15 expenditure.
Passing quickly over the suggestion that Stanford studenfs need lessons on how to go on date, the reaction on Twitter seems to be: "have you seen how overpriced coffee shops are? I'm probably not getting coffee and a croissant for two people out of 15 bucks." The principle that it should be a relatively inexpensive date is, I think, a good one. But we're all going: man, coffee shops are expensive,
Trace says he had to do a similar exercize at BYU. Presumably, there's an additional difficulty if you're a mormon: you can't even have a coffee at the overpriced coffee shop.
Back when I was at university, my idea of a date was to take a walk in the nature or the city, and drink some Kofola afterwards. A girl who doesn't like this probably wouldn't be compatible with me anyway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kofola is a traditional Czechoslovakian soft drink; basically like cola but with 30% less sugar and no phosphoric acid.
My morning 16oz coffee and two bagels is $6.54, in Manhattan. Fifteen dollars is doable. And it is La Colombe coffee, so it isn't crap. But it is straight coffee, not a latte or what have you.
A $5 bottle of wine and $10 worth of snacks on the beach sounds like a great date to me, but I do wonder what class would have such an assignment.
Oh, $10 worth of weed and $5 worth of snacks then I guess.
By a date, do they mean "someone you have romantic feelings for" or is it just "you and a friend or a classmate can do this together"?
I'd fail the 'date as romantic event' requirement, but I'm sure I could get a sibling to come with me to McDonalds to hit up the Eurosaver menu for €13.75 for two people!
The coffee shop isn't overpriced; your (and my and Stanford students' and the coffee shop owners') money is simply worth substantially less than it was a few years ago. The fact that anybody blames the coffee shop for this just serves to underscore how astonishingly clueless even "smart" people are about how money works.
Edit: I haven't looked into the Twitter discourse and don't care to, but it occurs to me that whoever designed the experiment *may* have picked $15 precisely because they knew that everybody's mind goes straight to "coffee shop!" at the suggestion of an inexpensive date, and they wanted to force people to be a little more creative than that.
I disagree, given what else you could do with that same $15. The same with the McDonalds comment, as I haven't found McDonalds to offer good value, whatever you may think of what they call food.
I truly hate to be a "not an argument" guy, but this is just you expressing a personal preference. That this preference is far from universal is amply demonstrated by the proliferation everywhere of coffee shops (and for that matter McDonalds, and on that one I share your preference for doing literally anything else with the money).
I suppose, then, that examples are in order. For $15, you could get a footlong Subway sandwich with a drink, and have change left over. I don't buy or drink coffee, but I know one can get a dozen McCafe K-cups for $10, or $7 when on sale. The fast food restaurants all have some kinds of deals ranging from $5 to $10 for meals; even Taco Bell, which has expensive ones for what you get, range to less than $12.
Yes, it's personal preference to actually spend the money however you want, and if you feel you get at least adequate value then that's your judgement, and yours to make. My personal preference isn't universal, but neither is it universally recognized that one must patronize coffee shops.
Nobody said that "one must patronize coffee shops." What I did point out was that coffee shops are very widely regarded as suitable places for an inexpensive, casual *date*. Those other places you mention....aren't.
Of course, one could try to be a pioneer in that regard, but it would be risky. And as I also pointed out way upthread, that may have been the point of the $15 cap. Set it at $30 and every student would lazily go for the obvious "pourover and pastries at a nice third wave coffee place."
I attended college at one of Stanford's peer institutions several decades ago and this would have been an unironically great idea then too. We all would have benefitted from it enormously (while of course making sardonic fun of the whole thing even as we secretly learned from and became happier from the doing of it).
Why doesn't SpaceX land its rockets on a floating platform in the middle of a big lake? Even if the rocket fell into the water, it wouldn't hurt it much since it would be freshwater. I've heard that salt water damages rockets really fast.
The lower risk of damage from debris is a major factor, as carateca points out. But actually, SpaceX seem to prefer landing their rockets on land when they can. The landings on the drone ship take place when the rocket doesn't have enough fuel (either because of the payload mass or because of the target orbit) to make it back to land. Use of a barge here can be quite effective, since it can position itself more or less freely in the ocean and so choose the spot that offers the best combination of fuel efficiency and sea/weather conditions. And, well, SpaceX seem pretty good at avoiding the rockets falling in the water, so the potential for damage is probably not a huge concern.
Though might depend on the size of the rocket.... my university's space flight society does some of their more ambitious launches over land in the US, because the US has bigger empty spaces not containing anyone who might be hit by a rocket than the UK does.
I guess when youre at Elon Musk level, the Nevada desert just isnt big enough.
Fun game (so I'm told) returning on a commercial flight when you've been responsible for fueling an experimental rocket launch. You see, the airlines have gas sniffers to detect explosives, and they are really very sensitive, and your clothing has been at a rocket launch site...
Related amusing incident. A guy I know buys some military surplus lithium batteries. Very cheap, good deal. He doesn't bother to look up what system they were originally part of. When he tries to tale them on a plane, the airline security people do look up the part numbers. Surface to air missile. Now, it turns out tthat comp9onents of a SAM are one of then things they real;ly, rea;;y wont let you take on a plane.
Hello!
I'm doing some work for https://fatebook.io/, a site for recording predictions.
We're particularly interested in improving the experience for new users, and in order to do that, I'd like to get feedback on what it's currently like.
In particular, if you have some interest in forecasting or tracking personal predictions but haven't used Fatebook before, I'd like to have a short call in which you try using the site and we talk a bit about how it went.If you'd be down to try that, you can book a meeting with me here: https://calendly.com/forrest-weiswolf/15-minute-meeting
Thanks!
I've been trying to find a map of what areas of the Middle East Iranian militias/allies control, with little luck.
Has anyone seen something like that?
https://israelpalestine.liveuamap.com/ perhaps?
Hi, I'm a small-time SF author from Finland. You may be unfamiliar with me from such works as The Paperclip War novelette on AI, apocalypses, and unusually harsh game theory. https://waterdragonpublishing.com/product/paperclip-war/
Anyway, I'll be on two panels at the Glasgow Worldcon on Friday (Aug 9), "Imagining our Great AI Overlords" at 16:00 BST and "Neurodivergent Approaches to Stories" at 17:30 BST. More details in my blog post on the subject: https://rauhala.org/2024/08/04/panels-and-paperclips-at-the-glasgow-worldcon/
So if anyone's going to the con, see you maybe there.
"Neurodivergent Approaches to Stories"
Heh. I mean, that is literally sci-fi. In the classic sense - solving problems with applied science and engineering. Can you add something more than "just read Larry Niven, it is like that" ?
You're not classically wrong, though things change. And, of course, there's the "diversity" part where maybe somebody has their own weirdly interesting viewpoint; with several panelists, I'm sure we can get some comparative studies going. We'll also be covering how we consume fiction and how our focus there might, well, diverge, as they say, from the main.
Then there are the adjacent speculative fiction genres (fantasy, horror, magical realism, new weird and what-have-you) that are also topical for the Worldcon, and classically not AS territory to the same extent.
Why don't you have those very cheap solar systems in the US?
https://www.netto-online.de/werdasliestistdoof/p-2666949000
They cost around 300€, produce up to 800W, and typically consist of two solar panels of about 20 ft² each, one converter box and a couple of cables. You mount them on a sunny roof, on a balcony, or put them up in the garden. Every idiot can plug it in, into a normal power outlet. With power prices around 25 ct/kWh, they pay off in less than three years.
But it seems like you don't: https://mastodon.social/@waldoj/112873032309076239
Reasons I can think of: The American power grid is not prepared for a consumer occasionally sending power back into the grid, and everything will burst into flames? Electric power is much cheaper for you, so amortization time is much longer? (No, US average is 18 ct/kWh, not so much less than here.) Neighbors will find it ugly or complain about reflections, and take you to court?
The American power grid is happily accepting that at scale right now. About 4.2 million US homes have individual solar power installations now, up from 3 million just four years ago and continuing to rise steadily. States in which homeowners are now paid for power they feed into the grid appear in every region, ranging across the political spectrum: Arizona, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Ohio, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, New Jersey, parts of Texas, Virginia. A dozen more states are now putting such programs into place.
Aside from the factors already mentioned, power prices aren't "around 25 ct/kWh" in the United States. It's a bit less than half that, on average. So the payoff is more like 6-7 years, which is probably beyond the time horizon of most consumers and comparable to that of other investments or efficiency hacks that don't involve betting your life on your ability to assess the safety of amateur electric power installation.
Also, I've got 7 kW of solar permanently and professionally installed on my roof, as do many of my neighbors, so why would we want your little 800 Watt system? And the Americans who aren't in a position to have solar panels permanently installed on their roofs, are mostly living in apartments or the like where they don't have access to install forty square feet of solar panels..
I have the "18 ct/kWh" from here: https://www.bls.gov/regions/midwest/data/averageenergyprices_selectedareas_table.htm
Still, cheaper electricity, plus tariffs on Chinese panels, makes it much less attractive.
Sure, lots of people here have much larger systems, too. They are great of course, but cost more like thousands, need to be installed professionally, and craftsmen are expensive (at least here). Pay-off should be much longer, and depends heavily on how much they pay for what you feed into the grid. "Bet your life" sounds overly dramatic, when you can just hang the panels on the south-facing balcony railing and plug it together.
Right now I'm in an American house that is literally in the middle of installing these, so you should probably replace "have those" with "have more of those"?
Probably it has something to do with EU regulators using a heavier hand to encourage these things?
"In the middle of installing" sounds like this is a larger system, plastering the whole roof? I was especially interested in the very small systems with only two panels. I guess they exist, but apparently aren't sold in hardware stores or supermarkets in large quantities, are they?
And yes, they are encouraged. The VAT was dropped to 0%, and lots of towns have been subsidizing them, so they reimburse part of the purchase price.
It's a bunch of small modular units, so it's more like "tiling" rather than "plastering".
Here we're simply looking at a "it pays for itself after 7 years" deal, but I don't know where any subsidies come in.
Which is not bad at all, mind you! It also depends on how much they pay for the power you feed into the grid. Or perhaps in a few years it could be worthwhile to add a storage battery to the mix.
Yeah, right now the inverters are connected in a way that won't power the house if the grid goes off (so they'll still use natural gas for that), but that's mostly because it's the most foolproof method. But with more attention and knowledge, there are other possible setups that would work better.
Why? They have enough deserts where the government can just install solar farms in a planned way. If there is a will. Germany just does not have any empty room for that, nothing comparable to the Nevada desert, for example. What we do have a lot of in Europe is those annoying pseudo-greens who think if you can generate a thousand gigawatt of clean energy at the cost of disturbing the mating season of 143 protected swamp dicknewts, then you should not do it...
Sure, but installing giant solar farms in the desert before even trying to produce solar energy closer to where people actually use it is destructive and stupid (not that this has stopped energy producers from installing giant solar farms in American deserts, or American government agencies from letting them do it).
Edit: upon closer reading of your comment, I now realize that you don't care how destructive it is. You are of course entitled to that opinion; however, that opinion is wrong and bad.
Deserts don't really have things whose destruction matters. Their flora and fauna is scarce and boring.
You are of course entitled to that opinion; however, that opinion is wrong and bad.
OK, so instead of putting up their own solar on their roof and enjoying a smaller electricity bill, people would rather buy shares of some solar farm in Nevada and pay their bills from the dividend?
And please don't draw the poor dicknewts into this. I was just wondering why those small solar systems don't exist in the US while they're ubiquitous here.
You say these systems "don't exist in the US." Are you implying that they are not available in the US and wanting to know why not, or are you implying that they are available in the US and wondering why Americans don't avail themselves of them?
OK, I have found this: https://legionsolar.com/getStarter.html
It's 300W for 659$, much more expensive than here. So they do exist, and at such prices it's obvious they aren't so attractive. I wonder whether the price will fall in the next few years.
The link doesn't work for me as of this writing, but there's multiple safety risks to back-feeding power in this way:
* At home, it overrides fusing on the circuit. If your circuit is nominally rated for 16A, then a misbehaving device could draw 14A from the grid, not tripping the house fuse, and 14A from the solar panel on the same circuit. The combined 28A still heats household wring and would be a major fire risk.
* In the community, back-feeding the grid causes problems. It disables the operator's electrical safety systems for the same reasons as it can supply power at home, so if the power is cut for safety reasons (e.g. a line down) the lines might still pose a danger to electric workers or bystanders.
The right way to install such a system is to join it at in at the power box or main distribution panel, ahead of the house's own fusing, and with an automatic transfer switch to ensure that the solar powers disconnect if grid power does as well.
The way it works here is that the system needs the 50 Hz frequency from the grid. When that is missing, it shuts down immediately. Therefore it's safe to touch the "suicide cable" (the male plug connecting it into the outlet), and when the power is cut, it shuts down, too. People who are worried about it not shutting down fast enough in case of a short-circuit could add an RCD.
Your first point is somewhat valid. Old wirings should be checked for their capabilities. Luckily, the solar panel cannot provide the 14A from your example, because 800W / 230V is only about 3.5A (and that is only achieved in broad sunlight). Therefore, the risk is deemed not very high for reasonably modern house grids. But if you're worried about this, you could swap your 15A fuses for 12A fuses.
Your last sentence is what an electrician would indeed say. But thousands of people here have ignored that advice, and it seems no major catastrophe has happened so far.
> The way it works here is that the system needs the 50 Hz frequency from the grid. When that is missing, it shuts down immediately
On a combined system where power is supplied right alongside consumption, it's not straightforward to detect the frequency from "the grid." A large enough synchronous motor running on the circuit will maintain a 50HZ frequency for at least a fraction of a second thanks to its own intertia. Depending on the design, the inverter attached to the solar panel might be able to maintain that frequency, leading to a powered yet disconnected circuit.
> Luckily, the solar panel cannot provide the 14A from your example, because 800W / 230V is only about 3.5A (and that is only achieved in broad sunlight).
And if the resident says "saving a bit on my electricity bill is good, but I want to save more!" and thus buys four of them?
A major part of residential electrical safety is that – to the maximum extent practical – household wiring should fail safe by design rather than require that residents follow particular documented practices.
> But thousands of people here have ignored that advice, and it seems no major catastrophe has happened so far.
No "major" catastrophe is likely thanks to the small scale of things, but would you even hear about an individual line-worker injured thanks to mis-installed home solar panels?
I don't know. But Germans are among the most risk-averse and worrying people there are, so if such mini-solar systems were dangerous, perhaps it would make the news.
The limit for permit-free solar is 800W, so if the resident puts up four of these, it's illegal. And stupid, because he would give away a lot of surplus power for free. Larger systems need a permit, and of course a proper installation directly into the power box, as you wrote, and then you can receive something like 8 ct/kWh or so for the power you feed back.
I think there could be more red tape on sending power back that way, but price-wise, the US has increased tariffs on many Chinese goods, including solar panels (25% >>> 50% iirc).
Venus would be pricey; Mercury, stylish.
Uranus joke incoming in three, two...
I'd like to give a shout out to Bean and https://www.navalgazing.net/ , with honorable mention to John Schilling. Today I was able to answer 30 minutes of questions from an 8-year-old boy about naval warfare, starting with why a battleship was being used as a museum, moving on to the current dominance of aircraft carriers, Japanese strategy in WWII, Space Battleship Yamato, and including answers like "actually yes, that's basically what a torpedo is" and "I don't know if they do now, but they used to do that in WWII, and they were called 'torpedo bombers'". (Eventually the questions wandered into geology and engineering via the hypothesized use of lava as a weapon.)
Glad to be of service, and thank you for the kind words. I will now ponder the use of "lava bombers" in some future conflict. Though really that might be a better fit for conflicts a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
Don't forget lava monsters, which my kids are currently obsessed by!
Whether lava monsters would best be used as shock troops, special forces, or terminators, is a question best left to someone with more military nous than I.
Stories like this are always gratifying to hear, and I am glad I could help.
Good find. ISTR the Yamato, mighty though it was, had a slight design flaw - Nobody could be on deck when the triple 18 inch guns fired, because the concussion from them was so appalling that anyone on deck would have been blown around like leaves and suffer perforated ear drums and lung injuries etc. So that meant the anti-aircraft gunners had to abandon their posts at regular intervals and scurry below decks, allowing the US torpedo plane attackers easier and safer access!
Not exactly. Muzzle blast was a serious issue for all battleships, but it isn't going to clear the entire deck. Yamato actually went further in trying to deal with this by giving some of the 25mm guns enclosed turrets to protect the gunners from blast. Pity they were using 25mm and bad fire control.
This conversation is making me itch to fire up World of Warships again.
Which my elder brother, a lifelong naval-history geek who could give you all a run for the money, scornfully spurned upon discovering that the game designers took historical liberties for the sake of gameplay and balance. An attitude which at one level I understand but really seemed a shame: to throw say the late-version Warspite into a hard turn in beautifully-rendered detail on a big-ass screen and land a perfect broadside on a frantically-fleeing cruiser which blasts it to bits from say 18,000 yards....is _it_ boys. Truly. Highly recommended.
also I need a cigarette now
>Which my elder brother, a lifelong naval-history geek who could give you all a run for the money, scornfully spurned upon discovering that the game designers took historical liberties for the sake of gameplay and balance.
See, I predicted this, and spurned it before. Given the issues World of Tanks has, I don't plan to play until a quarter of Sovietsii Soyuzes fail at the start of the game.
Also, bah, I don't need graphics in my naval games. That's madness. Instead, I have Rule the Waves, which has very little in the way of graphics, and also the best shipbuilder loop. Serious recommendation for your brother:
https://www.navalgazing.net/Review-Rule-the-Waves-3
Congratulations on your qualifications from the ACX University of 'You Ask It, One Of These Nerds Will Answer It' in the field of naval warfare! 😁
This is a cheerful little anecdote, thanks for sharing it!
I'm moving to Berkeley! Looking for recommendations for things to do in the Bay Area, especially:
- Tourist destinations - museums, landmarks, etc. I'm particularly interested in local history, earth science, or engineering + technology.
- Micro-adventures. What is something that's *not* a tourist destination but is worth visiting? For example, a cool sculpture, a bus route with interesting things to look at, your favorite tree.
- Day to day stuff. Food/activities/places to hang out in the Berkeley area, especially near the UC Berkeley campus and in the North Berkeley/Gourmet Ghetto area
- Social dance. I've already found the contra dancing - what else is there?
Things that are transit-accessible from Berkeley are ideal, but I'm not fundamentally against using rideshares or even renting a car for the right activity.
The Marin County Civic Center is one of Frank Lloyd Wright's more underrated buildings. In Marin you might also be interested in the Bay Model museum in Sausalito.
The UC Botanical Gardens are excellent, as are the SF botanical gardens in Golden Gate Park.
When I had lived in Berkeley for a while I was teased for not knowing about the Thai Temple, Sunday buffet Thai food.
Honestly it’s mediocre Thai food (IMM is very good, if you want better food), but it’s kind of an enjoyable weird slice-of-life thing to do.
And it’s right down the block from Berkeley Bowl (East), which is a great place to buy produce (it’s not always cheaper than Trader Joe’s, but it’s almost always dramatically better quality/fresher).
Just don’t accidentally go around Thai New Year, which is 3x more crowded and somehow when I always annually get a hankering for the experience.
Another on my list would be the Pinball Museum in Alameda. Alameda is unfortunately a royal pain to get to by transit, but it’s got a cute small town feel and the Pinball Museum is really just… one or two hundred pinball machines you can play for hours after paying your entry fee. I guess only interesting if you like pinball!
Tourist destinations:
In San Francisco: https://www.exploratorium.edu/ (science, technology)
In San Mateo: https://www.sfpuc.gov/learning/come-visit/pulgas-water-temple (engineering)
I live across the bay so this is mostly SF stuff:
First stop should be Sutro Baths: the ruin of an old (built 1894) swimming complex right at the tip of Land's End. It's historic and extremely beautiful. If you eat fish head to the other side of Golden Gate park after (quite a walk) to get a stellar burrito at Hook Fish Co.
The Cable Car Museum is cooler than it has any right to be. Lots of history of the development and preservation of the cable cars. Lots of cool purely mechanical tech that lets them operate. It's also actually the hub that keeps the cables moving so you can see the massive machinery that's dragging cable cars miles away along.
I'd also take the ferry over to Angel Island. A beautiful spot in the middle of the bay, it was SF/Oakland's version of Ellis Island, and the small museum that's basically preserved immigrant internment housing is a visceral experience.
In the category of museums cooler than they have any right to be, the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum. Delightfully weird, but with a large and impressive collection of ancient Egyptian artifacts well displayed, including a walk-through replica tomb that feels more real than anything seen in any incarnation of "The Mummy".
Also an entire floor devoted to alchemy, which has little to do with Egyptology but is a big deal for Rosicrucians. An elegant pseudoscience for a more civilized age.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosicrucian_Egyptian_Museum
Seconded on this one. The alchemy floor manages to never come down on the side of "this is a real thing" vs "this is interesting history", which is the second weirdest museum tonally I've been to in the last few years. (The weirdest is in Missouri.)
Is the arcade game museum still open? IIRC it was near the maritime museum. You can play arcade games going back to the 1920s.
PS this is it https://museemecanique.com
The Life Sciences building on campus used to have a cool display of antique microscopes (and perhaps other instruments) in the lobby near the library. Not sure if it is still there.
Edit: I am not sure how close this is to public transit but https://www.thecrucible.org/
The Crucible is two blocks from a BART stop! Definitely going on the list. Thanks!
> Tourist destinations - museums, landmarks, etc. I'm particularly interested in local history, earth science, or engineering + technology.
Sounds like you need to visit the Mountain View Computer History Museum.
Also SF has a bunch of museum boats that are really interesting.
The Jeremiah O'Brien is excellent. Extremely charming, lots to see, reasonably priced. Pampanito is a normal fleet boat, with bad signage and a price that's way too high. Not saying don't go, but it's nothing out of the ordinary.
Hornet over in Alameda is quite nice. Lots of cool stuff to see.
The Maritime Museum ship collection was awful when I went in 2022. Lots of stuff closed, ships not in great shape, signage was bad. Actively disrecommend, and the National Park Service should be ashamed of itself.
I thought the Maritime Museum was great when I went (2021), but perhaps you're more of a connoisseur.
If you're interested, you can read the whole rant:
https://www.navalgazing.net/Museum-Review-San-Francisco-Maritime
Contrast to the San Diego version, who should be put in charge of the SF one immediately:
https://www.navalgazing.net/Museum-Review-San-Diego-Maritime
The Eureka was definitely open when I was there in Oct 2021. I'm not sure about the Alma and Eppleton Hall, but I think they were open too. IIRC there were also at least a couple staff members there.
It's certainly weird that things would be so much worse in 2022 than in 2021, but knowing that Bean didn't see the same museum as me makes his anger at least a little bit more understandable.
Has anybody experienced something similar as the folowing? Any advice?
I find myself having a constant runny/stuffed nose inside of some houses/flats (but not others), particularly newer ones for some reason. I have a pollen and dust mite allergies but the pollen season is over and I don't think there is more dust in my new flat than in the previous one.
I've just spent a month in a friend's flat (who lives in a small apartment in a rather old housing block) and I had zero problems there. Then I returned back home (to a different city) to my new flat and I started experiencing that again. I had the same bed (and mattresses) in a different flat (also rather old) before moving and no problems there.
I don't think the new flat is particularly dusty (although I have no carpets, so perhaps the dust ends up in the air more?).
My suspicion is that it has something to do with humidity. Those old flats are not very well insulated so there is actually a lot of air circulation and they are drier. This new flat was just built a few months ago and the building is still somewhat wet (I need to ventilate constantly to keep the humidity acceptable).
I bought a humidity monitor and on wetter days the humidity gets over 60% inside (60% right now, 80% outside but if I don't ventilate, it can get to to 75% in a few days even if the flat is empty in the meantime). I don't know the exact humidity of those old flats but I know I had even worse problems in my ex-girlfriend's place which was very well-insulated and we had to regularly deal with water condensing on the windows from the inside during in winter.
Consider the possibility that it has something to do with carpets. I was having the same problem until I moved to an apartment that has hardwood floors and no carpets and pretty soon, my stuffed nose issues improved enormously. I think that carpets are just extremely hard to clean of allergens, or maybe they themselves just happen to sometimes be made out of materials that are allergens. I vacuumed the carpets in my previous apartment pretty often, but that seemed to do almost nothing compared to just living in a place that has no carpets at all.
You could consider running a dehumidifier for a while (monitoring it with equipment). If it helps immediately, might be the humidity itself bothering you. If it helps after some weeks, maybe an issue with dust mites or mold.
I had some problems like that after moving to a dustier and more humid country. I ended up buying an air purifier and a dehumidifier. Not sure if they're working or if I've just acclimatized, but they're pretty cheap, so I think it's worth a shot. And the dehumidifier definitely helps with mould, at the very least.
could it be Dust mite allergy?
It's fairly common where I live. When you have, it just dusting isn't enough, you need special equipment (e.g. a vacuum that has a finer bag than a regular vacuum).
I do have a dust mite allergy. When there is a lot of dust visibly in the air I have the same symptoms. I guess I might want to buy a vacuum with a HEPA filter.
It still does not explain why this wasn't an issue in those old flats (no HEPA filters there either, also more carpets on the floor which the mites should like). But yesterday I did some more digging and it seems that the mites thrive in higher humidity which is more common in newer flats (better insulation and particularly the very new houses need some time to dry up after construction).
I guess I might go see an allergist to confirm. Thanks!
I read somewhere that people's allergies change over time. So maybe your dust mite allergy is gone? Or maybe, as you say, there are more of them in moist places. Extremely thorough cleaning helped, so you could do more of that, but it's a lot of work! What about getting allergy shots? My friend who has the mold allergy is also allergy to mulitiple kinds of pollen and various other things, and spent a lot of the year really uncomfortable, despite taking antihistamines and doing nasal rinses. She just finished a series of allergy shots, and her allergies are now all *much* weaker.
I had the same issues in some flats, but not in others. It was particularly bad in my old flat in my parents' house. Antihistaminika would help during those visits. (A test you could also make.) At some point my mother told me that she very thoroughly cleaned absolutely everything in the flat, and that actually helped. I have no problems in the flat since that time.
I am not sure what it is (or was), but mold spores were my main candidate, even before reading Eremolalos' answer. I am not sure that this fits well with the fact that the problem went away with the thorough cleaning. Perhaps humidity could also help carrying other stuff better. The flat in my case had a bathroom inside without windows and with only a small ventilator, so humidity would stay a long time after showering. That would fit your hypothesis.
I guess it is either the mould or the dust mites. I might try those antihistamines, maybe a vacuum with a HEPA filter and probably a visit to an allergist. thanks!
I think you should get allergy testing, then you'll know. You could, for instance, be allergic to mold spores. I know someone who is allergic to mold spores and hers are worse when it rains in the fall, because lots of mold grows on the fallen leaves.
I guess it is not a bad idea. I've been to one before but that was when I was a kid and never since then. I know I have dust mite allergy, cat allergy (sadly, cause I love cats ... though some cats are somehow better than others) and a mild pollen allergy (which seems to have gotten a lot better over the years). But maybe the dust mites are more active in higher humidity as well or maybe it is the mould spores you mention. Thanks!
Do you know if there was a pet in the apartment and if you are allergic? I am allergic to cats and dogs, and only discovered it after spending time in a home where a cat used to live.
The flat (and the house it is in) was literally finished 1 month ago, nobody has lived there before me.
Interesting... I wonder if there remain some trace levels of formaldehyde or other new-stuff-related volatiles that irritate you.
I guess it is dust mites after all. They had a whole month all for themselves when I was away and the humidity inside was about 75% (apparently ideal for them). I would expect them not to have anything to eat (they eat dead skin and stuff like that ) when I was gone but I guess they don't need much.
The symptoms are the worst in the bed, which is why I drew that conclusion.
But I am surprised how much of an effect humidity can have (if it is humidity). I my friend's apartment I had no problems at all and she doesn't have any special hypoallergenic bedding or anything.
I will change all the bed linen (although I have to keep the mattresses) and if it helps then it has to be mites.
I guess that keeping humidity low (and maybe changing the mattresses for something hypoallergenic) might solve the problem. And I should also buy a robotic vacuum with a HEPA filter (robotic, cause I am too lazy to vacuum frequently enough).
My monthly wrap up of the best long form lectures, podcasts and articles continues.
This set includes an interview with an amateur plant biohacker, a study showing almost no correlation between soil and crop nutrient content, an deep analysis of human evolution in Sahul (modern day Australia and New Guinea), and the current tools for genetically engineering human babies.
https://open.substack.com/pub/zeroinputagriculture/p/the-long-forum-july-2024?r=f45kp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
What do you mean by content? And what qualifies as long-form? Honestly, a little more long-formed description of what you're talking about may be in order — just to lure in the eyeballs.
Post edited at your helpful suggestion- thanks!
Now that's more interesting! I'll dig into it.
So, Umar Kremlev of the IBA refused to release the results of the tests that disqualified Imane Khelif (WaPo link below). What's interesting is that initially, the IBA claimed they tested Khelif twice, one year apart. And they continued to allow her to box after the first test. What gives with that? Kevin Drum had a nice summary of what we know and what we can surmise (below the WaPo link).
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/olympics/2024/08/05/umar-kremlev-olympic-boxing/
https://jabberwocking.com/the-strange-tale-of-imane-khelif/
Mostly I feel sorry for her. She's randomly caught up in a cultural war through no fault of her own. Having intimate details of your medical health including the state of your genitals be discussed by so many people can't be all that fun.
TIL that sex (not gender) verification in sports is surprisingly complicated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_verification_in_sports
I would've thought just checking your cells for the right pair of chromosomes would be enough! But apparently not.
"Sex verification can be substantially more complicated than checking whether a person's sex chromosome pair[a] is XX vs. XY, or comparing their levels of key sex hormones to distinct reference ranges, to determine an athlete's sex. This is due to variations in human biology where some people are not unambiguously female or male, not all cells in a person's body have the same genotype or the presence of other genetic abnormalities. These reasons, among others, led sporting bodies to abandon chromosome testing towards the end of the 20th century and use hormone testing instead. The downside of hormone testing, however, is that policies on hyperandrogenism (women with naturally higher testosterone) were required, which have sparked both public debate and legal battles."
Sure seems rough for women with naturally high testosterone.
Part of the problem is that olympic athletes are all freaks - if you selected out all athletes on the basis of being outside 1SD of (any marker related to performance), then you'd likely lose a huge chunk of your discipline right there.
This is even worse for female athletes - I recall seeing a paper that claimed that around 1/3 of elite female athletes are intersex, hyperandrogenous or similar.
"This is even worse for female athletes - I recall seeing a paper that claimed that around 1/3 of elite female athletes are intersex, hyperandrogenous or similar."
I'm honestly a little surprised that it's not higher...I don't watch much sports so when I look at pictures of professional athletes I always get a bit surprised at how feminine and conventionally attractive many of them seem to be...like obviously there's a general factor of fitness but it's still surprising to not have any tradeoffs obviously visible even at the elite level.
I think some sports reward 'raw' strength (I.e. total strength as opposed to power/weight ratio) more than others. Sprinting versus marathon, shotput vs skeet shoot, weight lifting vs. floor gymnastics. So that pulls the ratios closer to normal for androgenic traits. They're still freaks* along other axes, though.
* I should clarify that I mean "freaks" in the most positive way possible. These are people out at the ends of the bell curve, who are uniquely strange and beautiful because of it.
When her parents released the birth cert, why was it dated 2018 when she was 19? Note that Algeria does not allow legal gender change - so likely people get one certificate at birth for life.
It is probably one of these: https://www.algerian-consulate.org.uk/civil-status/12s
With the world's eyes turned to the Paris Olympics, some athletes are also looking ahead by four years. They're seeking to introduce the Women's Decathlon to the Summer Olympics for the very first time, when the games are next held in Los Angeles in 2028.
For over a century, men have competed in the modern Decathlon, the marquee 10-event track and field contest. Its winner is often lauded as the World's Greatest Athlete.
But it was only beginning in 1984 that women were finally eligible to participate at the Olympic level in a similar but shorter contest, the 7-event Heptathlon.
Outside the Olympics, however, women athletes are actively competing in Decathlons. As a milestone, the first-ever Women's Decathlon World Championships is being held in Ohio in early August 2024, in parallel with the Paris Olympics.
Organizations like Heaven to the Yeah and Let Women Decathlon are spearheading the quest to bring the Women's Decathlon to the next Olympics. They offer multiple ways to support their efforts, including a public petition, themed merchandise and wine sales, and corporate sponsorships.
More (including links to the organizations above):
https://mailchi.mp/highsierrashowerheads/2024-july-newsletter
I agree it seems like a no brainer in terms of gender parity and am surprised this gap hasnt been closed when theres so much focus on parity overall
The heptathalon already includes throwing events, and the women perform behind specialists in the events by about the same gap as male decathletes, so the same balance is there.
The only thing I might speculate is that the current heptathletes themselves might be pissed off as it scrambles the events they have optimized for.
Astute takes, Andrew!
And yes, a switch from the heptathlon to decathlon would clearly be disruptive for some of the athletes training for the former. There may be some ways to mitigate that; among the most helpful would be the IOC committing, soon after the conclusion of the 2024 games, to holding the decathlon in 2028.
Women's sports brings out my worst opinions, but I cannot help, they seem true. First, in the US 63% watch men's sports and 3% women's sports. Everybody understands deep in their bones, that men's sports are something between simulated war and a dominance contest, which is why men's sports brings out the nationalistic side of people, like how Ireland finds it important to collect more medals than England, this is a message to London, the are Irish are tough, don't try to bully them. This is literally why Ancient Greece invented the Olympics as simulated war. And this is why few care about women's sports, it is basically a pointless thing from this angle. Women don't solve their conflicts this way.
So either the radical feminists or radical antifeminist redpillers are right. Either we despite all efforts live in a society that sees men as warriors and women as baby-makers and we made very little progress on this. Or we are biologically hardcoded to see men as warriors and women as baby-makers and equality is an impossible idea and we should not pursue it.
Or perhaps a third opportunity is that there is a small number of high T lesbian women (yes, there is a correlation), who think like men, compete like men, and very much want equality for themselves, but they are very different from most women. They are driving the equality thing, because they are masculine, ambitious, competition-oriented, but most women are not.
> this is a message to London, the are Irish are tough, don't try to bully them.
They do ok for a small country, but the U.K. is a high performer far exceeding the republic.
How many people watch the Male Decathlon event today? Your comment is the first time I've heard about it.
Same. As a mostly disinterested member of the general public I know of several champions through cultural osmosis but I've never heard of a decathlon champion. To me, it's a French sporting goods store chain.
Like, by all means let the women have fun and play that but it feels like a big overstatement of the sport's importance.
I’m guessing by this that the US isn’t very good at it.
Plausible guess, but the United States has actually done well in the Olympic decalthlon competition:
1992 bronze
1996 gold
2000 bronze
2004 silver
2008 gold
2012 gold and silver
2016 gold
2020 4th place
I couldn’t come close to naming all of the Olympic sports, or even all of the ones where the United States wins medals on a regular basis. There are simply too many of them.
I followed it closely during the Olympics. A German athlete was among the favorites, so it got very broad coverage in German television and news.
It used to be famous as the event The Athlete Formerly Known As Bruce Jenner won a spectacularly record-shattering gold medal in. Which I suppose makes it particularly appropriate to debate where women fit in to the decathalon.
I'm not sure I'm correctly understanding either of these two comments, myst_05 or John Schilling, so please feel free to clarify!
My post was about biological women getting an opportunity to compete in a parallel women's decathlon event, alongside the modern decathlon men's event that has been held since 1912. There are women already competing at a high level, in decathlon events held outside the Olympics, and they'd like to have that become an Olympic sport, as well.
Offering a women's decathlon would be even more central to the spirit of the original, modern Olympics than the various sports which have been added recently, like surfing, skateboarding, and breaking (aka break dancing). (No matter how cool and groovy it is to watch athletes great at these very modern sports, as well!)
Is your wife a decathlete?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-XWERje0Ak&ab_channel=JoshBrett
Video about men's body image issues and the rise of the bodybuilder aesthetic. Not especially different from anything else on the subject, but I'm using it as a hook for a notion-- that extreme body demands for both men and women are actually anti-fertility. Sometimes people trying for optimal hotness take themselves out of the gene pool.
I'm wondering if we're seeing selection against a certain kind of gullibility.
Its a clickbait/ragebait video. 99% of men don't take steroids and only a small fraction of the remaining 1% take enough to ruin their fertility.
How widespread is this crap, really? This video is not presenting any statistics, just sensationalized images.
I would guess pretty widespread among 40+ men. Google says up to 2016 TRT went from .5% to 3% of men, and that was before Joe Rogan got popular.
Watch a baseball game from the 80s pre steroid era: they look like teenagers compared to baseball players today.
Fair question. It's certain that the movies have changed, but less certain that a significant number of men are trying look like movie actors.
On the other hand, how low a percentage need to be affected to have (if possible) a genetic effect?
Certainly a lot of men are trying to look like this. Gold’s Gym is representative. It hosted a few dozen weird hobbyists in the 1970s. Today it has 600 locations and 3 million members.
Sure, but it doesn't mean all these members, or even any sort of a plurality, are injecting steroids and other crap.
FWIW, an anecdatum: I've trained in many gyms around the US (and Europe, and Asia, but I digress), and never once encountered a freak like the ones in the ragebait video (have to agree with myst_05). And I've trained with some pretty strong guys, powerlifters, olympic lifters, etc.
> Today it has 600 locations and 3 million members.
How many of the members show up at least once a month?
I think it would need to be a pretty large effect to be worth discussing, in the context of the ~halving of the fertility rate since the 1960s in most western countries. I doubt it's in the top hundred factors that have contributed.
No, I'm not looking at the whole drop in the fertility rate, though one thing that might be going on is people wanting partners who meet artificial standards. I'm looking at the possibility of a differential drop for people who are easily influenced by media images.
Yeah, fair enough. But for any differential drop for people who are easily influenced by media images I would blame Sex and the City.
Girls of my generation used to watch Sex and the City in their early twenties and grew up thinking that there was no better fate than to be a brunching thirty-something single career woman blissfully dumping a new man every week. Don't worry, I'm sure that a handsome billionaire will show up to propose if you ever decide you're bored of being single.
Turns out that if you want to have kids you really want to be married by the time you're ~30, and if you want to have more than two kids you really want to be married by the time you're ~25.
Yeah, second this. Male fertility is bimodal (or rather, lopsided) anyways - about 60% have zero offspring, and the other 40% have the rest. So this is long-tail noise piled on top of noise piled on top of a 50% bijection.
I think that men's body standards are anti-fertility but women's generally aren't. For example, boob jobs or BBLs do not cause fertility issues. The degree of musculature very attractive women have still usually has enough fat that they can have healthy children. And some women are considered very attractive despite not being muscular at all. Plus being obese makes having children more dangerous specifically for women due to biological differences.
Meanwhile, men's body standards are generally based around being hyper-muscular to a degree that requires things like steroids or testosterone supplements. These are literally fertility suppressing: they make it harder to get women pregnant. It also requires so little body fat (to get those very defined muscles) that it can cause significant health issues.
That said, I think it's kind of a historical accident that that's the case. A few decades ago women were supposed to be so thin they looked almost anorexic and that was more anti-fertility than the male prettyboy punk aesthetic that was popular. People in general are just willing to sacrifice a lot for beauty standards.
There's also the risk of an eating disorder for both men and women.
I'm not sure whether the current ideal for women is low enough fat to interfere with fertility.
Iirc, women start having health issues below 15% body fat. Here's an example chart (https://www.nerdfitness.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/women-body-fat.jpg). Men start having issues below 8% roughly. Here's two example charts (https://mennohenselmans.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/bodyfat-percentage-compilation-men-front-1.png) and (https://www.intrainingsports.com/img/articles/body-fat-men.jpg).
Women in general have more body fat than men so men can get more defined safely. But you really shouldn't get too far below 10%. Women should also stay above their 15% minimum.
That said, a few decades ago when you had heroine chic (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/7/77/Kate_Moss_Calvin_Klein.jpg/200px-Kate_Moss_Calvin_Klein.jpg) next to buff-ish pretty boys (https://i.ytimg.com/vi/NmmeDU2kMbo/hqdefault.jpg) you had the opposite. Women had to be skinny fat instead of buff. But it was still dangerously low. And while men had to be muscled it was expected they would have enough fat to look soft and pretty instead of super hard and defined.
Eh. Look at the birth and abortion rates of Russia, who tend to be not vulnerable to this. Iran and Turkey have 1.5! There are many factors in declining birth rates. "Gender ideology" is more like a post-facto justification rather than a cause.
Nobody is growing, except Africa.
I'm not so sure the psychology here is connected to genetics in a way that biological evolution can work with. I suspect the selection will take place at the level of culture.
Can you walk through how you envision that working, if you've the time?
That is, I think I know what you mean by the latter part — cultures that don't encourage this will eventually outweigh those that do — but only if you posit that falling prey to "hm yes I SHOULD do this popular thing" has no systematic mental correlates, or that genes have no effect on personality, would this be beyond the ability of evolution to influence...
— (barring wild scenarios involving stuff like, I dunno, in-utero effects that are themselves uncorrelated with any alleles, or serendipitous equal-and-opposing SNPs, etc)
— and those are almost certainly not the case; so I think maybe the initial section of the comment isn't right...
...unless I'm totally missing something, which is very possible (keep falling asleep trying to write this comment; might go to bed after this, heh—)
Anyone following the Olympics womens' boxer controversy? It seems like quite the nuanced "scissor statement" where you lose hope in each side of humanity.
The left/liberals (even Destiny) claim there's no evidence Imane Khelif is anything but an XX female, which while "no [definitive] evidence" is technically true, the actual outcome probably isn't.
The right run the gamut of "he's 100% a man" or trans, which isn't true.
But in all likelihood it's another case of intersex, or DSD, where Imane has XY chromosome, male-range testosterone, but was raised from birth as a female and knows nothing else. There was a previous case like this in Caster Semenya with 5-ARD, XY chromosome, male testosterone, and a vagina.
Best evidence so far is that the Olympic IOC corrected their statement that "it wasn't a DSD case." to "it wasn't a trans case." Olympic current determination for their category is based on passport identification, and they don't seem to want to change that.
I have immense sympathy for the position these athletes are in, but I also believe the womens' athletic categories raison d'etre is specifically because of womens' ranges in things like testosterone, and an intersex situation that lands you in the XY / male testosterone should warrant them in the Mens' category. (which is essentially the more permissive open to anyone because of the sex-based athletic differences in most sports. The whole reason Women's exist is to carve out a category where they win.)
More info: https://quillette.com/2024/08/03/xy-athletes-in-womens-olympic-boxing-paris-2024-controversy-explained-khelif-yu-ting/
DSD has nothing to do with trans of course. One is a biological reality, the other is a feeling.
I personally don’t really care about female sports, particularly if a biological man is running in the female 100M and i can bet on it.
(£100 on the fine sturdy lady with the large chest and prominent Adam’s Apple, if you please).
However in a non clown show world we probably would uncontroversially discuss testosterone, muscle mass and genetics with regard to female boxing, in particular. Given the danger.
Right now trans activists are up in arms about the exact thing, perhaps the only thing, they should be circumspect about, concerning adults and sport. Boxing can kill you. Losing a race to the lady with the very deep voice won’t.
The day that a female boxer dies because the 220 pound trans woman pummels her isn’t going to be a good day for the trans movement, and by extension trans people in general.
But we live in a clown show world where trans activists are building their own grave, blinded as they are by absolutism.
We know doping is endemic. Why don't people suspect that?
Hot take: we should have a doped-up-the-wazoo category. Maybe not things that have long term deleterious effects, but wouldn’t it be fun to see what the human body can be pushed to if the human race applies all its collective ingenuity to the matter?
See World's Strongest Man competitions for what the human body can do when absolutely jacked on all manner of drugs. For any sport including weight classes or focusing on speed/technique, the results might not be as crazy as one may assume - the primary benefit of steroids is increased muscle mass, and that only goes so far, and can be counterproductive (e.g. a 300lb professional bodybuilder is not necessarily a good javelin thrower, and will certainly lose sprint races against people much smaller).
"I have immense sympathy for the position these athletes are in, but I also believe the womens' athletic categories raison d'etre is specifically because of womens' ranges in things like testosterone..."
This seems like special pleading to me. Athletes aren't a randomly selected subset of the population: they are specifically selected FOR exceptional athleticism. Unless you go completely blank-slate (in which case having women's categories would make no sense) the inescapable assumption is that ALL athletes competing at the Olympic levels are genetically gifted and abnormal in one way or the other. It could be rare mutations or karyotypes, or it could be an unusually high clustering of more mundane genetic factors but you are, once again, *specifically selecting* for a certain set of unusual genetic features.
To turn around and say "oh, but THESE unusual genetic features are disqualifying" is patently absurd. Not only does it require significantly invasive tests (can you think of any other job that would require you to get your genome sequenced?), but it's demonstrably making a problem where none existed before. Intersex conditions are not common, but they're A LOT more common than Olympic Athletes of any calibre. Never have I heard it suggested that any significant fraction of female Olympic Athletes are intersex, so one presumes it's hardly the stand-out advantage that you're making it. I suppose it's possible that many intersex Olympians have simply gone undetected, but in that case well...if it wasn't a problem that could even be *noticed* before, updating on this (highly dubious) case seems little short of farcical.
If you genuinely hold this position I think you should explain in concrete terms what, exactly, you think would be gained by the IOC poking around in athletes' DNA. What would be the benefit for the IOC, for the spectators, for the world at large? (Obviously some athletes would benefit by seeing their competitors disqualified, but that would be true of any arbitrary qualification criterion.)
'To turn around and say "oh, but THESE unusual genetic features are disqualifying" is patently absurd.'
Like what you quoted me said: THESE genetic features are literally the only reason the women's category exists. We make women's categories because XY men have a variety of physical advantages due to that XY. Almost everyone watching the Olympics around the world, from many cultures, understands this. We're not talking about "muscle size" categories, or "height" categories, we're talking about women's categories because that is the distinction people care about watching as a separate competition.
It's only since the 80s that it was even possible to know a woman was XY. Before DNA testing, if you had a vagina, they'd have to let you compete as a woman.
It's somewhat arbitrary which typically female features you consider essential for a woman. You might consider being XX to be the defining feature of being female (though very rarely people with XX can be phenotypically male), or you may consider it to be having a uterus, or female genitalia, or identifying as female, etc. We never clearly defined the women's category.
This comes back to the question of what we want from having a women's category. 99% of people are probably genetically not cut out to be a world champion boxer. Say we discover that there's a strong correlation between having the O+ blood type and developing strong muscles, to the point that people with O+ blood never win boxing competitions. Would that mean we should make a boxing category just for O+ people?
We have a women's category because people identify strongly with their gender. We probably wouldn't create an O+ blood type category in the above scenario because people don't identify strongly by their blood type. But with gender edge cases, it's not clear which group we identify the athlete as. Some women will see Khelif as a woman like themselves, and others won't. The boundaries of who people identify as belonging to a group has more to do with politics, psychology, and culture than any scientific definition.
There is no objective right answer for the edge cases, and as long as people identify with different group boundaries, we can't make everyone happy.
> though very rarely people with XX can be phenotypically male
How? There is no mechanism that would allow for that.
If the SRY gene has moved to another chromosome.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11076692/
The other link says that in 10% or 20% of such cases, the victim can't produce SRY, and "the reason a male phenotype develops in these individuals is poorly understood".
In the majority case, the argument is available that the chromosome cannot be cleanly labeled "X" or "Y", though X inactivation does apply.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XX_male_syndrome
Biology is bloody annoying.
Unrelated: I seem to recall that your original comment was just the link, and I see an edit stamp on the comment.
In my "activity" menu, the summary of your comment includes the remark "Biology is bloody annoying".
Was that part of the original comment, or did the activity widget update to include your edit?
> Would that mean we should make a boxing category just for O+ people?
Why on earth not? We have categories for different weight, why not - if we decide we want to - for blood type?
We make up the categories; we can make the boundaries be wherever we want them to be. The key is to be explicit up front about requirements and decide the new rules calmly and deliberately, well in advance of the event to which they will apply; not retroactively in the middle of a media circus while panicking and crying.
Why on earth not?
Lack of interest, basically. People don't care much about their blood type. Many people don't even know theirs. I could have used a gene in the example instead of blood type.
People care a lot about gender and strongly identify with their gender.
I agree the rules should be clear in advance.
> People don't care much about their blood type. Many people don't even know theirs.
Well, not if you're not Japanese anyway.
Alternately, you could just project all the different criteria to a single axis, called 'advantage', and build your bins there.
Like, your current testosterone is so and so, that is +5kg, and estimated from a CT scan of your bones, your testosterone during puberty was that, this is another four kilograms to your weight category.
I like this idea.
I think you should maybe spend a little bit more time reading about what congenital androgen insensitivity syndrome actually DOES before you confidently proffer such an opinion. My own knowledge of the biology is somewhat limited, but what you're saying here is plainly, obviously, egregiously oversimplified. If XY were the sole determining factor of everything you are claiming is relevant, than such intersex conditions *could not exist at all.*
As best I can tell, you're equivocating between "XY is the 'factual' way to determine biological sex" and "the XY karyotype confers massive physical advantages." The former is a definition and not subject to falsification. The latter is an *observation* about the world, which can be false as a matter of fact (or partially false, or subject to nuance and elaboration). If you want to hold up the former as your standard you need to abandon the notion that it's actually about controlling for athletic ability at all. If you want to hold up the latter as your standard you need to check if it's actually as universally true as you're trying to represent it.
(Spoiler: the answer is "no." We wouldn't be having this conversation at all if the answer were anything other than "no.")
In a farcical press conference yesterday, Umar Kremlev of the IBA failed to release the results of the tests that disqualified Imane. So far no evidence has been provided that she's an XY.
And the IBA is so corrupt that it makes FIFA blush. Why should we give any credence to this crap?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/olympics/2024/08/05/umar-kremlev-olympic-boxing/
I agree IBA isn't completely reliable. However, given IOC has said "it's not a trans issue," retracted their statement "it's not a DSD issue," relies only on passport identification, and has nothing to verify it's not DSD, it makes you wonder the missing hole here. If it was IOC vs. IBA I'd trust the IOC. But IOC has not disputed DSD. Do you think it's more likely the IBA is completely fabricating an issue, or that they are disqualifying based on DSD that the IOC guidelines currently allow?
"But the IOC has not disputed DSD."
Why on Earth should they? They are in no way beholden to the IBA, they're free to set their own rules and standards and they don't have anything to gain by taking either position. If, as you say, they're relying on passport identification than *they don't know.* Which means you simply shouldn't update on what they say one way or the other.
All of which brings it down to a simple question: do you think the totally unsubstantiated word of a corrupt organization with ulterior motives is all by itself sufficient evidence to noticeably shift your prior? Because that's literally the only thing you have here.
Emphatically yes. The organization may be corrupt, but when they say "these athletes sre male", that should definitely be enough reason to demand a definitive test. That the IOC withdraws to a position of, "they were raised female, have a female passport and have competed as females, and that's good enough for us" in a full-contact combat sport is, frankly, pathetic and outrageous.
"that should be reason enough to demand a definitive test."
Now you're making unsupportable assumptions. There is NO SUCH THING as a definitive test for biological sex. Of course there is not. This *entire conversation* stems from the fact that there is not. There cannot be.
There cannot be a definitive test for biological sex because biological sex is not and never has been a perfect, absolute, platonic set of categories that perfectly partitions the space of humans into two and only two buckets with no exceptions or ambiguity. Now it is actually surprisingly *close* to such a perfect category: if you compare any of the several common definitions, I'd guess probably ~99.9% of humans will test as the same biological sex under all of them. But even if they are only a fraction of a percent of the human population, the exceptions and corner cases still demonstrably exist.
Now a lot of times those corner cases don't matter, but this whole conversation *starts* with the premise of "well, perhaps Khelif is one of the corner cases," so clearly this is not one of those times. When you say "demand and definitive test" you are assuming way *the entire problem.* Different people of good faith can disagree on what constitutes a "definitive test" where the corner cases are concerned: ultimately you'll have to pick one test or another to apply, which is exactly the issue.
Now for a competitive event run by a longstanding organization with an actual rule book, none of this presents a huge practical problem. You choose whatever standard you think best captures the actual criteria you're trying to impose, you write it into your rule book and you'll empower people to apply it (which, of course, might involve adjudicating unforeseen disagreements and ambiguities). To put it plainly, the IOC is free to set whatever standard IT wants[1] (not whatever standard YOU want, nor whatever standard the IBA wants) for determining who is eligible to compete and in what events. Competitors who don't like those standards are, of course, free to protest them, to air their grievances with the media or to refuse to compete.
I say this because every indication I've seen, every report I've read on the subject suggest that this is what the IOC has *already done.* They had standards. They applied those standards. Under those standards they determined Khelif was eligible. The IBA's claims about Khelif aren't even new information: they disqualified her over a year ago[2]. If the IOC was at all concerned that said disqualification indicated that Khelif wasn't in compliance with THEIR standards, they had plenty of time to look into it BEFORE she showed up in Paris, which would be the fair and even-handed way to handle something like that. And of course Khelif competed in the 2020 Olympics: nobody raised concerns then either. Now, if you have some information that the IOC *failed* in some way to correctly apply its own rules, please do share it and I'll update accordingly.
Regardless, once they have determined her eligibility under their rules, they're pretty much locked in. Nothing could possibly be less fair in a sporting competition than changing the rules *in the middle of an event.* Doing so would absolutely destroy the IOC's authority and credibility, and rightly so. If this event causes them to re-evaluate any part of their standards, they can make whatever changes they like in between this Olympics and 2026.
What you're suggesting (as far as I understand) basically amounts to "the IOC should throw out its own rules in this instance and adopt the IBA's rules instead." Which of course they will never and should never do. It seems as though a bunch of people see this as an opportunity to soap-box about what they think the "real" determinants of biological sex are, but nothing could be more irrelevant right now. Even if you're dead certain that you have The One and Only Correct Way to Determine Biological Sex, you can't retroject it into the rulebook in-use in 2024. Call for a future rule change if you believe it's important, but recognize the fundamental reality that here and now the question is settled.
[1] And yes, that includes the standard of "we'll designate other organizations which happen to answer the question for their own use, and then go with whatever they say."
[2] The fact that they released a new statement only after somebody else stirred up the controversy should make their entire position even less credible. It is very poor timing if their goal had anything to do with fairness, but (as we have seen) excellent timing if their main aim is political shit-stirring.
p.s. I think it's speaks very poorly of global human culture that this sort of debate need to happen at all. When you've painted yourself into a corner of *needing* to impose your own categories on reality, even in cases where reality is indifferent to them, clearly you've done something badly wrong somewhere.
You raise a couple of good points, but I think you miss the mark on a few.
Looking at the testing issue without all the political BS that has been wrapped around it: Yes, there are a small number of edge cases. Ideally, we'd have a test that conclusively says "m" or "f"; in reality, we have tests that agree for most individuals, but give different or ambiguous results for a couple of individuals. That would be a problem if we needed to make an "m or f"-classsification, but the two sexes are not symmetrical. "F" is the protected group, so what we need is "clearly f or not-clearly-f", and we can round the edge cases to "not-clearly-f".
I don't even think that Imane Khelif is such a complicated edge case - I would bet that one would find XY chromosomes and internal testes - but we don't know, and we won't find out anytime soon, because neither she nor the IBA seem willing to release the existing reports, and the IOC doesn't care.
Now you say, yes, the IOC is applying its own rules consistently. That may be true on one scale; on a different level, the IOC has published suggestions for the individual sports' governing bodies that state that gender determination should prioritize the safety of athletes and assure that no one has an unfair advantage. Classifying boxers (!) by "if the passport says she's a woman, that's good enough for us" clearly does neither.
Now, when faced with public pressure due to a situation that is widely and rightfully perceived as fucked up, an organization could say "oh, there may be an unforeseen problem in our ruleset, let us understand the situation and find a remedy for now or for next time" - that would indicate blatant incompetence, since this topic has been discussed to death in last two years, but at least it would show a willingness to improve. Or the organisation could say, "everything's working as intended, nothing to see here, move one", which would indicate they are corrupt and evil and don't give a fuck.
To be clear—the only suggestion that Khelif is intersex is a claim from the International Boxing Association, a Russian organization that got banned from the Olympics due to alleged corruption and cheating. The tests that indicate she is intersex have not been released.
Whether or not you think intersex athletes of various types should be allowed to compete in women's sports, there are two positions that I think are ridiculous to disagree with:
1) Everyone in a sport should be held to the same criteria for inclusion. If Khelif is intersex, and she is banned, every other boxer must submit to a genetic test before they can compete.
2) We should rely on actual data, not rumor and hearsay. The IBA must release their genetic test results before anyone can take their claim of it seriously, and the Olympic committee should conduct their own test to verify its accuracy before banning anyone.
> 1) Everyone in a sport should be held to the same criteria for inclusion. If Khelif is intersex, and she is banned, every other boxer must submit to a genetic test before they can compete.
Sex verification for women's sport has always been done, until recently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_verification_in_sports
But it hasn't always been done in the same way. Khelif would definitely have passed under some standards. It's unclear whether she would have passed under others (as it depends on private information that is, frankly, none of our business).
“to be clear” ;)
- Khelif's manhood is also strongly suggested by 100% looking like a dude: https://x.com/brandubh4/status/1819832865477071189/photo/1
- The IBA claims they can't release the tests because they're private medical information. No idea what jurisdiction demands that, but medical confidentiality is a common rule.
- The IOC is clear that they don't care about DSD athletes. If it says female in the passport, you can compete in the women's events as far as the IOC is concerned. This is a terrible rule IMHO.
Obviously your comment is absurd. But I like the idea of taking the implied test literally.
Instead of going by chromosomes or testosterone levels or plumbing, from now on, a panel of Olympic judges will look at someone (fully clothed), and decide whether they look girly enough to be considered female for the women's section of the Olympics.
Honestly this could be pretty entertaining.
When you're not arguing on the net, I think you also know that the physique of people with high and low testosterone are very different and easily recognized by us humans.
…no ugly women allowed in Olympic events, got it.
Ah yes, the very highly scientific method of eyeballing someone and comparing them to your preconceived notions of what [category] looks like. Perhaps you should reread point 2 with an emphasis on the phrase "actual data."
> 1) Everyone in a sport should be held to the same criteria for inclusion. If Khelif is intersex, and she is banned, every other boxer must submit to a genetic test before they can compete.
A testosterone test would probably suffice -- this is of course already done and not considered too invasive?
IIRC the issue with that is that men and women have overlapping testosterone ranges, so there's no line that cleanly divides women from men without edge cases. Set the bar low enough to catch all XY women and you'll end up putting some XX women into the men's division, and the other way around if you set it higher.
I think that you do not recall correctly -- normal male testosterone levels are about 700 ng/dL; normal females are more like 25. While certainly there is some range there, <100 would indicate a serious medical problem in an Olympic age male, and >100 would be fairly unheard of in an XX female.
Approximately 25% of elite male athletes tested in this paper (https://clindiabetesendo.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40842-017-0050-3) have testosterone levels under 10nmol/l, the (perhaps arbitrary) higher limit for female athletes used by some sports bodies. Some have extremely low levels, certainly overlapping with the female range.
> A testosterone test
Heck, I'd propose doing this for everyone. Create a height/weight/T-level matrix, and increase the number of divisions!
This would certainly be better than any standard that currently exists.
My only criticism is that a person's testosterone levels presumably fluctuate somewhat, but aren't subject to the same ease of measurement and small manipulation that weight is. Ideally you'd want to use something like a rolling average starting well before the competition, so boxers less likely to flip-flop between categories.
That is a problem with these sorts of qualifications. I know wrestlers in particular can damage their bodies and develop bad eating habits due to trying to get into particular weight classes. Clearly, if there were a one-time T measurement, people would be doing far worse things to themselves.
Maybe some form of averaging multiple measurements over time would be better?
Agreed. I think if the criteria are sufficiently load-bearing, trying to game them in a long-term sense would be counterproductive: shifting the measure will also noticeably shift the target (athletic ability). But it's much more plausible that people could shift the single day-of measurement without harming their overall ability much.
Also from an event-scheduling perspective, it seem pretty crucial to know what categories everyone is competing in well beforehand.
…that’s where I came in! ;)
> 1) Everyone in a sport should be held to the same criteria for inclusion. If Khelif is intersex, and she is banned, every other boxer must submit to a genetic test before they can compete.
I think it would make sense to hold the champions to a higher standard. We'd expect disproportionately many cheaters making it to the very top, and people care more about the champions.
This is a complete non-sequitor. lalaithion is talking about what the rules are for being allowed to compete at all, not about cheating. Nothing at all about this discussion is about cheating.
The (largely unsupported) speculation is about Khelif being intersex: a specific rule about being intersex at the Olympics would need to be in place *before* the competition--complete with a metric for evaluating compliance--before "cheating" against that rule would even be a coherent thing that could happen. A lot of people seem to want to retroactively apply a rule that (AFAIK) doesn't exist. But again, if they do, they need to apply it to *everyone.* No fair competition should claim "we'll wait to see if you win, and then decide on a criterion to retroactively determine if you were cheating, which we will apply for nobody else."
Side note: keep in mind that it's extremely common for intersex individuals not to be aware that they're intersex.
The IBA's announcement of (secret) test results proving her to be intersex came three days after she had defeated a previously-undefeated Olympic boxing prospect from -- wait for it -- Russia! Hence allowing the IBA to "restore" that boxer's unblemished W-L record.
I didn't hear that part of the story. I assumed it was an IBA shakedown of Algeria.
>This is the sort of thinking that led to the TSA strip-searching grandmothers after 9/11.
Which is a good thing. The moment you make an exception for "people who are X" is the moment terrorists start recruiting people who can pass for X. Why would one want to give potential bad actors helpful hints re how to evade security?
>Which is a good thing. The moment you make an exception for "people who are X" is the moment terrorists start recruiting people who can pass for X.
This is not actually correct; it's more difficult to recruit certain people than it is to recruit other people.
Yes, obviously, but so what, given that it takes only one recruit to blow up a plane, and 9/11 itself required only 16 recruits.
So what? The goal is to spend your effort where it's effective. If you're currently checking Arab men ages 15-45, and you want to expand or reorient that program to lower the rate of terrorism, you're better served by putting the additional effort into checking another high-risk group than by putting any of it into grandmothers. You'd only ever check grandmothers as part of a policy that non-randomly checked 100% of people. And that policy still wouldn't drive the terrorism rate down to zero, but it would drive terrorist recruitment back to its natural demographics, making the grandmother-checking look even more ridiculous.
Of course you do random testing, but it's also good to put resources toward the categories that you're most suspicious of. And what's even better is tracking hit rate to see how well your suspicions pay off. And then there's the matter of, as you point out, figuring out whether your targeted suspicions are causing a reaction in the opposition.
Some neighborhoods in my city have a lot more gun violence than others. I think it would be a bad idea to ignore this and distribute police randomly. So do most of the residents of those neighborhoods.
The high-crime neighborhood is a very poor analogy, because it cannot be gamed in the same way as a rule like "don't search little old ladies who set off alarm bells at the airport" can be gained. You know, once upon a time female suicide bombers were unheard of. Moreover,
> For several years the US military had in place a profile for car and truck bombers with one exception, if there was a child in the car, there was no need to worry. Al Qaeda in Iraq used this to their advantage and began to strap children into their car bombs to evade the profile.
Bloom, Mia. "Bombshells: Women and terror." Gender Issues 28 (2011): 1-21 (citing Ricks, T. (2009). The gamble: General David Petraeus and the American military adventure in Iraq 2006–2008. NY: Penguin Press).
Violent criminals in my city have seemed pretty good at identifying places where police enforcement was lax, and moving movable activities there. But yes, things like high schools full of potential drug customers are hard to move.
No, that is not the takeaway. Please read more carefully.
Except the IBA refuses to release the results of the tests. Why shouldn't we single the IBA out for more scrutiny?
OK, you are accused of being transexual masquerading as the opposite gender by a Putinophilic organization. Prove that you're not. Until you submit chromosomal proof of your sex, we will consider you of the opposite sex. Does this sound reasonable to you? ;-)
Submitting chromosomal proof of your sex is a really easy thing to do. So yes, refusing to do so is highly suspicious.
As to the precise form of your comment, there are no rules against women competing in "male" events; the reason they don't do that is just that they can't win. So the accusation couldn't even be lodged.
> This is the sort of thinking
Is it, though?
What if we just want to make sure future competitions don’t devolve into mud slinging wars and requests by the losers for extra testing of the victors after the fact every time?
The Olympics should be about athletes competing. The circus is a different kind of event altogether.
Whatever your actual criterion for inclusion in a set is, test for it up front, not retroactively.
It really is. The left insists that we have to ignore our lying eyes and pretend to believe that no one is more likely to do X than anyone else. And so we have to apply equally high scrutiny to grandmothers and middle aged Arab men if we're to scrutinize anyone at all.
Who better than an innocent-looking grandmother who has already lived a long life to sacrifice herself for the cause?
You're right, it should be extended to Arab grandmothers and hijabis too.
Or a young child? I hear that Hamas likes to occasionally wire them up with explosives and send them toward Israeli soldiers. :-(
IIRC the rationale for screening grandmothers was a little different: it went - (at least some) terrorist organisations are not run by complete idiots, and also demonstrably have ways to motivate people into doing suicidal things. If you leave a gap in your defenses, it will be exploited. They make kids run at soldiers wearing bombs, ffs. If you never check the grandmothers, they will find a way to recruit a grandmother. Sure, profile the people you want to profile, but also be seen to check at least enough of the grandmothers that trying that sort of thing doesn’t look like it’ll be worth the extra effort.
Bruce Schneier wrote at least two books with several chapters each on this sort of thing, well worth a read.
This is a rather different situation to what we have here, where what I really want to see is sports events that finish during the event, and not during a war of accusations afterwards.
Test for your actual decision criterion, whatever it may be, before the event.
A violent sport like boxing is going to attract masculine individuals regardless of their sex or gender, so it's no surprise a number of almost-men participate in Women's Boxing. It's an odd sport. Thank God for stupid culture wars or nobody would care about it at all.
That's pretty much my view as well. The whole thing could, and should, be clarified with a thorough examination of the athlete. If Khelif turns out to have testicles and xy chromosomes, he has no business competing against women (and in a full-contact combat sport at that!), no matter what any passport or birth certificate says. It's embarassing that Western media are dancing around this issue.
What if she has a vagina but xy chromosomes?
What if she has a vagina and xx chromosomes but produces extra testosterone for some other reason?
What if this is all just fallout from her beating a Russian last year and the Gazprom-funded organiser coming up with an excuse to fiddle the results despite the question never arising at any point before this?
If we want to base this stuff on testosterone levels, we should make that explicit up front so we never need to have a culture war over it again. If you want to exclude other classes of people, do it for the next competition.
If once you let someone get disqualified retrospectively based on criteria that were not stated up front or tests that were not performed on entry, you open the door to bad actors and every competition thereafter will become a mud slinging war forevermore.
The IBA clearly states that XY individuals count as men, vagina or not, and XX individuals count as women, and that seems like a good first approximation. I don't know if there are DSD conditions that cause extra testosterone with XX chromosomes. If that is a thing, it might require clarification in the rules.
Your "corrupt Russians" innuendo doesn't lead anywhere - the IBA has informed the IOC about the case two months ago, and if the IOC had taken it seriously and wanted to double-check, they could have. They didn't, and now we have that farce.
https://www.iba.sport/news/iba-clarifies-the-facts-the-letter-to-the-ioc-regarding-two-ineligible-boxers-was-sent-and-acknowledged/
But in an interview yesterday Kremlev of the IBA was unable to offer any evidence that Khelif had XY chromosomes — nor even that the tests had been done. So Khelif is guilty until proven innocent in your eyes. While the IBA is above reproach. That seems bassackwards to me.
I have no idea who this IBA guy is, and what he knows about the case, and I don't care. I see the written statement from the IBA, which includes links to the letter they sent to the IOC, and the letter from the IOC acknowledging it. I have no idea if the IBA is "above reproach" here, but if the IOC wants to handle the event, and they are alerted to the potential problem and don't do anything about it, any failures on the part of the IBA are neither here nor there - it's the IOC who's dropped the ball. Everything I read makes me suspect that Khelif is indeed an intersex male, but we shouldn't have to speculate about it. Can't be that hard to test conclusively, can it?
The IOC stripped the IBA of its status as boxing's governing body over governance and finance issues last year, due to the complaints about bribery and corruption among IBA executives — and especially over allegations of match-fixing at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics in return for payoffs. The IOC took charge of the Paris Games boxing competition and they applied eligibility rules from the 2016 and the 2021 Olympics. The IBA has no standing with the IOC. The IOC is not obligated to listen to their complaints nor their squawks of outrage.
And it's worth noting that the current IBA president Umar Kremlev is a personal friend of Vladimir Putin, and he has moved IBA's HQ from Lausanne, Switzerland to Russia. He has spent heavily on apparent self-promotion and has opposed independent appointment of judges and referees. He made Gazprom the sole and only sponsor of IBA events, and he even cancelled their last board election. The only people who seem to regard the IBA as a legitimate sports organization are US Putinophiles.
"It seems like quite the nuanced "scissor statement" where you lose hope in each side of humanity."
Ha!
For my part I've just glanced at it in passing, really, but assumed that it was another Semenya case, where it took me a surprising amount of work to find out that the core problem was that Caster Semenya has working, though internal, testicles. All of Western media (almost!) was extremely reluctant to actually explain this in plain language, clearly because they did not want to admit that the complaint against Semenya had merit, which in turn is clearly because of the comically heavy political skew of journalists as a group.
So I just took it for granted that something similar must be the case with these two controversial boxers: obviously unfit to compete in the women's division, but defended by the media because we... can't let chuds win, with their awful reality fixation? Or something.
"Best evidence so far is that the Olympic IOC corrected their statement that 'it wasn't a DSD case." to "it wasn't a trans case.'"
To be fair, that guy's tongue clearly just slipped at the press conference and IIRC he corrected himself, then and there, on the fly; it's not like they made a forceful claim and then had to issue an official correction or anything. He just made a mouth typo.
Semen-ya seems like an unfortunate case of nominative determinism.
It seems unlikely that the name is in English.
Agreed. But hindsight is 20/20; in advance one often feels like a fool going by something that looks dangerously close to superstition, even though it's ALWAYS ACCURATE!!!
….so we should remove gender from the divisions and make them about the thing we actually care about: the way we have boxing divisions based on e.g. weight, have them based on testosterone level, body mass index, amount of force behind punches, whatever it is. Low testosterone, mid testosterone, superheavy testosterone, whatever.
Or if it turns out gender is the thing we actually care about after all, stop bringing testosterone into it.
What do we actually care about? There's some reason we're not just having one competition for everyone, but what exactly is it? If there was only an NBA, women effectively wouldn't be able to play basketball, but men who are shorter than average still can't play basketball. If we're so concerned about half the population not being allowed to play, why don't we have a shorter-than-average league?
Boxing has weight classes, which seems to follow that principle. Maybe we should make it take testosterone into account as well as weight? But ultimately, whoever win will always have some advantage that will just be something we didn't account for. Maybe it's testosterone. Maybe it's how much time they spent training. Maybe it's whatever genes get people to work harder, or whatever parents get people to work harder. If you account for everything, it's an 8 billion way tie. So what things are we supposed to account for and what aren't we?
The argument and reason for having sporting events just for women is that in most sports women have zero chance to compete with men, and are thus excluded from elite sports if there is no female category..
That's it, really.
That’s why the parent poster used basketball as an example. Height disqualifies way more than 50% of the population from playing basketball at an elite level and nobody bats an eye.
That's a fundamental property of sports. A competition where everyone has the same chance of winning is not a sport. It's a lottery.
So why is it that when women want to play basketball, we should make sure they have their own league so they get a chance, but when short people want to play basketball, we just tell them that a competition where everyone has the same chance of winning is not a sport, it's a lottery?
Advantages in a sport can come from skill and training rather than biology. It's not a fundamental property of sports that people will always have biological advantages.
For example, there are sports that don't rely on muscle power at all, such as target shooting.
You're missing the point. Why are women given the chance to win competitions but short men are not?
…I actually don’t even care that much what the answer is. What I want is for the people who do strongly care to decide what the answer is, test whether or not people qualify for the event based on that criterion before the event and stick to those results for that event, so that the winner of the event is determined by them winning the event rather than by them winning a media circus afterwards. We already have elections for the latter; I’d quite like sports to be a different kind of event.
I sympathize with your point, but I'd also offer that we only have a rudimentary understanding of how sexual development works, and of all the ways that the two standard paths can go awry. Settling on some random criteria now is unlikely to produce something that seems viable in 10 years. We're literally figuring this out as we go, and that happens one outlier at a time.
Sure, why not? Changing the rules every ten years, in a civil calculated manner before a game, is much much better than changing them in a media-fuelled rush after a game and applying the changes retroactively.
Whatever it is is vague enough that you can't keep politics from seeping into it. One side will always say biological sex is important. Another will say gender identity is important.
I don't really care for sports, but if I was watching the, I would prefer women's sports. Women are attractive. But should our test really be a beauty contest?
Well, in sports, the side that says that biological differences are what counts is clearly correct.
And I honestly don't think the issue is that hard to resolve: if you want to compete in the women's division, you have to be an XX individual without any clear DSD. If someone raises doubts, you undergo a test to prove that is the case, or you sign up for the men's division.
That will disqualify a small number of edge cases in favor of fairness and simplicity, but there's a long list of medical conditions that can prevent a person from participating in athletic competitions, and I don't see the problem with adding a couple more, especially since the men's division is open as an alternative.
> Well, in sports, the side that says that biological differences are what counts is clearly correct.
Usually, transgender people use hormones which minimizes the differences. I haven't seen actual studies on this and any differences that remain are lost in the noise of politics, but that's remarkably easy to do so it doesn't really say much. In any case, I wouldn't call it "clearly correct".
But that's not what I was talking about. I mean, under what circumstances should we make a separate sports league for group X so they can compete fairly? Why should we include women, but not short people? Should it be about biological women, or psychological women? If it's about psychological women, that would imply that we shouldn't let trans men who haven't used hormones compete in women's leagues, not because they'd have any sort of advantage, but because the whole point of the league is to make it so women have a chance to compete, and giving a trans man the chance to compete in no way helps with that.
This seems more like a case of the right finding out that "biological sex" is complicated, which is a common talking point on the left.
If it’s too vague to make a decision, you shouldn’t use it to make decisions.
Whatever you do use to make decisions for any individual event, test for it up front and stick to the rule you set. You can update the rules for future events if you want, sure, but if you refuse to, say, run genetic tests up front because your rule is that the information in a birth certificate is good enough, don’t retroactively change that afterwards just because a loser complained loudly enough.
I feel like you've made up this rule just so you can get the outcome you want. If a loser suspects that the winner of an event cheated, why shouldn't he be allowed to complain and draw attention to this after the event? And perhaps more to the point, are you suggesting that isn't how it works now and has always worked? Why should this case be considered special? (Entirely leaving aside the fact that the IBA *did* warn the IOC in advance, and they could have checked in advance, but refused.)
Or just do it by sex. The point of women's sports is to have sports that women can win. As a father of a daughter I support this general concept. If my daughter wants to play sports then I want her to be able to do it safely and with a reasonable shot of winning, so she can have fun and stay healthy. Nothing wrong with that.
If Khelif is a genuine edge case (let us charitably assume that she is phenotypically female and went her whole life assuming she was a normal female until the day she did a genetic test and got the shock of her life) then that sucks for her that she'd be disqualified from womens' tournaments and too weak for open tournaments. But it sucks a lot less than a world where all women are outcompeted in all sports by the 0.1% of the population who are sex edge cases.
Are you by any chance a father of a boy of average height who’d like to play basketball?
Fairness is not a system - it is people caring about some random stuff and some other random stuff not.
According to everything I've read so far, Khelif was born a girl, grew up as a girl, competed at every level as a girl/woman, and there was never any controversy until she beat a Russian in a Russian-controlled IBA bout, AFTER which Khelif was suddenly disqualified. IBA used a "test" that they refuse to release or even describe (one guy says "testosterone", the other says "chromosome", they can't even coordinate their story). The whole thing is just one of myriad ways Russia makes everything suck.
For context, I'm a martial artist, I have female friends who compete, I care deeply about fighting sports and am very much against M-to-F trans competing in women's divisions. This case is not it.
Also, I've read that Khelif lost some bouts, which presumably demonstrates that she isn't always going to win.
"This case is not it."
Frankly, you don't know this. IOC has not disputed the DSD claim and retracted a statement where they said it wasn't DSD. I don't trust the IBA but we won't know until the IOC chromosomal tests and cases like this, Semenya, have happened.
By "it" I meant M2F trans. I think we can assign >99% probability that Khelif is not M2F.
Oh agree. Poor reading comprehension on my part.
The IBA says they had two independent chromosome tests done, and both came back with the same result that disqualifies Khelif. They also formally informed the IOC about the issue two months ago, after first alerting them in 2022; if you don't trust the IBA, then you have to ask why the IOC didn't commission its own tests to clarify the facts.
https://www.iba.sport/news/iba-clarifies-the-facts-the-letter-to-the-ioc-regarding-two-ineligible-boxers-was-sent-and-acknowledged/
That "clarification" doesn't describe the tests, and I frankly don't care what the Russians "how-dare-you-say-we-plan-to-invade" truth-tellers have to say about anything at this point. You can also read the transcript of their press conference where they themselves can't tell what the tests were: https://www.bbc.com/sport/olympics/articles/cq5dd2lz8y8o
Edit: the letter sent to IOC states that "The disqualification took place after the IBA had conducted two gender tests which concluded that the boxer's DNA was that of [black bar] chromosomes."
Neither you nor the IOC is obligated to take the IBA at their word, but their repeated warnings shouls be cause for the IOC to clarify the issue. If a test shows that Kheluf is a bona fide women, everyone can shut up and continue with the competition. Otherwise, the IOC should follow their own guidelines that suggest being inclusive while prioritizing the physical safety of the athletes and ensuring that no one enjoys an unfair advantage.
“The point of women's sports is to have sports that women can win.”
…but a woman won, and we apparently have a problem with this. So something has gone wrong in this argument, and the thing you claim is the point is not /actually/ the point. We may profess that it is our true belief, but we do not act like it.
Either we need to act like it, or we need to change what we claim so that it matches what we do.
That would depend on your definition of "woman". In sports, the reasonable definition is "biological female"; if Khelif is indeed an intersex person with XY chromosomes, internal testes and corresponding high testosterone level, that would mean Khelif is not a female, and hence cannot compete as a woman.
My definition doesn’t matter here; the IOC’s does. They have been very clear that they have a definition: the athlete is a woman if her passport says she is. This is widely reported, e.g. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/olympics/articles/cq5dd2lz8y8o
They may well now think it is a terrible definition and needs to be changed. I am fine with that! The bit I think should not happen is applying rule changes retroactively. Decide on the rule for the game and stick to it for that game! Don’t apply requirements retroactively that you did not announce beforehand.
The IOC also generally leaves it up to a sport's governing bodies to make the detailed rules (with IOC guidelines suggesting inclusivity while ensuring safety and fairness, which the IOC happily seems to ignore here). Fortunately, most governing bodies have found reasonable standards in the last few years, otherwise we'd have a couple more athletes to talk about.
And the passport criterion is completely useless, particularly now that more countries have self-determination laws (which are another travesty IMO).
Sure, don't change the rules retroactively. But they should have better rules in the next Olympics and if left-wing media downplays this enough where they don't, that's a problem imo and only going to stoke unpopular tension in the future.
The passport definition is indeed a disastrously terrible definition. Which is not unexpected from the IOC.
One problem of many is that it's a huge incentive for countries to issue such passports to male athletes in the future.
Testosterone levels between (non-intersex) males and females do not overlap. Which is why biological sex, not gender, is a very useful criterion for a simple but fair classification. (On top of that, weight classes as needed.)
This paper suggests they do (https://clindiabetesendo.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40842-017-0050-3). The authors measured various properties of elite athletes 2 hours after completing an event, and one of the things they measured was testosterone. Just looking at the men, 25.4% of the elite male athletes had testosterone levels at 10nmol/l or below. 10nmol/l is the "lower end of the reference range for non-elite men" according to the paper, and the top of the permissible limit for women's sport. The variability in testosterone levels in the male athletes is pretty high, actually. Check out Figure 10.
AFAIK, the 10nmol/l is an artificial limit set by some associations to allow trans-women to compete if they reduce their T levels far enough. The normal range for females is given as 0.7 to 2.4 nmol/l.
Edit: looking at Fig. 10, you have to wonder what's up with the female outliers. The vast majority is nicely clustered below 5, and then you have a small number of freakishly high values. Hmmmmm.
That's why I didn't talk about the female athletes. I couldn't find anything in the paper about checking for DSD or intersex conditions, so thought it simpler to just discuss the men. Who, as mentioned, varied widely from pretty much 0 to 40nmol/l (interestingly, both the lowest and highest values were from rowers. Not sure what that says, if anything). And they certainly overlapped with the female athletes, even leaving out the ones with over 10nmol/l levels.
I agree that gender is more of just a proxy for the things we actually care about, but I think it's still necessary for gender to be the main division. The same way 18 years old is the division from child to adult. The number of years old a person is isn't inherently important, but it's a good proxy for the things we do care about - maturity, rationality, independence, etc. So 18 is the main division, but in certain circumstances it's shifted (e.g. a minor being tried as an adult for a crime).
And I think this methodology - having a simple proxy (gender) and then the ability to zoom into the actually important characteristics (testosterone, weight, strength, etc.) in edge cases - may be the best combination of simple and just that you can get.
Do human rights contain the seeds of its own destruction?
The discussion on the latest book review brought to mind old thoughts. Human rights first largely applied to basic negative rights, the right to not be arbitrarily arrested, to freedom of religion, to not be killed, etc. It has since been expanded dramatically: right to housing, right to healthcare, right to education, right to marry the same gender, right to force people to call you whatever gender you want, right to claim asylum, right to euthanasia, etc. And, once based on the individual, the right of governments to conduct foreign affairs how it wishes without regard to the interests of other countries. Note that I'm not commenting on the merits of each of these.
There are obvious incentives to try to cram your political aims under the concept of human rights. Eg, there's much less need to first prove its financial feasibility before its implemented, you can bludgeon your political opponents as immoral monsters, the policy can be placed beyond the reach of popular will, you can more safely disregard potential unintended consequences, etc. Accordingly, it's reasonable to expect that the ambit of human rights will keep expanding. I'm predicting that as more political projects are appended to human rights, the less sacred the concept will become, the more people will realize that it's a cheap trick. Ultimately, it'll become meaningless to invoke human rights as a tool to further your aims. If everything is a right, nothing is a right.
It's not that the concept of rights contains the seeds of their own destruction, so much as the concept has become unmoored from its dual. I.e. I've said it before and I'll say it again: "for each right, is an equal and opposite obligation". This is *necessarily* how contractual agreements work. E.g. a right to housing necessarily implies someone else's obligation to provide that housing; a right to die necessarily implies others' obligation to let them die; etc.
I suspect, though cannot prove, that the obsession with rights is tied to the arc of progress and democratization. I don't see any reason for cthulu to stop swimming left. Thus, I expect the ambit of rights will continue expanding, at least in the near future. But who knows.
You are right that it is a trick. When at the World Cup footballists were wearing rainbow armbands and the FIFA reminded them the no politics on the field rule, they replied human rights are not politics. But so far this trick is working - and I predict it will be working. Your prediction is that all the liberals all the time talking about human rights is making it cheap and less sacred. But it can have an opposite effect - just talking about it a lot makes it look big and important.
They have to be careful to not talk about human rights violations - that will desensitize people to them.
But to talk about strengthening human rights? I don't think talking about it a lot will somehow make it look less important. Politics does not really work like that. If something draws a lot of attention, it does not become cheap and less sacred. Rather more.
People need a replacement religion and so far human rights works.
>They have to be careful to not talk about human rights violations - that will desensitize people to them.
I agree that talking about violations is somewhat distinct, though it seems to come part and parcel with human rights discourse in general. And I did mention that as a "benefit" of framing your pet political project as human rights, and it certainly doesn't look like there is any care taken at all to not accuse political opponents of violating/threatening to violate human rights. It doesn't help that it's usually aimed against the right half of the population due to the left's capture of the chattering classes.
I would encourage you to look into the libertarian distinction between natural rights and human rights. Roughly speaking, negative rights that exist in a state of nature are natural rights, and anything that requires another person's labour is a human right. Libertarians generally believe that natural rights exist and cannot be taken away, while human rights are bunk.
I share your worry about rights, and see the same euphemism treadmill–esque thing happening to various other taboos in our culture, from the old days of calling everyone a "Nazi" to modern usage of the word "genocide".
I'm aware of the classical liberal conception of natural rights (what we would call libertarian these days). I was trying to say, albeit not very clearly, that rights language started with natural rights (eg, given to humans by God as Locke believed) and has gradually (and rapidly, in the past few decades) expanded far beyond that.
I suppose the same goes for any emotionally laden category, whether it's Nazi or genocide or rights. It's much easier to categorize X as Y rather than push for or against X on the merits. I'm not worried about it though. If anything, I want the process to be played out already.
Ah, then I agree. Yes, people are going to expand the usage of emotionally-laden words beyond what was previously used for political gain. It's the Worst Arguments in the World, but it works. I think that's it's somewhat inevitable, but fighting back can help (we managed to keep the word "genocide" largely unsullied for nearly a century).
I admire your optimism.
A while ago, the U.N. tried to pass a "make food a human right" resolution. The only votes against were the U.S. (and Israel), and this resulted in many harrumphs from the usual suspects. Upon reading the actual resolution, it turned out that what it actually did was force U.S. agricultural companies (e.g. John Deere) to give up their patents, for free, to the entire world. Even if, when pressed, people might not endorse the statement "farmers should be forced to work, without pay if necessary, to provide food for the world", the phrasing of "human right" is easily abuseable.
(For a succinct explanation of the above, see https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/13eguvx/un_vote_to_make_food_a_right/. One of the rare cases of Reddit overcoming the anti-American hive-mind.)
In theory "human rights" could be framed as you mention, but I would much rather have a phrase like "ideal welfare" to communicate the idea. Using the word "right" in such a way degrades its ability to communicate information, much like with the word "Nazi" as I mentioned.
> Upon reading the actual resolution, it turned out that what it actually did was force U.S. agricultural companies (e.g. John Deere) to give up their patents, for free, to the entire world.
I don't see what the problem with this is supposed to be from a natural rights perspective. Unenforceability of patents is a negative right in the same way freedom of religion is a negative right.
And if this were the UN "make patents unenforceable" resolution, you would have a good point. But if it's buried in the "make food a human right" resolution, and it only applies to agricultural patents, then that isn't a statement about the negative right of patent unenforceability. It's implicitly accepting the general premise of intellectual property as actually being property, and then stating that if someone's property can help feed the poor starving moppets of Ethiopia then we can just take their property without asking or paying.
To which, no. Just, no.
I've always heard patents be classified under property rights?
Maybe the term "intellectual property" is misleading. I see your point, though.
Yes, sorry, I meant to draw the illustration of how so-called human rights are enforced in reality. The forcing people to work is a worst-case scenario.
Human rights originally worked because it was agreed on by the US and the USSR as well as most other major countries. It worked because both sides basically agreed on the underlying ideology and because both could use it as a way to bash each other in competition. This contained compromises from the beginning. For example, the USSR changed the definition of genocide to not include the destruction of economic classes. You see similar compromises in the wider diplomatic system intended to prevent a new war.
The human rights framework is falling apart because there's no longer even such a theoretical consensus. Russia, Iran, and their allies have attacked the entire concept. China has redefined it but has failed to get any other major power (including Russia or Iran) to sign on. So what human rights effectively coordinates at the moment is the consensus between Europe and the US and their respective allies. That's something. But it's not what it used to be.
In my view the adoption of rights language in international affairs is more another example of how the concept has been stretched ever further, in this case from a framework based on rights of individuals seamlessly to rights of states. I don't particularly see the Axis of Evil(tm) as unique actors in this regard. They have the same incentives as those who argue that trans athletes being able to compete with biological women is a human rights issue.
And I don't think the decline of the framework is due to them either. Few in the West take their invocations of rights seriously. However, many take trans athletes' rights very seriously.
The concept of human rights was invented by the United Nations in the 1940s in a negotiation between various countries. Russia and other nations have had their leaders say they no longer believe in those original declarations. China has put out its own redefinition. These are simply facts.
Your theory has at least two flaws. It requires China/Russia/etc to not be acting differently when even they claim they are. (They have justifications for why they're doing that. But they do not deny they're doing it.) And the rights of states are not a component of human rights to begin with. Those are actually older.
>The concept of human rights was invented by the United Nations in the 1940s in a negotiation between various countries.
I disagree. Human rights as we know it goes back at minimum to the classic liberal contract theorists.
>And the rights of states are not a component of human rights to begin with.
Sure, Westphalia and all that, but it's increasingly been dressed up as such because of the popularity of human rights as a concept and the dominance of Western soft power.
What's the long-term prognosis for SF? Will the city start putting repeated low level offenders in prison and allow housing to be built, or will it go the way of Detroit and experience a prolonged exodus that leaves it a hollowed-out shell, or something in between?
The current mayor seems to be pro-housing, but residents are fighting back. We'll have to see how the election goes.
It wouldn't need more housing if it would put criminals in prison. Get rid of all the criminals and all the illegal aliens from San Francisco and you've immediately got a quarter of a million extra housing units.
In terms of actual population counts, SF from the 2010 to 2020 censuses had a net gain of 68,000 residents, to a total representing the city's all-time record by a good distance.
Then the Census Bureau's annual guesstimates for 2021 and 2022 were of giving back almost all of that gain, to a total population just a few thousand higher than it was in 2010. And then the annual guesstimate for 2023 was of a small net gain.
As always we have to wait for the next actual census to have real data, but SF certainly does not at this writing look much like the sort of "hollowed-out shell" pathway of Detroit during the middle/late 20th century. The city's boundaries have not changed in decades after all so its not as if the steady population gains from 1980 to 2020 were due to expanded footprint.
Also worth noting that SF has had ups and downs before (a net drop of ~100,000 during the 1960s/70s) and swung back out of it.
I'm seeking feedback regarding a fundraising mechanism based on the idea of "Giving Vouchers" / "Donation Gift Cards"
The idea is that instead of people donating directly to charities, create a platform where they can send the money to their friends, and let them choose which charities to donate the money to. Basically saying: "Hey I'm donating money to charity, here's some of it, help me choose which charity to give it to". This allows donors to leverage their donations to engage their friends in charitable giving too.
The basic flow is:
1. You create a campaign on the platform, choosing say 3 charities and committing say $100
2. You download the coupons from the site and send them to your friends
3. Your friend redeems the coupon by clicking a link or scanning a QR code
4. They read about the 3 charities you selected and pick one
5. They are asked to optionally match the donation
Such a system allows donors to raise awareness of charities, engage others in philanthropy, create social proof of giving, and raise additional funds when their donations are matched. Such coupons can also be distributed by corporations and institutions, not just individuals.
I previously ran a successful small scale trial. I'm currently looking for feedback, ideas and collaborators to potentially scale up this project and would appreciate any help!
There's a burger chain around here that does something vaguely similar. With your order you get a token, and you are asked to put it in one of three containers to vote for which of three charities will get a donation this month.
Maybe some people like this sort of thing, I'm far too cynical. Don't guilt me into being some kind of low-level participant in your PR campaign, just give me a burger.
I have regular old gift cards in my wallet that I got back at Christmas, because I never got around to using them. My take is that giving someone a gift card will not get them to do something they weren't already interested in doing.
The point of this seems to be "emotionally bludgeon your friends into donating to your three favourite charities".
There's a lot of intermediate steps that seem superfluous - why on earth would I need to redeem a coupon you send me? Is it to prove that I read your email? Is it to get the money into my bank account (in which case, thanks for the hundred bucks)? Is it to get them to pick the charity for you?
That last would be, in my case, "I don't know and I don't care, why can't you pick your own charity? If you're really having trouble, just close your eyes and land your finger on one at random".
If you're trying to get me to donate to one of the charities you selected, but you're trying to trick me into thinking I picked it because you gave me three options, nice try but I'm not going to donate just because you ostentatiously showed off to me about "oh look *I'm* giving to a Good Cause, isn't that nice, isn't that wonderful? wouldn't you like to be as Nice and Good as me and donate, too?"
It seems like the mechanism could result in no money actually getting donated, because Alice is sending the coupons to Bob who is sending coupons to Carol who is sending coupons to Dave who is sending coupons to Alice, because they're all pushing off the selection onto their friends about "no, *you* choose which charity gets the money".
If a corporation gave me a charitable coupon, I'm afraid it would end up straight in the bin. I'm not interested in these kind of virtue games, and if I'm going to give to charity, I'm picking my own and not the "pick one of my three" going on here.
"Social proof of giving". Why not just get a T-shirt printed up on Redbubble about "I'm SOOOO Virtuous, here's my proof of giving"? That way even more people would know by simply looking at you that you are Socially Proven to Donate!
What's the base case if the friend never opens the link?
It seems like the intent is to "encourage" the friend to think about donating to charity as well. As described, the cost of this is delaying (or is even preventing?) the original donation from reaching any of the listed charities. Assuming it's a delay, there must be some tipping point where the extra pressure on the "friend" isn't worth delaying the original funds further.
Regarding euthanasia, until someone who’s undergone the procedure can report back on whether they’re satisfied with the results, it’s difficult to adopt an informed position on its effectiveness.
This absence of testimonials to the potentially enormous amount of suffering euthanasia has already prevented, leaves little quantifiable measure of its benefit. Instead we’re left with metrics like:
- Reported prospective satisfaction (post-decision to euthanize but pre-procedure)
- Reported family satisfaction
- Healthcare cost reduction
- Reported psychological relief for the terminally ill
On the other hand, it’s hard to ignore the very quantifiable measure of its primary drawback:
- Near 100% post-procedure mortality rate
Despite euthanasia’s potential benefit of relieving the most severe and needless suffering, there is very little hard data to support its defense, while any critic can blithely point to the premature death of every patient that’s undergone the procedure as its unacceptable drawback.
Basically, whether euthanasia is a moral triumph or moral abomination appears unknowable now and most likely forever. In this perpetual ignorance we’re left frustratingly dependent on our own intuitions and the expressed wishes of those in interminable, incurable misery who are asking us to please help them die.
I've heard refusing liquids and foods advocated people who want to end their life. If the person is not in a hot area it is not suppose to be painful and a person who has a painful physical condition will probably will be dead in a week.
A competent person has the right to refuse liquids and foods and they have a chance to change their mind for day or so.
From what I understand, VSED is very painful but not as severe if accompanied by the appropriate palliative care (meds for pain, agitation and dry mouth). I can’t find credible sources that say that dying of starvation and thirst is painless.
That said some terminally ill people elect to attempt VSED to end their suffering in the absence of euthanasia and some of those people manage to see it through. I think this might speak more to the desperation of the sufferer than the relative comfort of VSED.
There are plenty of people who work with the terminally ill and can speak to the variations in quality of life during the final days. Some patients are able to spend a good amount of the end of their life in relative comfort, others are doomed to prolonged agony. Some get one and then the other. At a minimum for those patients whose bodies are already irreparably ruined on a functional level and every waking moment is saturated with pain and nausea, I think it should be an option. Also, at least for now, all humans are mortal. Every medical procedure has a 100% post-procedure mortality rate on a long enough time horizon. Hastening death under intolerable conditions seems like a moral good.
> On the other hand, it’s hard to ignore the very quantifiable measure of its primary drawback:
> - Near 100% post-procedure mortality rate
Why are you assuming that's a drawback? Again, we have nobody reporting one way or the other whether or not this is a good thing.
I only mean that if the upside of euthanasia is ending a patient’s misery, the downside is that they’ll be dead after.
Edit: Maybe you’re saying that dying itself could be the gateway to bliss. Could be, I’m not unsympathetic (neither is most modern religion). But still if you ask 100 random people whether they prefer life or death, I think death will be a very unpopular choice.
> I only mean that if the upside of euthanasia is ending a patient’s misery, the downside is that they’ll be dead after.
I agree, but the way you worded that was making it sound like the downside was more clear than the upside. You are ending their life. That is clear. What's less clear is whether their life is worth living, but in a lot of cases there's very good reason to think it is not.
I believe that any religion with a vividly imagined heaven needs to have a stricture against suicide.
I find noteworthy that many of those who attempt credible suicide but survive (e.g. bridge jumpers) tend to report regretting it at the last second.
I’m not impressed by the argument that most jumpers who survive say that the moment they jumped they regretted doing so. For one thing, so fewjumpers survive that the sample is probably too small to use in drawing conclusions about what jumpers in general feel. But the main thing that’s wrong with the argument is that people are talking about the reflexive the terror of a falling person as though it were a considered judgment — as though it were in the same category as regretting an impulse buy on the day after.
Here’s a relevant experience from my own life. On my Outward Bound course we were given the chance to dismount from a high place as a pendulum. You sat on the edge of a little platform about 50 feet in the air, and attached your harness to the end of a rope that was maybe 70 feet long, and attached at its high end to a strong tree at a point way higher than you were. That rope, when it dangled straight down from its 70 foot high attachment point, reached to about 10 feet from the ground. So anyone who swung on that rope would not hit the ground, but end up dangling a little bit above it. After you were securely attached to the rope, all you had to do was lean forward and fall off the platform, and then you swung back and forth in a giant pendulum until it eventually wore itself out and somebody helped you dismount. So before my turn came, I watched several people take the ride, and nobody got hurt, and several were whooping in delight. And I trusted Outward Bound by that point. So I felt confident the ride was safe. I also saw several people dither for a while on the platform then elect not to use the pendulum. They climbed down a ladder instead, looking demoralized. So by the time my turn came I had decided that as soon as I was clipped in to the pendulum rope I was going to just immediately lean forward. And that’s what I did. So of course right after you come off the platform you go almost straight down. It takes a couple seconds to begin to feel the pendulum effect, and realize you are moving more horizontally than vertically. So, during those 2 seconds of falling, I was horrified and terrified. I felt as though I had made a terrible, stupid, lethal mistake. In other words, I felt the same thing the bridge jumpers feel. But that was nothing like believing, in a sincere, conscious way, that I had made a terrible mistake. I didn’t believe that. I was too terrified and in-the-moment to even think anything as complex as “It was a terrible mistake to decide to take the Breathtaker, apparently it is unsafe after all.:” What I was feeling was some deep, hard-wired terror of falling. And that, I think, is the most reasonable way to think about what jumpers feel. I expect they know, before they jump, that the fall will be horrifying, just as people who hang themselves (in a way that compresses their windpipe) know that they will struggle to breathe and to pull off the noose. But in both cases the person goes ahead with the plan because it will end in death, and they know that whatever reflexive resistance to dying they feel once they have taken the plunge will not enable them to save themselves. They just say, “too bad for you, buddy” to their future selves.
Thank you for your testimony! Yes, I generally agree with your conclusion, although I wonder how much trading of current-me-happiness versus future-me-happiness we ought to socially allow (e.g. it seems wise to encourage people to work hard in school).
Sure, I agree. I'm not in favor of a prescription for lethal drugs being available on the spot for anyone who asks. But currently there is no place that does that. Even the European countries that are most liberal about these matters require the person to be examined by a professional and declared to be of sound mind, and also require the person to tell a professional several times, or a period of -- I don't know the period, but it's more than a few days -- that they want to commit suicide. These countries have, though, sometimes allowed people who have a longstanding painful psychiatric illness, but are not physically ill, to have an assisted suicide. And I'm not sure that's wrong. I worked in a mental hospital for several years (I'm a psychologist) and sometimes saw patients who had been tortured by anxiety or severe depression for decades. They had not been helped by any of the available treatments. And they were sane -- ie, they did not have hallucinations or delusions. If one of them wanted to throw in the towel, and asked for the drugs for an assisted suicide, I can see allowing them to do it. While it's possible that a new drug that would have given them great relief would come out the out day after they died, it is very unlikely.
But people who commit suicide by jumping, because of depression o a life crisis, are a very different population from terminally ill people whose doctors have told them they have 6 months or less to live, and are intolerably uncomfortable or flat out on agony. Those people are just regular people who, until they got sick, were no more interested in suicide than most people, ie not interested at all in committing suicide. They are doing it because of an unfixably awful life situation. In order to get a prescription for a lethal dose of drugs (in states where assisted suicide is allowed), they most convince a psychiatrist they are of sound mind, and must also tell the psychiatrist, in 2 separate interviews separated by a time interval, that they want to commit suicide. So I think all this rules out impulsivity, and regret like that of people who just jumped. Also, suicide attempts via a lethal dose of pills are not, like jumping, done by one irreversible act. It takes a while to swall all of the lethal drug, because it is a large dose. The person can stop at any time. If they have not taken much, they will probably be ok. Even if they have I’ll
bet they could save themselves by taking an emetic promptly.
Assisted suicide is different in every respect from jumping exact one: both result in death. I don’t think what’s known about jumpers has any bearing on whether dying people should be given lethal drugs.
Possibly all they needed was to be put in a life-and-death situation, but that wouldn't actually change whether their previous life was worth living.
Maybe "Fight Club" had an answer, when it gave homework to go out, pick a fight, and lose.
People who jump off bridges are, by definition, people fit and healthy enough to climb bridges in the first place. That's a very different population than the typical euthanasia-seeker.
It also suggests that if you take away the means of suicide accessible to bedridden invalids (assisted euthanasia, some sorts of pills, firearms if you already have one handy, not much else I can think of), then you may wind up pushing a lot of those people into offing themselves earlier, while they're still up to the more challenging sorts of suicide. And for some of them, that will be the wrong decision, realized too late.
Another factor to consider is that suicide by pills or gas is acceptable to many more people than death by guns, ropes, jumping, etc -- things that cause pain and/or mutilation. Everybody has always known that suicide is possible using the grisly methods I named, but I think the main reason the terminally ill are not using them is not that they are too disabled to, but that they are too horrifying for most people. That's why there people push for doctor-assisted suicide, or go to Switzerland for assisted suicide; These options make it possible for people to end it all by taking a bunch of pills, falling asleep and never waking up. Far more people can face that than can face the grisly methods. I'm pretty sure that no matter what godawful disease I had I could not make myself jump off a bridge or shoot myself. (I realize that shooting oneself in the head kills so quickly that there is no time to feel pain. But it is hard to get past the illusion that it would hurt like hell.) But I think I'd be able to swallow a bunch of barbiturates.
I think most of the people who would have loaded guns close at hand even when they are bedridden or nearly so, are rather more willing than you are to contemplate shooting someone as a means of resolving a serious problem. Even if the "someone" whose continued survival is considered undesirable, is themselves. Most of them would probably prefer something that doesn't leave as much of a gory mess for their family or caregivers. But guns do seem to wind up being the preferred suicide method for people who have them.
So, the common means of suicide that might be available to invalids, tend to be quick and/or painless, whereas the ones you have to work for are often the opposite. That's a weird incentive structure, and I don't think it is improved by taking the painless solutions out of the equation.
I think I understand the first part of what you said: If people have to do something physically effortful to initiate and painful to complete, that reality functions as a pretty good test of how serious they are about dying. But it's unfortunate that the means available to invalids (guns, lethal meds prescribed by a doctor)are both quick and painless, because that makes an impulsive suicide more likely. Is that right? But then I don't understand why you don't think the situation is improved by taking the painless solutions out of the equation.
Also, I think taking assisted suicide drugs orally is importantly different from a gun. Both methods are painless. But the gun kills instanteously, whereas it takes a while to swallow enough pills to kill you. Pharmacies do not make huge-dose pills for the convenience of those carrying out an assisted suicide. The person has to take a bunch of therapeutic dose pills. So people overdosing can stop and change their mind, either stopping before they have taken many pills, or taking an emetic after swallowing the lot. I think being willing to swallow 30 or so pills, and then elect not to vomit them, is a reasonably good test of whether someone is being impulsive or carrying through on something they are fully committed to doing.
> But the gun kills instanteously...
Not necessarily. About 15% of suicide attempts via gun fail. If the suicidal person hasn't done a little bit of research on gun suicide, at least enough to avoid the position most commonly depicted in movies, one has a worryingly high chance of surviving with catastrophic injuries.
I've owned guns since I was 18, I actually do know the most effective positions for suicide by gun, and yet I would still choose a couple of different options over the "instantaneous" and "painless" gun option. Partly because I don't want to leave a mess for people to clean up, but partly because even knowing what I do, I still don't quite trust myself not to flinch and end up in *much* worse circumstances than whatever it is I'm attempting to escape.
I imagine either one would hurt like hell if done wrong. But I think the same is true of overdosing on pills. Your suicide attempt failed, but hey, good news is, now you're on the liver transplant list.
I don't think that tells us much of anything about terminally ill people who choose assisted suicide, though. Most of the former are people who until they were ill found suicide no more appealing than the average person does. Their suicides are not impulsive -- they are motivated by suffering due to their illness, and the knowledge that it cannot be relieved. To be given a prescription for the drugs that will kill them they have to tell a psychiatrist several different times, during more than interview, that they are sure that they want to end their life. And, of course, the day they take the drugs is an additional occasion when the person actively chooses to die. In fact they probably choose it multiple times that day, because it's not possible to get all the meds down in a single swallow. There is every reason to think these people truly, and over an extended period of time, want to die. For them death is not a permanent solution for a temporary problem, it's a solution to a very painful problem that cannot be fixed and will never go away.
I really think there's some kind of fundamental difference between suicide done in response to a painful terminal illness and suicide done in response to a bad breakup, or even to serious depression. I mean, if you hear about some kid who shot himself because his girlfriend broke up with him, or some 30-year-old guy who shot himself after his lifelong depression finally caught up with him, you think "my God, what a tragedy." If you hear about a 70 year old man with terminal cancer shooting himself, probably you think something more like "my God, what a terrible situation he was in" or "at least he's out of his misery now."
That’s interesting. Can you point me towards that research?
I’ve heard that people who attempt suicide often try it a second time. About 20-25% of people who attempt it once will attempt it again.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/means-matter/survival/
https://bmcpsychiatry.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12888-017-1317-z
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-suicidal-mind/202310/how-can-we-reduce-the-risk-of-people-repeating-suicide-attempts
Many Thanks for the links! Looking briefly at the first link, one factor that I see missing is what fraction of suicide attempts leave people in a state sufficiently damaged that they are physically unable to make another attempt. Do any statistics quantify this?
I can’t find any studies with specific numbers on that. As you’d expect, methods such as firearms and jumping from height have high incidence of disability when unsuccessful. There are also lots of studies that point to the higher incidence of all kinds of health problems in people who survive suicide attempts.
Many Thanks!
>As you’d expect, methods such as firearms and jumping from height have high incidence of disability when unsuccessful.
Yes, that makes perfect sense.
>There are also lots of studies that point to the higher incidence of all kinds of health problems in people who survive suicide attempts.
That also makes sense, though the causality could go either way: They could have had health problems that led to depression that led to the suicide attempt, or they could have had depression, which led to the unsuccessful suicide attempt, which then led to health problems.
I think that this post is probably a good place to start. I will also note that 80–75% of those who attempt suicide, then, don't try it again, given that statistic. Logically, it would make euthanasia an abomination.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/25/in-defense-of-psych-treatment-for-attempted-suicide/
On the flip side, 100% of people who die remain dead, indicating its overwhelming popularity.
Not quite true. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-44681264
A long time ago now, I read an account (on Imgur of all things, I think?) of a man who had tried to commit suicide by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, but miraculously survived. He said something like "the very instant that I started to fall, I knew that all the problems I had accustomed myself to seeing as permanent and insurmountable were actually completely contingent and fixable if not wholly irrelevant – *all* of them, except one: namely, that I had just jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge".
>Still, I'm not seeing any articles or studies saying that unassisted suicide attempts have definitely decreased anywhere after the introduction of assisted suicide, so it may be that the more straightforward effect that making suicide more socially acceptable leads to more suicides does indeed outweigh any other effects.
This research might be worth a look.
https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/117110/pdf/
A poster here shared it with me recently (thanks for everybody’s counter arguments—I learn from them). It doesn’t prove any connection between the unassisted suicide rate and the introduction of assisted suicide in the Netherlands, but it does seem to suggest a significant increase in unassisted suicide following euthanasia’s introduction. I don’t know enough about the Netherlands, or this evidence specifically to understand why unassisted suicide might be on the rise there, and whether it’s even out of line with global/regional increases in other countries with/without euthanasia.
Someone involved in an assisted suicide organization did try the method used in the Sarco device, up to the point of nearly losing consciousness (they had a helper with them, of course). Their report was of no physical distress of any kind. And I’m sure there are also reports by people who were exposed to the same agent accidentally
Other things, such as family satisfaction, and improved peace of mind in the ill who know they can exit without pain at a time of their choice, can be measured and probably have been.
I’ve a feeling that if we all did in fact live twice and could remember our deaths the support for euthanasia would be almost universal.
There's a science fiction story where they've invented the technology to replay the memories of the recently dead = so you can find out what death is like - and it turns out that knowing that death is, typically, not that bad actually has an unfortunate psychological effect on people.
I have a feeling that it wouldn't.
Is there anywhere else to take the conversation based on our "feelings" about the result?
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Thanks, worth a try!
My grandma is weird about going to the doctor, so the only way she will get around to getting hearing aids is if I get them for her and help her set up all the correct frequencies or whatever.
What's the consensus about over-the-counter hearing aids? Does anyone here have experience with them, or know of a brand with good reputation?
I would recommend checking out Lexie, which uses Bose tech: https://lexiehearing.com/us/lexie-b1-powered-by-bose-hearing-aids
Update: that's what Costco offers, so looks like all roads are leading there.
I was recently fitted with hearing aids at Costco. I chose Costco primarily on the suggestion of a user who has been hearing impaired since birth. As I recall, everyone I asked for recommendations agreed Costco was the best choice.
At Costco a hearing aid technician gave me a detailed examination and generated plots of the frequency response of each ear. The results showed a gradual drop off in frequency response from about 250Hz up to 4kHz, and then a more rapid drop in frequencies above 4kHz. The technician adjusted the gain and frequency response of the devices to fit my requirements.
For my part, it was worth the extra money to to get the professional help from Costco, along with the excellent guarantee, support, and convenience they provide.
Additional comments:
1) It is my understanding that there are several causes of hearing loss. Exposure to loud, high frequencies can damage the cilia, and that damage is irreversible, at least with today's medical technology. Aging results in a different mechanism, which is related to ion differentials in the inner ear, similar to a battery losing charge. At one time there was some hope this could be overcome with technology.
2) The hearing tech said the high frequency drop off in my hearing was likely due to exposure to high sound pressure, while the low frequency degradation was related to age.
3) Since wearing my hearing aids, I have found that my unaided hearing sounds "muffled," indicating loss of high frequency response. The hearing tech told me this is the result of my brain processing differently.
4) It struck me as funny that the only way to make an appointment for a hearing test at Costco was over the phone. That might be the basis for a Bob Newhart routine.
I would be interested in hearing about a comparison of the two once you have had the custom ones for a while, if you are willing to share!
I guess they're not really OTC. You have to have an exam by an audiologist to get them. But if you have hearing loss, I can't think of any reason they wouldn't sell them to you.
>Once hair cells are damaged, the game is up.<
...you know, it never occurred to me that the cure for deafness would also be the cure for baldness.
Not sure if you're jesting or serious ;-) . Just in case, "hair cells" refer to tiny long sensor cells in the inner ear. They are thin and long, which is why whey're called that. Nothing to do with the actual hair! :)
Just to be that annoying person, you are nearly but not quite right. Hair cells bear bundles of stereocilia on their tops, and that's why they're called hair cells (and they're very pretty to look at via scanning electron microscopy too). The tips of the stereocilia bear mechanically-gated ion channels. The stereocilia flex with the motion of the sound wave, and with that flexing, the mechanotransduction channels are pulled open, and the hair cell depolarises, creating a signal which is passed on to the spiral ganglion neurons and thence to the brain. The cochlear hair cells themselves come in two flavours, the inner hair cells, which are flask shaped (bulbous at the bottom) and the outer hair cells, which are more thin and long. Outer hair cells are a mammalian specialty and act as amplifiers; inner hair cells are the actual sensors.
Forget "annoying" - you're being that awesome person who adds technical depth to the discussion in a concise and clear manner. Thank you!
You're very welcome :)
While watching the Olympics, I'm seeing a few ads in support of Kamala Harris in her pursuit of the Presidency of the United States.
One of the claims in those ads was that Kamala Harris, as prosecutor, was very aggressive against sexual predators.
When I search for any story that names the predators put in jail by Kamala Harris as Prosecutor, I don't find any... I instead find articles about victims of sexual abuse complaining that Harris as Prosecutor stonewalled release of information that could help him remove former-abusers from positions of power.
Most of the articles are from the June 2019 time frame.
https://www.ncregister.com/news/kamala-harris-district-attorney-documents-on-sex-abuse
https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/clergy-abuse-survivors-question-sen-kamala-harris-record/
Does anyone have any better sources for which perpetrators of sexual abuse were put in prison by Kamala Harris?
Kamala Harris shut down and arrested the creator of backpage. In law enforcements worldview people involved in the sex trade who are not themselves prostitutes are sexual abusers and many other bad things.
You may not share that worldview. You might think sex trafficking is the sort of thing depicted in the movie Taken. But to her its any time a sex worker crosses a stateline.
> But to her its any time a sex worker crosses a stateline.
That seems overly strict. What if a customer in California responds to a prostitute in California, the two of them meet for sex, money changes hands, and then we learn that the customer was using a VPN?
That one seems like an entire thicket of thorns to get tangled up in. The linked stories mention one guy who is a self-described survivor and activist, and it's the "activist" label that has me going "Hmmmm, I wonder?"
Mr. Piscitelli has one book out, with a doozy of a title: "A Witch Wins Justice: A Memoir of Victory Worthy of a Witch" and the blurb is even better (and plainly self-authored because it jumps right for "Inquisitor General" and "Pagan Witch" territory):
https://www.amazon.com/Witch-Wins-Justice-Memoir-Victory/dp/1463672128
"In 2008, the High Appellate Court of California re-addressed an unprecedented jury trial case of clergy sex abuse, which was filed, and won 5 years earlier in 2003 by Joey Piscitelli, a former Catholic clergy abuse victim in the San Francisco Bay Area. This non-fiction story reveals the lengths the Catholic clergy and hierarchy were capable of going through to shield a predator, during Piscitelli's school years, and the lengths they were capable of going through to fight a victim for the cause of saving face for mother church. The irony of the case is magnified by the fact that Piscitelli subsequently returned to his roots as a Pagan Witch. To add to the irony, the present day Pope Benedict, and the present day General Inquisitor, Cardinal William Levada, had kept the accused sex abuser as pastor in active ministry intentionally. The abusive cleric had access to children in San Francisco, throughout a vicious litigation, without regard for his accuser; and the added potential danger to children at his parish. It is estimated that the Catholic Church and the Salesian Order of priests spent several million dollars for the 5 year battle, and hired several law firms to represent the church and the accused sex abuser priest, Fr. Stephen Whelan. They had refused to compromise or settle the case. Although over ninety-nine percent of clergy abuse cases in the USA are settled out of court, the Catholic hierarchy and the Salesian Order had no intention of losing this case, nor settling a highly publicized case against a practicing Pagan Witch. Despite Piscitellis relentless public protests, press conferences, and letters sent to Cardinal Ratzinger - now Pope Benedict, and to the Inquisitor General - Cardinal Levada of San Francisco, to remove the accused priest from having access to children, his countless efforts went ignored. The Catholic church had never lost a court jury trial to an abused Witch in history, and this unprecedented battle was literally at the Inquisitor Generals' front door. But this was no ordinary case, and Piscitelli was not the typical abuse victim who was included in the ninety-nine percent of clergy abuse settlement victims, none of whom were admitted to be Witches. Piscitelli takes the reader through an autobiography of his early life as a devout Catholic, his transformation, the discovery of his past, and the traumatic journey through his abusive experiences in a Catholic school. He describes the aftermath of child sex abuse with a surprisingly different twist, and the multiple ironies that take place throughout his exposure to corrupt clergy, their protectors, and the ultimate war with the top officials of the Salesian order, and the modern day Office of the Inquisition. The story culminates with an unusual turn of events and conclusions, unlike any other story of clergy abuse, leaving the reader to ponder the after effects of clergy abuse; and induces questions as to the reality of Pagan Magick; and also what may actually occur when a practicing Witch goes to trial in the present day clergy abuse battle against the Roman Catholic church."
So Harris may well have "stonewalled". *Or* this guy could be a serial/nuisance litigator who liked getting his name in the media and what better way than to do protests and letter-writing and then ring up the local paper or TV station with "I am a survivor of abuse and the DA is protecting the abusers!"
I don't want to take either side here because I think it'll probably turn out to be six of one, half a dozen of the other.
The case that Piscitelli seems to be alluding to is this:
https://www.bishop-accountability.org/accused/whelan-stephen-1969/
"Editor of the Salesian Bulletin in 1997. A civil suit was filed in 2003 by a man alleging abuse, including rape, by Whelan when he was a student at Salesian High School in 1969-early 1970s. Whelan’s accuser said Bro. Sal Billante witnessed the abuse and said nothing, that he told a counselor and was then chastised and threatened by the school principal. Also, that school administrator Rev. David Purdy tried to get him to commit suicide. Whelan was still active in 8/2005. Civil trial started 7/7/2006. Jury awarded the plaintiff $600K on 7/19/2006. Whelan was removed from his position after the verdict and resided at the provincial house. CA Appeals Court upheld verdict in 8/2008. Removed from ministry. On the Oakland diocese’s list in 2019."
For the others, it was a fishing expedition by Piscitelli:
"Asked by email if the archdiocese asked Harris not to make the clergy files public, Marlow responded, “We have no knowledge that anyone from the Archdiocese of San Francisco made any such request.”
Piscitelli’s abuse took place in Contra Costa County, not in San Francisco. The documents he sought were not for his own case, he said, but rather to publicize the names of predators in other cases.
“If you had a kid in grammar school in fifth grade and there was a child abuser there, would you want the names released?” Piscitelli said. “You want to know who these priests are and where they’re at. Absolutely.”
We have just published an important review on the nootropic "peptide concoction" Cerebrolysin. It has exploded in popularity after a video of Bryan Johnson injecting it went viral on X.
TLDR is that it likely does not contain neurotrophic peptides and is just amino acids, salt, and water -- probably not dangerous, but likely a waste of money.
What we saw in the literature is indicative of more widespread problems in the biomedical literature.
This is a must-read if you are currently injecting Cerebrolysin or have friends who are! https://open.substack.com/pub/moreisdifferent/p/wth-is-cerebrolysin-actually?r=60fy&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I've never heard of this, but I continue to be boggled by how many things in medicine come from some guy in the 50s saying "hey this might work" and nobody double-checking their work for the next 50 years.
I could not resist the temptation to poke into the "Bismark" fella's* promise of riches and power for his followers. Amazingly to no surprise, scratch a bloviating master-morality-dudebro, find a small-time fraudster. Know what his secret way to power is? Ta-freakin'-daaa: get TWO jobs. Or three. No, I'm not kidding, it's "job stacking":
- get >1 fully remote job (!)
- collect multiple paychecks from the "clueless" corporations (!!)
- get RICH and POWERFULL (!!!)
What's his angle? For a small subscription fee, a link to a secret Telegram channel with legal advice and other perks.
I can't even, as the kids used to say.
* named his character after THAT Bismark? The inventor of modern welfare state? what irony...
Edit: link to the relevant ACT post: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/matt-yglesias-considered-as-the-nietzschean
Who are you talking about?
Good point, I should have added a link: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/matt-yglesias-considered-as-the-nietzschean
So I read your first link. Is that an example of the kind of person you are thinking of sending to Bismark for help? I might be able to suggest some alternatives to the Bismarck guy, but I don't feel like I have a clear 8dea of the kind of person you have in mind. What is their situation? They have tech skills that could earn them about $150K a year and can't find a job? They are aimless and not looking much? they have a job but life seems empty and pointless? And what do they ask for you for when they come to you for help?
I got a couple of glimpses of Bismarck think in his first post here, and then in a long exchange I had with a guy who seemed allied with him, and came away with the impression that shared hate and contempt for certain categories of people was an important element of the Bismarck bunch's bond with each other, and of the way they feel cheered up and energized. Bismarck's first post disagreed with Scott on a couple of points, but didn't present an argument -- instead it used mockery and insults. Overall thrust was that Scott was a weird little gnome so anything he says is lame and funny. In my exchange with the Bismarck acolyte, his essential attack on my criticism of Bismarck's post was that I sounded like a fag. (I tried to get him to clarify what he objected to in the points I had made and the way I made them, but he really had nothing substantive to say -- just that I was so damn faggy it was ridiculous ergo my post could be disregarded.)
If you're saying guys perk up when they identify with Bismarck, I find that easy to believe. But you should give some thought to the mechanism that's doing the perking. If it's dumb, shared hate, I doubt that it's good for them in the long wrong, and it sure as hell isn't good for the people they know to be seen as gnomes, fags and twats. And speaking of twats, I had a patient who gave me some very clear glimpses of the appeal of these macho, we-love-to-hate-lame-people types. My patient had terribly low self-esteem, despite being enrolled in an extremely high prestige grad program and having a FANG tech job paying $200K waiting for him. He was convinced no woman would ever want him. Actually, plenty would have been happy to date him. Besides his academic success and good prospects, he also was funny, kind, well-groomed and not ugly (though not handsome -- just average). But he as so terrified of rejection he did not date -- so, of course, he did not have a girlfriend. Red Pill stuff fit well with his picture of himself as despised and cruelly rejected by women (even the scornful and rejecting women were all in his mind). He saw the way it was not fair minded, but felt *much* better when he spent a day on REd Pill Youtube. There was a whole fresh take on things that cheered him up. The problem was not that he was a hopeless loser, or that he was too scared to date. It was that women have an agenda of making the most alpha possible male their spouse before they get crows feet, and have no compassion, don't see anything about the guy except how conventionally good looking he is and how much money he makes, and lie and play games to hook an alpha and reel him in. In short, it's a hate-based take on life that cheers up guys who feel bad about themselves and their lives.
Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some mistake their thrusting for rhythmic manifestations of
Greatness.
What's the scam? I looked into his substack a bit after the previous thread and he's not hiding the fact that his whole idea is job-stacking. It's not necessarily a good idea, but it's not a scam.
Well, he's taking money from people in exchange for helping them commit fraud. Job stacking may not be technically "illegal" (I'm not a layer so I don't know), but every employment agreement I've ever signed had a clause to this effect: "I agree that, during the term of my employment with the Company, I will devote myself full time to the business of the Company."
There’s little evidence that tech suffered from people working from home during Covid, unlike say shipping. That fell off a cliff with people (not) working from home and I’ll leave as an exercise to the reader as to why the difference.
I see no evidence that any major deadlines were missed either, even Apple released in time although they must need the hardware guys mostly in the office, quarterly reports were triumphant across all the industry that I follow, hiring was accelerating.
After covid, this changed.
So why oppose wfh? I think managers like to visibly manage and bean counters like to justify the office rent.
The story I've heard is that existing employees did well in the WFH times but new employees struggled.
I've read a few threads on the job stacking subredding "overemployed". It's mostly tech jobs, and it sounds like there are three major clusters:
1. People who could be top performers if they concentrate their efforts on one job or mediocre performers if spread between two jobs. They've concluded that they can make better money collecting two early-mid-career plateau salaries rather than finding one job with good advancement tracks and reaping the rewards of being a top performer. They're probably right in the short term, but in the long term they're badly underestimating how much a principal engineer at a big tech company can make.
2. People who are taking jobs where the average workload is very light but you're being paid a premium to make sure you're available for crunch times. This is all fun and games until two jobs have crunch times simultaneously.
3. "Churn and burn" people who have at most one job where they're actually giving a reasonable effort. For the rest, they only put in a token effort and ride it out a few months at a time until their employer fires them. This doesn't hurt prospects for future employments because they only put their primary job on their resume. This was probably a lot more practical during the Covid-era tech hiring boom when it was a lot easier to get hired quickly than it is now.
None of these strike me as terribly ethical, except for the subset of #1 where both employers are aware of the situation (this seems to happen from time to time but is very much not the norm). #3 is by far the worst.
Yes, being a high-level, e.g., Principal Engineer, is quite comfortable.
The thing is, there's no way to have one of those as a stacking job, at this point in your career you're a well-known quantity, there are connections all over the community, people know who you work for, etc.
So you're stuck in Senior Eng. level, at most. Say, you handle - incredibly - three of these. Your total earnings at this point may be 20 to 50 % more than what that Principal Eng. earns.
That's it. That's freakin' it! FFS, is this "Wealth and Power"-getting amount? The whole thing is laughable.
I don't think he's promoting a hateful world view to lure people into a sketchy as hell wealth generation scheme. I think that the hateful world view and the sketchy wealth generation scheme are two separate projects and I'm sure he'd be promoting the former even if he'd never thought of the latter.
+1 I've learned a lot from reading online arguments between other people.
Broadly agreed. I wouldn't engage with this guy directly, it's a waste of time, but pointing out to a broader community that he's nothing but a small-time fraud is, I hope, somewhat useful.
I’ve got a question on Zvi’s last post on AI where talks about the risk of “superpowered cultural evolution running under non-human selection pressures.” [https://thezvi.substack.com/p/ai-75-math-is-easier]
I was wondering if anyone has thoughts on some specific examples of what this might hypothetically look like in practice.
Zvi says that in the near future, AI might “do ideological innovation and come up with genuinely new and improved (in effectiveness) rhetoric and ideological arguments and attacks.” He references another argument from Richard Nog that “just as AI will speed up biological gain-of-function research, it’ll also massively speed up ideological gain-of-function work.”
My understanding of this is that “superpower cultured evolution” means LLM generating an ideology that is particularly rhetorically compelling and convinces people to go out onto the streets and riot or overthrow their government. Is it everyone entrusting their social media accounts to bots and then the bots making more and more divisive memes? This seems plausible in theory, but what would a specific example of this look like?
The idea of generating ideologies and then somehow promoting them in such a way that they gain a lot of adherents -- it's odd. Seems to me that that's not how ideologies come into being. They more sprout in the populace the way lots of mushrooms of a certain kind sometimes do overnight in wet areas. Before that night there were lots of spores around, but people were unaware of them -- then conditions made the spores sort of actualize.
I sprouted a crop of druggy, counter-cultural ideas and tastes when I was in college. Mostly that process felt to me like a bunch of stuff that me and my friends were all realizing at the same time. I was aware of alternative explanations, especially the idea that my generation was a bunch of weak, self-indulgent drug addicts, and I knew that theory was wrong. But even in retrospect I don't know what the right explanation was. To me it seems like such changes happen because there are the equivalent of certain spores in the air, invisible to all, and then some change in the world makes them sprout, and then weather over the next period happens to be good for helping that field of mushrooms mature and at spreading their spores. And if it happens that there's enough favorable weather in enough areas then some tipping point is reached and you end up with 20% of US lawns sporting a bunch of mushrooms.
That's just my personal theory, don't know what the dominant ones are among sociologists and historians. If my theory is mostly right, then in order to be successful with spreading an ideology an AI couldn't do anything like just talking up the ideology and its advantages, giving courses in it, etc. It would need to become good at recognizing the spores in the air, finding spores for the mushrooms it thinks are desirable, then at replicating the conditions that help them grow and spread. So it would have to be good at And the latter would involve either creating big events that stir emotion in a lot of people or in somehow inflating the impact of smaller events.
So being able to do all that requires expertise in an area where so far AI is kind of dumb. It has a tin ear for speech and for nuance in communication, for instance. It can't even tell when I'm being sarcastic, it is easy to trick, etc. But I can see a path by which AI could become smart about what ideologies would appeal to people, and what would help an ideology spread and become popular. Maybe you'd start by training it to predict Google trends, using things like news media headlines and twitter topics as a basis for its predictions about trends. (Actually, I wonder if anyone has tried something like that. It seems very doable. Maybe you should!)
Compare the algorithmically curated feed on your content consumption platform of choice to your subscribed feed and you’ll see what AI can do.
Substack's my platform of choice, and for a while I was receiving emailed suggestions of new blogs to check out. (I don't know whether Substack's suggestions were algorithmically curated -- do you?). Anyway, for a while I actually checked out the suggestions I got, but I didn't like a single one of them. None were ridiculously off the mark, they were all just blah in my book. So I stopped reading the emails. I haven't gotten any lately, and I wonder if Substack stopped because it wasn't getting good results with them.
It's whatever the political equivalent of "youtube video thumbnail with bright yellow text and ugly doofus making shocked and confused face" is.
It turns out that this was the most attention-grabbing thing in existence, all along, outcompeting even girls in bikinis, but nobody had ever realised it until someone created the incentive structure whereby small pictures could compete for our attention side by side with the results quickly analysed and billions of dollars riding on the result. Now every fucking video is a doofus making a shocked and confused face beside some bright yellow text.
What could the political equivalent possibly look like? I don't know, but consider how many people can be called into the street to protest about something dumb like George Floyd or Gaza without the slightest understanding of the issue.
> It turns out that this was the most attention-grabbing thing in existence, all along, outcompeting even girls in bikinis
I don't know; I still remember a youtube video titled along the lines of "bodycam - officer administers sobriety test to girl with NO PANTS". It had a lot of views.
> Now every fucking video is a doofus making a shocked and confused face beside some bright yellow text.
On the other hand, I'm not even familiar with this thumbnail format. Are you sure it's not just you?
No, it's not just him, Melvin is onto something here. Even the most innocuous topic videos often seem to have a doofus making a shocked and confused face beside some bright yellow text as the thumbnail.
I just spent a while scrolling down the main page of YouTube and there are (for me) zero videos matching this description.
There are a few that come close, with a guy making a funny, arguably shocked or confused face accompanied by white text, but in that case he's a standup comic, the video shows one of his acts, and the funny face is a part of the act.
e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJeRs6-rOko .
A wider category of "an in-your-face mug + screaming bright text" is about half of what I see when I open YouTube, and it infects even what should have been fairly bland topics, turning, "Chord sequences that sound good" into "Use THESE chords to BRING your AUDIENCE to TEARS" or something...
The dumb face thumbnail with bright text is standard for the influencer crowd. Bloggers, streamers, people who make their living on the internet. I don't see it very much on other types of videos though.
> This seems plausible in theory, but what would a specific example of this look like?
The usual example given is that if you or I play chess with Gary Kasparov or Magnus Carlson, we know we'll lose, but can't specify how. Similarly, it's probably hard to come up with examples of propaganda designed by someone smarter.
Still maybe we can use our imaginations. Take your favorite political coalition in whatever country you're in. You're probably aware of all of its internal stress points, even if you don't like thinking about them, even if it would be disloyal to talk about them or even articulate them in your own mind. That's the sort of weak spot that someone smarter than us could see and understand and exploit.
Let's say that the coalition has two parts, group A and group B. Imagine the worst sort of event that could happen that could pit those groups against each other, irrevocably destroying the compromise between them. Imagine the sort of irresponsible news coverage that could inflame passions on both sides against each other. Imagine that the facts dribble out slowly enough that people feel the need to stake out a position based on incomplete information, and unconsciously assume that the facts will match their prejudices, only to find that the actual facts require them to become more and more extreme in order to preserve face.
And that's just me extrapolating from two recent flashpoints in American politics: the Israel-Hamas war and Joe Biden's aging. There are going to be lots of other factors that aren't obvious to me, but would jump out clearly to a superintelligence, the way I can spot a mate in 1.
I think the most powerful force to exploit would be the suffering of some sympathetic victim.
There's no shortage of suffering in the world, we mostly just treat it as background noise. But if someone were to create a direct pipe from the suffering of (say) some exploited twelve-year-old cobalt miner in Congo named Ntoki to your living room, if they gave you hour-by-hour updates on Ntoki's suffering and the iniquities of his oppressors, you would be willing to take to the streets and demand whatever it took to get justice for Ntoki.
Or take Kony 2012. A film made by mere humans and not actively pushed down people's throats, and yet it managed to get people to briefly care about the problem of African warlords. It flamed out, but a better optimised version would not flame out, and we'd all be sitting around occupying Uganda right now.
I agree with what you and Moon Moth are saying, in that it'll be better at rhetoric than we are. But I think that misses that other AIs might be creating counter narratives. For example, Moon Moth talked about one AI splitting a group apart. But what if everyone is under pressure from these sorts of rhetorical attacks? Another AI could also feed some powerful narrative to unite those groups.
I'm also curious about this part of what Zvi said in particular: "superpowered cultural evolution running under non-human selection pressures." This makes me think that Zvi is talking more about a feedback loop of various AI competing with each other. That phrase "selection pressure" makes me think that he sees AI as consumers of culture, as well as producers.
> But what if everyone is under pressure from these sorts of rhetorical attacks? Another AI could also feed some powerful narrative to unite those groups.
There's a fantasy series starting with the book The Dagger and the Coin about some priests who are maximally persuasive, in the sense that anyone who can hear their voice is magically compelled to believe whatever they say.
Within the story, this is eventually revealed as a technology developed by dragons thousands of years in the past for the purpose of getting humans to kill each other. They aren't able to persuade people who can't hear them, so they can't organize at large scales without schisming.
I would rate the series pretty highly.
An equilibrium caused by competing pressures isn't going to be stable. If you have three people holding something by pressing into it very hard, all it takes is one stumble and the object goes flying. That trope in movies where two swords are pressed together for long enough that the people exchange glances, is a bad idea because proper technique is to nigh-indtantly identify the incoming pressure and re-route it.
Plus there's almost no chance that competing AIs will exactly balance out. Even if they're identical, reality isn't, and some positions will be easier to exploit than others, and individual events will be more suited for one purpose or another.
I only picked splitting because it was a convenient example that came to mind. There's a lot of other stuff that could be done, too. The basic upshot is that we're going to lose control sooner or later.
As for AIs being consumers of culture, I didn't know what Zvi meant. To me, it's going to be a medium they exist in, and they'll ingest and every it with every action, like a fish in water. (Or like us.) Perhaps there'll be an important inflection point where they devote more of their effort to manipulating each other than manipulating us, but maybe not.
Yeah, the big problem with all the AI doomer narratives is how they always assume there's just one AI that's infinitely more powerful than anything else, even other AIs (which usually seem to not exist at all).
Also, underestimate Murphy's Law at your peril. In real life, your elaborate clever plans will often be foiled by random chance in ways you never even thought of.
Murphy's law, absolutely.
But the lack of other AIs follows logically from the assumption of fast takeoff. Which is I think extremely dubious for a number of reasons, but it's a common belief in the AI community and it isn't *completely* absurd.
If there are True AGIs, then the first ones will be created by humans. There will be a first human-created AGI, and a second human-created AGI, and the second AGI will follow the first on a timescale in the normal range for human achievement. Even in a fast-moving world like software development, that means whole *weeks* at very least.
But the usual conception of fast takeoff means the first AGI will hack the internet, grab vast quantities of compute, and bootstrap itself into full ASI status literally overnight. Well, maybe over a long weekend. At that point you'll have one Artificial SuperduperIntellgence looking at a world of glorified monkeys tinkering with not-quite-AGI, and wondering whether it should allow the creation of rival superduperintelligences not aligned to its goals.
Even if the first ASI isn't ready to literally Take Over the World quite yet, it's presumably capable of discretely sabotaging other AI development projects.
I'm looking for a new weight training routine, focused around a barbell, power rack, and a bench. I found the "AllPro" routine via an old SSC comment thread years ago. Still really like it but a little tired of it now. Any (relatively) recently popular/effective routines or other resources been bouncing around here/reddit/whatever?
In order to answer this question best, it would be helpful to know your training goals. Different programs might be good for different purposes.
I think the old school 5/3/1 program is like the standard. There are more sophisticated programs if you're a more advanced lifter
I second 531 for strength progression - it's fast, it has good progression, and it's got plenty of variants or additions (like BBB) if you want to up the volume in a bulking cycle.
And for what it's worth, I was a regionally competitive powerlifter when I was younger and competing, so I've tried and talked about a lot of different routines over the years. 531 is still my "training base" for baseline strength, though I'll use Mag Ort in mesocycles for progression.
I haven't been serious about lifting heavy for years, but when I was, I had a lot of luck with the high-volume approach of nsuns. A fair warning that these workouts are time-intensive: they can take 90+ minutes 4 or 5 days a week.
A quick google for the AllPro routine makes it look like it progresses on volume weekly, and then goes up in weight after 5 weeks.That seems like a very slow progression that would be best suited to lifters that have already plateaued in their growth. This might be where you're at - though for those newer to their weight training journey (say, not anywhere near the thousand pound club, lifting for less than a year, or simply seeking a more aggressive lifting progression), I might recommend a program that increases weight more frequently. Nsuns, if I recall correctly, increases weight as frequently as weekly - and a beginner program like StrongLifts increases weight as frequently as every two workouts.
Hope this helps - happy lifting.
Absolutely agreed on the advanced vs novice programming question. I'd recommend Starting Strength over StrongLifts for novice programming, though. The 5 sets x 5 reps used with StrongLifts is more appropriate for the volume phase of intermediate or advanced programming, while the 3 sets x 5 reps of Starting Strength is plenty for a novice, lets you get further without stalling, and makes more efficient use of your workout time.
I agree with 5 x 5. Simple and easy to remember. Start off just an olympic barbell. First day 5x5 squat, bench press, row. Second day rest. Third day 5x5 squat, overhead press, deadlift. Repeat and increase weight by 10 when you feel ready.
There's some nuance with the deadlift and raising the weight *every* time in the official program, but I think the above is the simpler way to get started.
Texas method is fairly widely accepted
1. It sure seems like the large majority of what American special forces actually did in the GWOT were just raids via helicopter to capture or kill specific people. Are raids really 'special operations' per se? I kind of feel like the definition of what's SF has really been stretched quite a bit, AFAIK conventional militaries were carrying out raids decades before this required special units
2. Seems odd that the large majority of raids in the GWOT were carried out by the SEALS, who in theory are America's naval special warfare unit. Neither Iraq nor Afghanistan involved a lot of maritime operations AFAIK. How did the SEALs take this job on land (for the most part) from the Army and Marines?
3. Hard to believe that the US' current SF model is going to survive a major war against a peer adversary. 2 year long training pipelines where 95% of the enlistees wash out..... feels like a luxury of being without a major war where you're taking serious casualties. Whatever the benefits of such a rigorous pipeline are, I can't imagine that in a future war in the Pacific where we're taking WW2 levels of casualties, the US can really await a 2 year training pipeline for new SF guys. I feel like that's gonna get cut down a lot once the lead starts flying
2 is in a lot of ways related to 1. The US Army doesn't really have a generic "special forces" unit on the lines of the SAS for complicated reasons of internal politics. The 75th Rangers come close, but they're a bit too much normal infantry. Army SF (Green Berets) are mostly trained to do guerilla warfare, and generally do things that aren't shooting. Delta is trained for this, but they're too small and too elite. The Navy doesn't have an existing ground combat force that can object to building a more normal elite unit, so they went ahead and did it with the SEALs. (Well, they did, but it got independent enough that it wasn't really a player.) The SEALs were also helped by getting lots of publicity., and by the fact that they weren't running their recruitment pipeline through a lot of other units. Traditionally, to be in something like Delta, you needed a long time in infantry, whereas you could go straight into the SEALs after the mid-2000s (a mistake, IMO) and even before that it was a pretty quick pipeline relative to other elite units, and you didn't have to spend time in the regular Army.
Re 3, that's not really what SF are for. The SEALs have been deemphasized over the last decade as attention has shifted towards China.
Thanks. Interesting to think that we have less effective special forces in general just due to service internal politics I guess? Infantry types just didn't want resources going to a large, dedicated elite unit?
I think you can go directly into Army SF via an 18x contract FWIW, though I also think that's relatively new. How do other countries do it?
>Interesting to think that we have less effective special forces in general just due to service internal politics I guess?
To be clear, I'm not saying that they're less effective. They're just designed to do different things. Rangers are a very elite infantry unit, but not big on sneaking around behind the lines and such. Army SF is for insurgency and counterinsurgency. Delta does do dramatic raids, but there just aren't that many of them.
>Infantry types just didn't want resources going to a large, dedicated elite unit?
Pretty much. There's always been tension between SF and line units, which see them as siphoning off the best people.
>I think you can go directly into Army SF via an 18x contract FWIW, though I also think that's relatively new. How do other countries do it?
Yeah, that's happened within the last 15 years, and I suspect that this is not working as well as they'd hoped. No clue about other countries.
Actually, I should expand on 1 a bit. It's not that conventional units couldn't do "raids", broadly speaking. But that's not a particularly unitary category, and if you're trying to do snatch and grab raids in the middle of hostile territory, a typical infantry unit isn't going to do a good job of it. The main army is an organization designed to take teenagers camping with maximum firepower and minimum supervision, and the level that that kind of unit can operate at is a lot lower than the level you can get with more selection and training. And you really want everyone to be competent and capable when you're in the middle of hostile territory and need to be gone within an hour or you're in huge trouble.
1. Raids are pretty much the central example of "special operations", and I'm wondering what it is you think *would* be "special" in this context. The baseline, for almost every regular military force in any society functional enough to field an army, is to take *and hold* territory. And that goes triple for the infantry. The purpose of "boots on the ground", is to control the ground. A force that conducts an attack and then hands the territory it just attacked right back to the enemy, is something rather special in military terms. And it does call for different training, tactics, and gear than regular infantry.
2. The SEALS are legitimately good, and they didn't come in to the GWOT with a recent history of embarrassing failures like most of the other SOF elements in the US military. The original Special Forces were still carrying the stink of Vietnam, Delta Force had Iran, and the Rangers had Somalia. The last of which, OK, was really a victory, but not the sort of victory we were going for and not the sort of thing that would lead commanders to say "I want more of that next time; are those guys available?"
3. In the modern era, major wars between high-level peer adversaries have generally lasted only a few weeks or months at most. If you take the leash off a modern war machine, either there won't be anything left to fight after three months, or there won't be anything to fight *with* because the other side's even more capable modern war machine has demolished yours.
Ukraine is a singular exception, but two of the most notable exceptions are that neither side has been able to gain air superiority, and that one side is apparently being drip-fed weapons at
just the rate necessary to prolong a stalemate because Team America is afraid of having *either* side lose. Neither of these will apply to any future war where the United States is directly engaging a peer adversary. The US will almost certainly gain air supremacy, ending the high-intensity phase of the war in months, or if it doesn't it will *lose* the war in months because America's regular forces have absolutely no clue how to hold territory without air supremacy and have been essentially taught not to try.
Raids are a conventional infantry tactic taught to every military around the world. And as I note below, what the SEALS et al spent 15 years of the GWOT doing is air assault, or raids via helicopters. This is standard infantry stuff that the 101st specializes in:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_assault
Certainly there are levels of raids- raiding a North Korean nuclear facility requires Tier 1 special operations, no doubt. But my point is that the whole GWOT wasn't that- it was just raiding Abu Whatever's home, probably along with his family, to capture or kill him. In vastly less hostile terrain. I've heard & internalized lots of criticism that we turned the SEALs and Green Berets into just door kickers, basically- like a glorified SWAT team.
I'm just skeptical that you need a 2 year pipeline with a 95% washout rate to find guys who can do this. What's the connection between swimming 10 miles at BUD/S and raiding the villa of some random tribal schlub...... It seems to me that the US SpecOps should be less like the SEALs and more like the Rangers- 3 or 4 month training pipeline, difficult but not impossible course, and then just train up as many guys as you can this way. Better to have a few regiments of elite light infantry plus guys than a few companies of insanely tough, insanely trained types who take 2 years to replace
>Are raids really 'special operations' per se?
Yes, they're practically the definition of special operations. Special ops as we know it today basically started with British WWII commando raids. Special ops are almost always "get your special forces in there, they complete an objective (destroying something, killing someone, killing everyone, stealing something, rescuing hostages, or extracting someone), then they leave. So most special operations fall under the general category of "raid". That's what special ops do! What was you understanding of special operations that you believed raiding wasn't the primary example?
2. "SEAL" stands for "Sea, Air, or Land" which reflects the fact that the group, while being part of the Navy, is meant to be used in operations everywhere. They grew out of the Navy Underwater Demolition Teams (UDT), which were primarily sabotage teams at first but had started to take on commando duties as well over the years. As the Vietnam war was starting up the military knew they needed special forces to perform anti-guerrilla operations, and the Navy created the SEAL team to fill that role, staffing it with experienced UDT operatives. So, essentially, we needed an all-purpose anti-guerilla special ops team and the Navy happened to have a team ready that could be easily spun off for that purpose.
I think you're looking at things backwards. We send in the Navy Seals (or other highly trained group) only partly to get the job done. We also send them in so that they always have recent combat experience. If you go 5-10 years without sending them somewhere, and maybe your entire force lacks any real combat experience.
I've heard (and may agree) that the US starts or jumps into wars periodically to get real combat experience (and real logistics, and real everything) for our troops, so that they never become a novice/rookie force. All of the military's incentives line up to encourage this as well, with better funding, new equipment, opportunities to prove themselves (individually for rank and institutionally for credit when winning).
There’s basically only one war we need to worry about that, and if that happens many things about the military will change dramatically.
1. What do you think special forces are for, if not secret raids deep into hostile territory to take out high-value targets?
2. I'm not sure if this is true, Army special forces did many of these raids.
3. Yeah, a lot of things in the US military would cease to work so well with WW2 scale casualties. I'd be less worried about the Special Forces training pipeline and more worried about the lack of factories to churn out equipment.
Raids via helicopters are air assault, which is a normal infantry function. The 101st has been doing air assault for as long as helicopters have existed AFAIK. Reinforces my view that all we've done is give regular infantry jobs to SF types and gussied it up
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_assault
First sentence in that link includes seize and *hold*. Read Johns response.
"How did the SEALs take this job on land (for the most part) from the Army and Marines?"
Minor point, but the US Marine Corps is also a part of the US Navy. Surely that's evident from the name?
This is misleading. More precisely, the US Marine Corps is part of the United States Department of the Navy. The US Navy is *another* service, also part of the United States Department of the Navy, but independent of the US Marine Corp and equal to it.
Your concerns are not misplaced. Our military is really optimized for small policing/clean-up/get-Bin-Laden operations. The irony is that back in the 0's the Russian military apparently underwent reforms to similar effect, establishing a smaller military good for whacking a small country like Georgia. This proved to be utterly disastrous in a large land war.
If you asked me what's scalable for SF in the middle of a major conflict, I'd say take the 75th Ranger Regiment as a model. It's only a 3 or 4 month pipeline to get in, they only take experienced guys who are already in a major infantry unit like the 82nd or 101st, and they're elite light infantry that does borderline SF stuff (like raids) all the time. No one's pretending that they're Jason Bourne and there's no 2 year pipeline where they learn every single skill under the sun
Actually, I think there's a direct pipeline in these days, or was as of 10 years ago. You could be a year out of high school, and doing raids in Afghanistan (basically direct quote from a book).
My very hypothetical solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict is to have a generation on both sides which is sick of war. Any thoughts about what might make this possible?
Otherwise, we've got a case of "We've got to stop hurting each other. You first."
One factor here is that Palestinians (and other groups) get a lot of money from outside forces (usually Iran and the UN via UNRWA) for keeping this going.
UNRWA is unique in that it lets refugees have inherited status they keep under resettlement (and in that it's absurdly well funded compared to the other UN refugee agency - the one that handles every other refugee case in the world). So it gives a strong financial incentive to keep the conflict going, because if it ended Palestinians would probably stop getting the cash infusion.
Similarly with Iran - e.g. part of the reason Hezbollah in Lebanon is so strong is thag in parts of Lebanon it's the only available employer for a lot of people.
Bush wasn't wrong that both sides were sick of the war. What he underestimated was anti-democratic resilience. If you could put it to an honest vote I think the vast majority of Palestinians would vote for an end if they could be convinced it would lead to security and prosperity. But the ruling terrorist organizations would not because that would be the end of them.
But how do you take power out of their hands and put it into the hands of a civilian leadership? How do you keep them in power when the terrorists will shoot any civilian leadership that defies them? When there are outside powers that will actively keep those factions alive because it makes Palestine geopolitically useful to them? When the Palestinian government is so weak it cannot credibly promise Israel no more attacks because they can't effectively police their own population?
That's the issue. Israel's current government might not be good for peace but I know how to get rid of them. They just need to lose a vote. If we need to change the IDF in some way then I believe the government could do that. Palestine has no similar mechanism.
The Chinese have solved this exact problem with "re-education camps". They're criticized as inhumane etc but they definitely got rid of any trace of extremist ideology.
They didn't though. Uighur separatism still exists and now has a large diaspora of refugees who've been radicalized. Also, China didn't solve the problem of anti-democratic forces running Xinjiang. At no point did the Uighurs have a separate government that effectively ran the region. Even China doesn't claim that.
Are these refugees settled in a nearby country, well armed and preparing for an invasion? A bunch of angry people protesting in front of a Chinese consulate in Berlin is of zero consequence. For something as grand as overthrowing the Chinese regime in western China you’d need at least 100,000 armed men and some way of getting to the flat part of the Chinese border efficiently. Which country is going to let them do that? There can be a billion angry refugees out there but they’re completely powerless to change anything without guns in their hands.
And the lack of “democratic forces” is a feature from the Chinese perspective?
> And the lack of “democratic forces” is a feature from the Chinese perspective?
That was the original topic. China did none of the things that I said would be difficult in Palestine. You changed the topic for some reason.
> Are these refugees settled in a nearby country, well armed and preparing for an invasion?
They're not preparing for an invasion, no, because that's not how terrorism works. Most of them are in nearby states and relatively few in Europe. There are multiple states nearby that don't care enough to really help China and one outright terrorist state on China's border.
You're changing the goalposts a great deal here. No one talked about overthrowing the Chinese regime.
> China did none of the things that I said would be difficult in Palestine. You changed the topic for some reason.
China didn't do those things in their other provinces either, that's how China works. Re-education is about suppressing extremists in society. That it wasn't followed up with democracy is just a consequence of China not having free elections in the first place. The question was about how to stop radicals from influencing local society - and "re-educating" the population is something that clearly works.
> They're not preparing for an invasion, no, because that's not how terrorism works. Most of them are in nearby states and relatively few in Europe. There are multiple states nearby that don't care enough to really help China and one outright terrorist state on China's border.
So far these "radicalized" refugees have been a complete and utter failure? The last serious attack in Xinjiang was 10 years ago. They might be extremely radicalized or whatnot but this appears to be no match for Chinese security forces.
I don't think we can emphasize enough how important Iran is to that conflict. Israel could probably just win without Iranian interference. If Israel could outright win, it might (hard to guarantee, but it at least puts it on the table) actually give rights to the Palestinians.
If Iran wants to keep putting hardliners in charge and give them weapons, it's going to be really hard for anyone else to end the cycle.
I agree Iran is the main force behind the current attacks. But just as Israel has switched patrons so have the Palestinians. If you could deprive them of any support at all then it would get easier to defeat them. But they already sided with the Soviets and Iran and have recently made overtures to China. So I'm not sure it's that easy. Likewise I don't think the US can just force Israel to do what it wants.
Make both sides use bronze age weapons. Hand to hand fighting's gotta wear people out pretty quick, don't you think?
Go Ask the Tutsis
"The Rwandan genocide, also known as the genocide against the Tutsi, occurred between 7 April and 19 July 1994 during the Rwandan Civil War.[4][5] During this period of around 100 days, members of the Tutsi minority ethnic group, as well as some moderate Hutu and Twa, were killed by armed Hutu militias."
100 days sounds reasonable. I say go for it.
Apparently 800,000 to a million people were killed in that timeframe. Not exactly a great solution here. We're at maybe 150,000 in the current war, going on 10 months.
Buncha bleeding heart peaceniks around here.
Anecdote: When I was a young IDF OCS cadet I spent a week doing guard duty in Otniel, a relatively big Area C settlement. The town's security chief told us that he used to have Arab youth from the surrounding villages regularly vandalize their fences, throw rocks at cars, occasional molotov cocktails etc. Then he went to each of the villages one by one and offered these people construction jobs in the expansion of Otniel. My time there was a very peaceful week of just checking IDs and work permits of dozens of Palestinian men paid well building Jewish homes.
This contributed to my personal vision that violence will always exist, but a high enough level of economic and political cooperation will incentivize both sides to actively fight against it - the Palestinians to clamp down on their terrorists in-house (preventing the need for the IDF to come in), and the Israelis to stop settler violence and reduce counterterrorism to minimally oppressive levels. The high level of cooperation with the PA Muhabarat (despite Netanyahu) and the hundreds of thousands of West Bank Palestinians that used to come work every day in Israel are my main sources of optimism.
It is worth noting, in general, that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has five sides at least: The Israeli society with a wide range of value systems including land vs life, the Palestinian society (societies? Israeli/WB/Gaza Palestinians all have very different contexts) with a wide range of value systems, the anti-Israel axis (Iran-Hamas-Hizballa-PIJ etc) with a narrow range of values optimizing for using Palestinians to destroy Israel, and different global superpowers with their own interests. Which makes navigating it with minimal life loss much more challenging than simple two-sided blood feuds.
I have a model of Palestinian and Israeli psychology that goes like this: Palestinians, as the underdog, want a better future for their children by changing the status quo. They see two possible paths there: 1) The fake easy path, by which you 'retvrn' to some mythical glorious past Palestine where everything was great by removing all the Jews, and 2) the hard real path, by which you cooperate with Israel in building the Palestine you want. How many people follow each path (and therefore, how much they are likely to follow/tolerate/stop Iran-backed terrorists trying to push path #1 versus participate in the hard institution-building of path #2) depends on how likely they find each path to be. For example, if you're in Gaza, think that there are only ~1-2M Israelis that will run back to Europe at any moment, and anything good you build ends up standing in the way between a Hamas tunnel and a bomb from an F-16, you understandably find path #1 more likely. There's an excellent scene in the series Fauda where a PA Mukhabarat official takes his son, who is beginning to be swayed by a charismatic Isis terrorist, to have coffee in Jaffa. The father points at the Tel Aviv skyscrapers around them not with a lesson about how Israelis are good and deserve to live, but just about how much of Israel there is, how no one is going anywhere and how the most his son is going to achieve is killing himself and a few Israelis, getting no one anywhere.
Israelis on the other hand, are very anxious about preserving what they know (even before Oct 7th) is a very precarious status quo of relative prosperity, security and safety. When and only when you return, with military supremacy, to the level of confidence and safety Israelis had before, you will find willingness to compromise and take risks for some longer-term peace. The 1979 peace deal with Egypt, for example, with considerable territory concessions, came on the heels of successfully beating back the 1973 invasion. And lots of peace talks in the early 2000's came only after somewhat stemming the flow of suicide bombers by 2002 IDF work in the West Bank ("Operation Shield Wall") and building the wall.
As Israelis, we need to thread the very difficult and contradictory needle of ruthlessly killing any hope for path #1 and simultaneously building and promoting path #2. It's hard because the first requires somewhat oppressive counterterrorism and the second is very harmed by it. That's why IDF supremacy over Hamas/PIJ/Hizballa/Iran, professionalism (e.g. punishing the fuck out of soldiers raping Hamas Nukhbas), stopping settler violence, and cooperating with the PA on everything from security to investments, are all so crucial.
This feels satisfyingly difficult.
Do you think something like $2 billion a year in aid, probably from the US, could go to Gaza for the purposes of building up a real country, pieces at a time? And such aid would stop for a year after any attacks on Israel?
There *will* be attacks on Israel, if only because there will be Palestinians who would wind up relatively worse off in the hypothetical peaceful and rebuilt Gaza so if they can stop that with a few rockets they will.
If you're going to offer aid but yank it away for a year after any attack, and the attacks are inevitable, then what's even the point?
The one thing Gaza absolutely needs as a precondition for peace and prosperity, is for its streets to be patrolled by a force that will immediately shoot dead any Palestinian they catch trying to launch rockets at Israel. And as it turns out, the only force willing to take on that job is the IDF.
It's true it isn't a perfect plan, and I don't know how to fix the specifics of the crazies who don't want it to work. One aspect, I think, is the people's unwillingness to give up the aid that is making their lives better, so they may root out those that would fire those rockets and prevent it happening. This would effectively be the patrol force you mentioned.
Maybe instead of saying the "aid stops if Israel is attacked" say "the aid MAY stop if Israel is attacked"? Some other stipulations?
What little I understand about middle-east thinking indicates anyone NOT receiving that aid may be jealous enough of those that ARE receiving the aid to stop the aid from coming, which would, of course, make this fail.
>What little I understand about middle-east thinking indicates anyone NOT receiving that aid may be jealous enough of those that ARE receiving the aid to stop the aid from coming, which would, of course, make this fail.
That's not middle-east thinking, that's everywhere-thinking. And it's not just the people who are NOT receiving the aid, it's the people who aren't CONTROLLING the aid but think they ought to be. The ability to decide who gets aid and who doesn't represents real power, and commands real deference and respect. Whoever has the power, wants to expand their power to ensure they remain on top, and that means they want *all* the aid to go to themselves, and then through them to their loyal supporters.
Pretty much anywhere aid is being delivered, without an armed escort with permissive rules of engagement, the local Big Man's armed thugs are going to show up and take the aid to distribute themselves. At best, they'll let the aid agency's people and trucks make the deliveries, but with the Big Man's thugs riding shotgun so everybody knows who's in charge - and only to the places populated by the Big Man's loyal supporters.
> so they may root out those that would fire those rockets and prevent it happening
And this is pretty much Nowhere Thinking. Well, nowhere outside of thought experiments populated by the simplest ECON 101 automatons. In the real world, and especially the real Arab world, the benefits of such action are diffuse and unreliable, whereas the costs are real, substantial, immediate, and certain. Even if everyone collectively would benefit from such a policy being applied collectively, pretty much everyone individually will look at the situation and say "Someone else go first. And second and third".
> What little I understand about middle-east thinking indicates anyone NOT receiving that aid may be jealous enough of those that ARE receiving the aid to stop the aid from coming, which would, of course, make this fail.
Something like this is my biggest problem with sending aid to dysfunctional states. During the '90s in Somalia, there was a huge famine and outbreak of a civil war. The UN and US launched a huge food aid operation to the tune of billions of dollars per year. When the food arrived in Somalia, it was deliberately targeted by militant groups. These militants would kill opposition peoples to steal the food and starve them into submission. Gangs of thieves and looters would target the food shipments. Rampant corruption saw food delivered to kitchens and towns that didn't exist. The aid organizations had to hire Somali mercenaries to protect themselves (which is where the term "technical", referring to a civilian truck with heavy weapons mounted on it came from). During the worst parts of the war/famine, somewhere between 50-80% of the food was lost or stolen.
Food shortages in the world today only happen because corrupt and/or dysfunctional states break down the needed distribution networks. As long as Hamas is in control of Gaza, they will take all of the aid they can and use it as leverage to further entrench their own power structure.
Thank you. I'd known that hijacking aid was a possibility, but had no idea how bad it got in the Somali case.
A lot of things in politics are economic anxiety. The strange part is this, people do not express their economic anxiety directly. They do not hold demos demanding more jobs and higher paying jobs. They express their economic anxiety by getting angry about random unconnected matters.
Look at universities in the West. The pay is shit and the working conditions bad. Are they talking about this? No, they talk about random unconnected social justice stuff.
Thank you for this very insightful post. This is why I come here.
If people weren't sick enough of war after WW1 to stop WW2 from happening, this seems like a rather difficult goal to achieve. But after WW2, the former axis powers all seem to have grown tired of war. Some of the things that were done to Germany, such as rapes and mass murder of civilians and other grave war crimes, it seems to me that Israel will not do to Gaza, but ethnic cleansing and occupation and massive propaganda seem to still be on the table, and perhaps that will be enough.
Were the tired of war, or did they just not want one with nukes?
That would be the mass murder of civilians that I mentioned, but I'm not convinced that Hiroshima would be that much more of a deterrent than Dresden in that regard. On the other hand, Egypt and Jordan have come to accept peace without any such events.
The implication is that the difference between WW2 and WW1 is that Germany experienced greater war crimes at the hands of the USSR, which made them not want to try again. I'm skeptical that that actually is the explanatory factory in Germany giving up on belligerency.
Kind off what happened in Northern Ireland.
The big difference in NI is that you had both the Republic and the ex-NI UK to be the ‘adults in the room’ against the extremists. There’s nothing like that in the Middle East. The Palestinians are a convenient abstraction to the other Arab states, but they sure as hell don’t want them coming to their countries. And while secular Israelis opposed to the settlers in the WB are probably still a narrow majority in Israel, they’re sufficiently small that they can’t do much about Netanyahu.
The discussion here is about the broader I/P conflict, not about the current war.
If the end goal is something like a functioning and economically viable sovereign Palestinian state that isn’t a security threat to Israel - i.e. what most moderates at least claim to want - then the sizable minority of Israelis who want to totally annex the WB are are a sizable obstacle to that.
Why is this mutually exclusive?
It's mutually exclusive because "You first" demands too much trust.
One gets sick of war by experiencing it, and this region has been a shit show for generations, so this seems like a moot point. Inhabitants are likely sick of war.
The hostile nations fueling these terrorist organizations don't have to endure the hardship first-hand.
Hamas pre-empting Israel in no way helped them avoid getting conquered. You just need them to be sick enough of war to not attack the obviously more powerful opponent.
That's why it's necessary for both sides to be sick of war at the same time.
It also presumably means large majorities on both sides to be sick of war so that provocations don't get expanded.
When it comes to sex, socially progressives and socially conservatives often argue from not only different moral standpoints but from different theories of sexuality development:
- Conservatives have a "vice" model: everyone is born more or less with a standard heterosexual vanilla kit of sexual preferences, but the more one is exposed to different temptations and to sex itself the more prone one is to developing and fixating to unnatural sexual preferences. That's why conservative-minded people work to limit exposure and expression of sex in public discourse, and also argue for a more restrained sex life (saving oneself to marriage and whatnot) lest one degrades its own sex instinct
- Progressives have a more "inherent" model: people are born with different sex preferences that may lie dormant within oneself until one is exposed to the right stimuli. This may be necessary for one to fully blossom into its own and achieve happiness. That's why progressive-minded people argue for more exposure and expression of sex in public discourse
Apart from the moral pov, this question seems like it has a very objective answer. Which of the models more accurately represent the development of the sex drive? I think conservatives have a point, it seems to be a widely agreed experience that consumption of pornography leads one to remarkably specific (and sometimes extreme) fetishes., for example. However, I think progressives also do have a point in the sense that some people seem to have a pretty strong innate preference to being e.g heterossexual or homossexual
What does science tells us about the development of sexual identity, and how would this help us shape policy on the matter more effectively?
Science does not have an answer yet. But our concepts of gay/straight do not cut reality at its joints. The Roman Model works better, Ozy wrote 1930's London or NY used the Roman Model. That is, there were feminine men being penetrated during sex, they were very camp, very stereotypically gay. And there were men penetrating them who mostly looked and acted like everybody else and they were not considered gay or anything unusual, because the important factor was not the gender of the partner, but whether being penetrated or penetrator. The Roman Model keeps popping up everywhere - for example in Russian prisons, they rape gay men and other "roosters", but they do not consider the rapist gay.
I am not saying the RM is inherently true, a lot of people object to it (Dommes for starters), but I am saying patriarchy seems to engineer an RM everywhere.
I think that homo/hetero aside, people are pretty susceptible to social pressure in terms of how they have sex.
Consider oral sex. At some point this was a weird specialty thing, now it's pretty much compulsory. Whether you enjoy giving it or not, you are expected to, and if you don't it will limit your prospects.
_Sex Is Not a Natural Act and Other Essays_ is about the premise that sex, like music, is strongly influenced by culture, and it's just cruelty to tell people it's natural, and they should just be able to get it right.
A possibly-related thing: new mothers and babies do *not* automatically get nursing right. In fact, there are lactation consultants (doing a job that was probably being done before humans had language) who help women and babies figure out how to get nursing to work. This is right on the critical path for successful reproduction, much as sex is, and yet we can't get by on just instinct, but instead often need accumulated knowledge to get it right.
Maybe there are natural instincts there, but they eventually figured out better ways. If we are not taught to eat with a fork, we can still just grab food and bite it.
That's an excellent point.
There might be some cultural effects on nursing on the mother's side, but I bet they're less than the cultural effects on sex.
"Heterosexual" like "gender," is an artificial construct.
In short, you're furthering the unsupported claim that same-sex co-masturbation is somehow "sex".
This argument conflates ejaculation with biological sex.
But I digress.
Agreed. Since when does ejaculation have anything to do with sex?
A lot of low-tech people from Ancient Greece to Zulus figured out the dick between the thighs kind of sex. Maybe grease was added.
I admit it: It's 14 transsexuals who dance on the head of a pin held in the mouth of Bigfoot while he rides a unicorn to the College of Gender and Leprechauns.
But I swore an oath not to tell anyone, so keep it close.
Apropos the science, this study found that feelings of gender dysphoria are highest in kids at the beginning of adolescence (age 11), and they fall until age 19 when the rates level out into young adulthood. From 11.8% for males and 12.9% females at age 11, down to 2.7% for males and 2.8% for females at age 19.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-024-02817-5
I was probably around 11 when as a boy I started doing things like trying my moms make-up. No one thought I am trans because that was not a thing in 1988 Budapest. But they also did not yell at me for being unmanly. They just treated it as exploration. It was. Eventually I stopped.
The study uses the term "gender non-contentedness", since they're using a much lower bar than a clinical diagnosis for gender dysphoria: answering "sometimes" or "often" rather than "never" to the prompt "I wish to be of the opposite sex". This should capture actual gender dysphoria, but will also capture vague "grass is greener" dissatisfaction that has nothing to do with a desire to transition.
The "sometimes" response is doing the heavy lifting in the top-line numbers. If you only look at "often" to the first question, you get a very different picture. The dissatisfaction rate starts in the 1-2% range at age 11, declines to about 0.1% by the late teens, and then increases again again in the early 20s.
Figures 2 and 3 also breaks down the population into three cohorts based on an LCGA clustering analysis. 78% show consistently no dissatisfaction over time. 19% show decreasing gender non-contentedness (most of these all of these responding "sometimes" in the youngest assessment wave and then "never' in most or all of the subsequent waves; almost none of these answer "often" after the second wave) and 2% showing increasing non-contentedness (starting low for both sometime/often and both increasing gradually over time to about 20% "often" and 75% "sometimes").
My own experience is that I would have started answering "sometimes" starting around age 13. I am trans. I started transitioning about two years ago, at the age of 41, and my only regret is not starting sooner.
We've seen the largest shifts in female bisexuality, even though there was far less repression against them than male homosexuals:
https://www.betonit.ai/p/lgbt-explosion
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/video-with-katie-herzog-on-the-expansion
Isn't that mostly a change in labeling? Are women's sexual preferences actually changing at all?
Potentially. The rise in transgender identification among young females could be having more practical impact in terms of medical interventions.
Good post.
My intuitive sense is that heterosexual/homosexual/bisexual comes down to innate preferences, but how intensely a person desires sex and how often a person thinks about sex, is influenced greatly by the surrounding culture.
If you grow up in a conservative culture where sex is rarely talked about or showcased, it really is likely that you'll think about it less than if you grow up in, say, modern America. You'll still have sexual desires, because that's innate to who we are, but it probably won't dominate your thoughts like it does for many modern people in the west. Well, unless you meet that special someone that you have an immediate crush on... but perhaps that's a good thing? Sexual desires heighten due to a specific person catching your attention, not out of society showcasing lots of sexual content to you.
The above being said, there's probably a golden mean somewhere between the conservative view on sex and the progressive view on sex. Perhaps it can be argued that this golden mean was achieved in 1990s or 00s America? Just a thought.
Personal story. I think I grew up in a fairly liberal culture, yet considered sex just disgusting, like eating or pissing, an animal thing people of the mind should be above. I didn't like my spirit being trapped in a body with animal needs.
Yet I liked girls, and I liked them for their beauty, but it was a non-sexual desire, more aesthetic, I sort of saw them as artwork I would like to own. I liked those girls who looked very pure, angelic, sort of not looking like someone who does sex.
Many decades later the LOTR movies happened and Liv Tyler as Arwen looked exactly like those non-sexually beautiful girls I used to worship.
So maybe this is actually a thing and not just me alone being weird? Does this has a name? I do get it it might be rooted in some kind of Madonna-whore complex, but usually ,most men most of the time like sexy women and like them in a sexual way.
Good comment! Thanks for the reply.
I understand where you're coming from. Or at least I think I do.
"Beautiful" and "sexy" are two pretty different things in my own eyes. It's possible to be both, but also very possible to be strong in one while not having much of the other. Liv Tyler's Arwen is a great example of this sort of strong non-sexual beauty. It's a beauty that's just pleasant to see with the eyes, to have around. It's passively life-affirming, like great architecture or great weather.
A "golden mean" by what metric? Presumably not Darwinian ones.
Well, given falling reproduction rates in modern 1st world countries... maybe Darwinian ones? Current levels of sexual progressivism certainly doesn't seem to support Darwinism if by Darwinism we mean "survival and propagation of the species".
Anyway, I was thinking along the lines of general societal well-being. Happy and successful marriages, stable supportive families, etc...
Yeah, the point is that if the metric was Darwinian success, one wouldn't use a below-replacement outcome for a mean.
Last week I waded into an argument on whether the blue or red state model was more conducive to stable marriages. https://x.com/TeaGeeGeePea/status/1818864999940431892 It's true that divorces are more common when people marry early rather than later. Latest of all would be immediately before death, resulting in a 0% divorce rate, but not actually constituting meaningfully stable marriages. I suggested a metric of years in longest marriage (rather than total years married, though thinking now that would ding people whose marriages ended in death rather than divorce).
I'm curious as the evidence that exposure to porn leads to fetishes. I understood that to be false, and largely a boggeyman. My understanding was that the rate of fetishes over time has more or less been constant, and that it just the internet enabling fringe communities to form that has lead to greater fetish awareness (e.g. 100 years ago, Kevin might privately like feat - but nobody else would know, and he certainly wouldn't be part of any foot fetish community).
I was 19 in 1997, hadn't the slightest idea fetishes exist, except that I found the whipping scenes in Conan books cool. Then I stumbled upon one S/M fictional story online and it felt like I was plugged into an electric outlet. I knew it immediately.
So it was not created by exposure. But the rate could not have been constant either as I simply had no idea this is a thing before. Not everybody read Story of O or Gor.
> Then I stumbled upon one S/M fictional story online and it felt like I was plugged into an electric outlet.
I just made a satisfied "Humphyes!" sound, out loud, by myself, reading this.
I'm just about your age. I had an emotionally secure, trauma-free childhood and wasn't exposed to anything to do with sex or kink (this was the '80s, so not even a basic bird and bees for kindergarteners chat), but cartoons about princesses being kidnapped and/or tied up and/or imprisoned nevertheless made such a strong impression that I would tie up my stuffed bunnies acting out those stories every night. Once, when I was five or six and deeply bored after being put to bed much too early, I tied myself up with a jump rope, couldn't get free, couldn't summon my parents over the sound of the TV, and had to fall out of bed and inchworm to the living room to be cut free with scissors.
When I got old enough for text rather than subtext, I likewise knew immediately.
I can't locate any studies in Google Scholar that discuss the exposure to porn and the development of fetishes. There may be some, but the various key words I used didn't turn up anything useful. There seem to be lots of therapy-oriented sites that deal with fetishes that claim porn is the cause. I think it's one of those urban myths that everyone assumes is true but have never been proven.
I’m willing to bet that watching porn leads to watching porn fetishes but not necessarily in real life fetish.
I doubt that. People can't have a fetish for, say, latex, if they don't even know that exists. If you came from a culture where spanking didn't exist, you also wouldn't have a fetish for that prior to discovering its existence.
Yes, but fetish knowledge doesn't require ubiquitous porn or social media coverage to spread. For instance, latex fetishism dates back 200 years to the invention of latex-coated rain gear in the 1820s. Almost immediately some people noticed that latex could provide a smooth friction-free source of stimulation, and underground publications sprang up discussing the sensual pleasures provided by the smooth new Mackintosh raincoats — along with a slang term for the fetish: "macking". In the UK in the 1920s latex fetishists founded The Mackintosh Society, one of the UK’s first modern fetish organizations. Latex fetishists were forced underground during the conservative resurgence of the 1950s, but I think it's safe to say, with the exceptions of phone sex and sexting, that most fetishes predate ubiquitous pornography.
Fascinating, that may take the place of my previous favorite Victorian era fetish: smelling women's bicycle seats
Underground publications are like a lower-reach version of the internet. And the 1920s is after pornographic films began, and longer after pornographic photography.
I read le raz as claiming fetishes are effectively zero-sum. The distribution might change but the rate of fetishists in the community stays about the same.
I have no idea if this is true or not but I can imagine reasons why it might be.
I guess that's more plausible, though I'm not convinced.
My reading of the inherent model you propose is that people are trying to introduce discussion of sexuality into public discourse so that people engage in sex earlier in life than they would have otherwise. Is that what you mean to say? I've never heard anyone argue that starting sex younger is _good_; I've only heard people argue that young people are going to engage in sex whether we like it or not, so we should probably try to make sure they at least understand it.
I've never seen people flat out argue that early sex is good, but I've seen people boast about their own early sex as though it's a sign of gusto for life.
How early is early? Nobody is pushing 13-year-olds having sex, but Hollywood definitely promotes the idea that you're weird if you're a virgin when you graduate high school.
Consent is super important kids! But you'd better consent to sex with _someone_ in your so far incredibly limited social circle, or else you're a weirdo.
Sex education is also weird or contradictory in that it supposes that teenagers are having sex from about 13, while mostly the law and culture also abhors that.
Is it that contradictory? We don’t want them to, but some will, and the outcomes are better overall if we tell young kids “tell a trusted adult as soon as possible if someone touches you in a swimsuit area”, slightly older kids “here’s what periods are, your bodies might start doing that to you any time in the next few years” and slightly older kids “here’s how a condom works, don’t ever touch privates together without one, if you need one here’s where you can get one” than if we do none of those things.
Do you remember being a kid? Default playground discourse is at the level of “douse the area in Coca-Cola afterwards, it’ll be fine”. Absence of correct information won’t stop kids being idiots or bad things happening to kids; it’ll just make the results worse when they do.
We don't want thirteen-year-olds to be drinking, or shooting people whether deliberately or accidentally. But we know that some will. And yet both "we should teach people how to drink responsibly in their early teens" and "we should teach people how to handle firearms safely in their early teens" are minority positions of the political left and right, respectively. As a libertarian, I of course favor all three.
Yes, inevitably, some people will do these things even if nobody teaches them. Also inevitably, some people will do these things *only because* somebody taught them and normalized the concept. It isn't obvious that the reduced risk per participant due to education, outweighs the increased number of participants due to education.
I think it probably does, but most people are driven more by loss aversion, status quo bias, and "first do no harm". So solutions where the first step is to nudge people sex/drugs/guns/whatever as a Thing They Could Do If They Wanted, and then hope it works out because of the education, are rarely going to be popular.
I don't think that's true at all - I think two things are being conflated here. There's "sex ed" in late-elementary/early-middle school (~11-14) and "sex ed" in high school, which despite being named the same are two very different things.
The former (which I had at 12) mostly focuses on *puberty*, which all 13 year olds *are* going through, and might touch on "you're going to get horny, you don't have to be ashamed". It's an education in "(biological) sexual development".
Then there was the "sex ed" I had in high school (15-17) which definitely had "safe sex" and stds and stuff as a major focus. It was an education in "sexual relations"
The two are similar, and there's arguments to include some of the latter in the former since they'll need it eventually, but the former is taught when it is for a reason.
This is way out there in hypothesis land, but in retrospect, did it make sense for Israel to take over the West Bank? Originally, it seemed reasonable to worry about Israel having a very vulnerable narrow stretch.
The actual consequences of taking over that land has been making a lot of Palestinian's lives worse, even before 10/7.
It may be possible to end Hamas in some sense, but I assume there will be successor organizations.
Maybe it would have made more sense to establish a few military installations to defend the region, and not do more than that.
I think if I could go back to 1967, I'd tell them to either give the west bank back to Jordan at once (tactical loss due to its elevation but long term gain), or if they're taking it, expel the population back into Jordan rather than having this constant half status for the next fifty years (it'd be ugly, but not as ugly as what actually happened). I think holding the west bank as is turned out badly for everyone involved.
On the other hand, that was sixty years ago and rethinking what we could've done then probably isn't useful anymore.
The Jordanians would almost certainly not have accepted them, and the Israelis would have been properly blamed for the consequences. It's pretty basic in international law that if you round up a bunch of people and dump them on a country that is neither theirs nor yours and say "these are your problem now", you're the baddie.
But I think things worked reasonably well for the decade when the West Bank was just Palestinians and IDF soldiers, the latter guarding the border and backstopping the local West Bank authorities in the "this *will* be an orderly society with absolutely no Jew-killing" department. It was the addition of settlers to the mix that ruined things for just about everyone.
So, keep the West Bank but don't let the settlers get started, would I think have been the winning move.
Maybe the same deal for Gaza, but I think there would need to have been more of a focus on economic development there.
> The Jordanians would almost certainly not have accepted them
Jordan had annexed the West Bank in 1950 and granted the people Jordanian citizenship. They'd be refusing their own citizens.
On a practical level, The Jordanians had just lost the war and weren't in position to object. On a "it makes you the baddies level", I agree with the moral implications being bad, I just think it would've been less bad than what we ended up getting. My preferred solution would be no occupation at all (you could make the case for minor border adjustments for security reasons, which wouldn't require much moving of actual people), but even a full rip-the-bandaid occupation+eviction would have been better than the result we got.
Re "it was fine without the settlements", I think that part is actually false. Compare Gaza, which doesn't have settlements, and is much worse and more militant than the WB. (You can make the argument that if there had never been any settlements to begin with the militancy wouldn't have developed, but I don't think that really holds up).
On a practical level, Israel couldn't really get away with invading Jordan, so Jordan really could object to having refugees pushed across that border. And when they all died of thirst in the five-foot strip between the Jordanian border and the Jordanian razor wire, that wouldn't be seen as Jordan's fault.
"The trouble with Scotland... is that it's full of Scots." -- from Braveheart
I respect the Israelis for NOT expelling them, as strategically unsound as it may have been.
Yeah there's a moral case for that. But I think if they decided not to expel people they should have drawn borders without them and stuck to those borders rather than keep a significant number of people in a half/half status, which was worse than either extreme.
Are the people in the West Bank worse off than those in Jordan?
They're worse off than Jordanian citizens in Jordan. It's not clear that they're worse off than Palestinians in Jordan, but you hardly ever see or hear about them in the news.
And any plan that proposes to solve this problem by having the Jordanians (or Egyptians or Lebanese or Saudis or whatever) arrange for Palestinians to be living good lives in *their* countries, is probably a non-starter.
Damned if I know, but I assume Jordanians have more freedom for trade and travel. Anyone have actual information?
Yes, it's possible that in hindsight Israel should have pulled out and built a wall. But that's water under the bridge.
>We should drop this idea that solving a problem isn't worth it if the solution is only temporary. Many problems can only ever have temporary solutions.
Agreed. In a broad sense, I'd guess that the _vast_ majority of problems can only ever have temporary solutions.
I don't think a generation sick of war is a permanent solution, since there are always more generations. It could be a fairly long term solution, though.
Many Thanks! Mostly agreed. Even if the populations on both sides are sick of war, the population also has to control the leadership, which is, at best, only partially true, even in democratic nations (and much worse in Gaza and similar places, as other commenters have noted).
> some Middle Eastern Barack Obama decides to rip off all the scabs again
This seems like at best an unnecessarily incendiary choice of analogy.
I'm an early-30s Canadian planning to move to NYC this October. I'm looking to sublet a room or apartment for 1-3 months to help me get settled before finding my own place.
If anyone knows of a potential sublet opportunity, either for a room or full apartment, I'd love to hear about it.
Additionally, I'm aware there are many Facebook pages and websites where people post NYC sublet and housing opportunities. If you have any recommendations on where I should be looking or posting, I would greatly appreciate your suggestions.
I can provide more information about my background and lots of references if needed.
If you have any leads, please feel free to contact me via email, which you can find here: https://danfrank.ca/about-daniel/.
Check out HousingPanda.com. You can probably find some decent options on there. I’d also post in the r/nyu r/baruch r/columbia subreddits saying you’re looking.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGRtyxEpoGg&ab_channel=DesignTheory
Maybe there's a difference between designing for developing countries and designs that get picked up independently in poor countries. The conspicuous examples for the latter are bicycles and cellphones.
Bicycles are almost intuitive-- all you need to do is see someone ride one.
So far as problems with mosquito nets used for fishing are concerned (the mesh is so small, they catch all the fish, even the tiny ones, it's like clear-cutting), maybe it would be a good idea to make cheap fishing nets with a larger mesh. Or not. Perhaps research is required.
I suspect the video is too hard on mosquito nets. Some ill effects aren't the same thing as a hopelessly stupid project.
As I recall, one of the problems with the playground water pump is that it was necessarily was harder to push than a proper toy, since some of the energy went into pumping water, so it wasn't as good a toy.
This is certainly more than I knew about what went wrong with One Laptop Per Child.
I think the video is mistaken about how much help children need with learning to walk, but it's at least true that children see people walking, I haven't raised a child. Do children need help with learning to walk?
Children figure walking out on their own, but they do need help not destroying themselves afterwards.
> Bicycles are almost intuitive-- all you need to do is see someone ride one.
Don't you also need smooth paved roads?
> Do children need help with learning to walk?
No, they don't.
Good point about the paved roads.
Well, is it? I think of smooth roads as a necessity of biking, but (1) mountain biking is a sport; and (2) I don't expect poor countries to have smooth roads. Though I'd have to admit that when I say "poor countries" there, I really mean sub-Saharan Africa; I see no real obstacle to other poor countries having working roads.
Which poor countries were you thinking of as an example of voluntary adoption of bicycles? Normal bikes or mountain bikes?
I was thinking that roads are needed, but they don't have to be very good roads. Presumably that's how it is in sub-Saharan Africa. I'd be surprised if people are riding bikes in totally unpaved jungle.
There might be areas where, for at least part of the year, unpaved ground is good enough.
> I'd be surprised if people are riding bikes in totally unpaved jungle.
Riding a bike through an unpaved jungle is most definitely impossible. Following an elephant trail might make it possible in some sense, but I can easily imagine that it would be worse than walking.
My impression is that SSA countries are generally able to put roads down, but not able to maintain them, such that roads that go through remote regions may often be impassable to cars. But this is actually much less of a problem if you have a bike; when you come to the break in the road, even if you can't ride across it, you can just walk or carry your bike over it.
Flat tires look like more of an issue if you're going cross-country.
For local trips... I do voluntarily bike over rough cobbled-ish sidewalks occasionally, for distances of 0.5 - 1 city blocks. But it's not something I'd expect a lot of people to do regularly; biking over a road that isn't smooth basically means being constantly kicked in the crotch.
Another problem with roads in SSA is the large amount of bribes required to get anywhere.
I was involved years ago in a UNICEF planning project to build the water pumping carousels, before it became clear they weren't effective, and consequently I've spent a lot of time stewing on how I could have noticed it wouldn't been fun for kids to actually use, if I'd exercised the right sort of attention.
It didn't take long when I applied myself to the question to come up with alternatives which would actually be fun to use. Any sort of play equipment where applying force against resistance is part of it's proper function should be a candidate. So, something like a Zipline, or a pole children can slide down, where the force of decelerating them against gravity could be used to pump water. I haven't done the calculations on the yield you could get from something like this, but it's better in its fundamentals than the carousel. If anyone wants to help explore the feasibility of this, let me know.
I can imagine designs that would be more fun to play with. But they'd still be expensive, complicated pieces of machinery that can easily break, and which produce a tiny amount of energy on a very sporadic basis.
A small electric pump with a generator (or solar panel) to charge it would surely be far cheaper.
Is some general lesson like if simple physics and engineering apply, check the numbers!
Checking the numbers is definitely an important step, but I think there was another issue at work here (if not exclusively.) The device works in terms of basic physics, but it's trying to reconcile two separate functions which are at odds with each other. If it's good at being a device which pumps water out of the ground (which requires applying resistance against the work the children put in to spin it,) it's bad at being a playground carousel (which requires it to have low friction and continue spinning when the children apply force and then jump on.)
Seems like one of the first numbers you'd check.
But I guess it goes to show how bad the do-gooder instinct can be. If people were willing to put effort into this idea that any undergrad can tell you is a bad idea, how much effort is going into improving the lives of poor Africans via ideas which are flawed in subtler more economic ways?
What seems like one of the first numbers you'd check?
When I was involved in the project, I was about twenty, and the notion of running the numbers for how much water you'd actually be able to draw that way definitely occurred to me. But my understanding was, a) whoever originally designed it had already run the numbers on that, and b) it was never intended to be a grand scale project to draw all the water the communities needed, but a cheap way to decrease the shortfall by drawing water with "wasted" energy children would have spent anyway, in communities with very limited access to electricity which were already drawing much of their water by hand. The problem wasn't that it didn't occur to anyone that this wouldn't be able to draw very much water as a matter of basic physics, but that it didn't fulfill its purpose of making use of "wasted" energy in communities which already had to draw much of their water by hand, because nobody actually wanted to use it.
>it didn't fulfill its purpose of making use of "wasted" energy in communities which already had to draw much of their water by hand, because nobody actually wanted to use it.
Not to say anything that hasn't already been covered, but if you want to devote your energy into drawing water out of the ground, you can already do that by using a well or a pump normally. It's one of the most infamously unpleasant tasks that a rural existence calls for. (Well, not necessarily drawing water. Carrying water around is the famously unpleasant task. Water is heavy! But being heavy seems like a downside for extraction too.)
It seems unlikely to get *more* pleasant if you replace the pump with a less efficient pump.
Or from another perspective, the energy the children were spending wasn't being wasted, because it was entertaining them, and the design specifically sought to remove that benefit from the energy expenditure.
I don't know whether those phrasings might usefully apply to other similar project proposals.
My take away was that the core problem is that much more labor is needed to pump water than is available via children freely playing, even if the device is fun to play with.
It seems that a child’s toy is best used as an augment to a regular water pump and should not replace a normal pump.
It may be that both are the case, but it's definitely *a* problem with the original design that the point of a playground carousel is to be able to spin it around and ride on it, with it continuing to spin for a long time with low friction. A version which extracts work to pump water is not a playground carousel which incidentally pumps water as a side effect, it's a labor wheel.
I can't believe you don't think the Wheel of Pain from the Conan movie is an appropriate child's toy!
https://acoup.blog/2020/08/06/collections-bread-how-did-they-make-it-part-iii-actually-farming/
> More than one Latin student has been profoundly confused by enslaved persons in Roman literature (especially Roman comedy, with heavily features enslaved protagonists) being threatened by being sent in pistrinum, which gets translated as “to the bakery” by the hapless student (Roman milling and bakery was often done in the same facility, so ‘bakery’ is often the first translation a dictionary offers for ‘pistrinum‘), when what is meant is “to the gristmill” to work turning the millstone. Such labor was brutal and backbreaking; moreover the continual inhalation of pulverized grain dust damages the lungs. Being thus sent in pistrinum was essentially a deferred death sentence, much like being sent to work in mining. Consequently, in large, muscle-powered mills, the fellows actually turning the millstone were likely to be captives, criminals or enslaved persons (often being punished for some transgression), or else very desperately poor; in any of these cases they probably had sadly short lives.
It was only in the last year that I learned to be pretty confused why so many African villages seem to be built in places without easy access to water. Why are there villages in these places? Why not live where the water is?
Well, you can't live in a place without easy access to water. I assume, where an African village looks like it lacks access to water, the water falls out of the sky.
Arguably the problem is people trying to find shortcuts rather than doing rather ordinary hard work.
Almost certainly. In my experience, most degrowth activists become extremely uncomfortable almost immediately if you buttonhole them about what exact standard of living they want to "degrow" the average western country into and that will be indefinitely sustainable for 7-8 billion humans. Even worse when the same people are also complaining about the rising cost of living.
I think there's a wide streak of internet "one weird trick" thinking. Sometimes there are big returns to rethinking a problem, but this doesn't happen as often as one might wish.
The development thing doesn't seem to be about solutions that have been kept secret, it's about "we can be clever and come up with a low-effort solution".
Check out new political and philosophical cartoons for Webcomic8: https://webcomic8.substack.com/
I argue that sunk cost reasoning is sometimes rational https://open.substack.com/pub/wollenblog/p/lip-gloss-and-sunk-costs?r=2248ub&utm_medium=ios
I agree with all of this.
I am undecided on the question of whether doing net-negative things so you can have an ego-salving story to tell yourself is actually rational, or whether it's a totally central example of human irrationality. How many of our worst decisions can be explained as rational attempts to give ourselves ego-salvaging narratives about our lives?
Perhaps the value of being a "rationalist" is in changing the sorts of stories you tell yourself, which gives you an "out" in situations like these. "I'm not a quitter, I'm rational!"
I took the sunk-cost fallacy to be less a logical fallacy and more an empirical fallacy, something like "on average, humans over-value the benefits to finishing a delayed project".
Yeah, every fallacy exists for a reason. The true nature of a fallacy is applying a heuristic in a situation where the conditions that it is designed for don't apply. They're a bit like optical illusions.
Yes, me too.
a proposal for a new type of social-contracting network inspired by the ideas of enlightenment, anarchy, socialism, ecology, feminism, cyberpunk, solarpunk, amongst others.
7 pages approx 15 min read : https://pjcollins.org/en/concordance-proposal/
Looking for wise allies to assist in making the system a reality. I appreciate any feedback and suggestions.
I apologise in advance in case it causes offense but it got a few chuckles out of me since I just read about someone offering a new social organisation, whose exposition would "occupy at least ten evenings". The attention spans have indeed decreased in the last 150 years.
you can read the rest here https://www.gutenberg.org/files/8117/8117-h/8117-h.htm